No Harry Potter magic for Daniel Radcliffe in 'Woman'

James Watkins' "The Woman in Black" will go down in cinema history as a wannabe classic gothic tale short-circuited by cheap shock devices, dramatic miscues, psychological missteps and a lackluster performance by Daniel Radcliffe more wooden than Harry Potter's magic wand.

The closing scene strives to simultaneously inspire warm, uplifting joy and jolting horror, and, failing to accomplish either, ambiguously slides into uncertain ending credits.

Worse, "The Woman in Black," based on Susan Hill's 1983 novel, comes off as an inadvertent reworking of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" - instead of Mother Nature pushing humans to commit mass suicide, a miffed mother ghost takes up the challenge.

Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a young father of 4-year-old Joseph (Misha Handley) and a failing attorney, depressed and emotionally arrested by the death of his wife during childbirth.

He gets one last chance to keep his job at a London law firm. He must go to the scary Yorkshire estate of a deceased woman and gather up all her papers and examine them for reasons I can't really remember.

Right away, we can tell the locals don't like Kipps hanging around the old mansion, a marvelously imagined haunt located at the end of a serpentine driveway sometimes surrounded by the changing tide, sometimes covered by it.

Kipps meets a local wealthy resident named Daily (Ciaran Hinds), a man of proud logic who thinks of himself as above the superstitious community.

He has accepted the loss of his son as a sad fact of life, but his wife (current Oscar nominee Janet McTeer) hangs on to his memory. She also lapses into trances in which her son's spirit inspires her to carve images into tables.

Daily imagines this to be a form of madness, but the evidence of the supernatural is just beginning for Kipps, who swears he sees a woman (Liz White) dressed in black out at the mansion.

Back in the village, a young girl appears before Kipps. She has just drunk lye. She dies in his arms. As Kipps learns, whenever anyone sees the woman in black, a local child dies a horrible death.

Kipps quietly pooh-poohs the cause-and-effect of the woman in black. Even when he's confronted by concrete evidence of a haunting - doors that open and close by themselves, a rocking chair that rocks with a vengeance, ghostly children watching him from a nearby graveyard - Kipps remains remarkably non-plussed by it all.

You'd think the guy might be slightly freaked out by eyes peering at him through lamps and such. Nope. He takes that, plus the frightening menagerie of mechanical toys in the mansion's playroom, as matter-of-factly as the tide.

"The Woman in Black" commits a major blunder early on when we see the ghostly title character watching Kipps in the woods.

We know at the outset that the ghost is real, not just some Henry James' "Turn of the Screw" figment of Kipps' imagination or some strained extension of his feelings of loss for his wife.

Instead of carefully constructing some old-fashioned suspense, Watkins relies on cheap jolts and soundtrack noises to keep us awake.

We have a rusty old water pump spewing out black fluid for a jump. We get a fluttering crow suddenly appearing in a bedroom. (Usually, someone throws a screeching cat into the frame for the same effect.) An old chauffeur appears out of the fog for a startle. The only cliché missing is the old "hand out of nowhere grabbing someone's shoulder" gimmick.

"I think she's gone!" Kipps quips of the title character near the end, and anyone who's ever seen a mad slasher movie knows that's about as likely to happen as the teen who says "I'll be right back" actually returning.

A subplot in which Daily runs into his dead son goes no place (the editing room floor maybe?), which is a disappointment.

But not as disappointing as "The Woman in Black" being the first movie in 35 years to bear the name of Hammer Films, the British company known for its lurid, sexy and violent re-tellings of the Dracula and Frankenstein stories (and other horror tales) during the 1950s through the '70s.

“The Woman in Black”

“The Woman in Black”

★ ½

Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Janet McTeer, Ciaran Hinds, David Burke

Directed by: James Watkins

Other: A CBS Films release. Rated PG-13 for violence. 94 minutes