The Ampleforths (Jeremy Kemp, Joanna Van Gyseghem) have bought a
mansion that's supposed to be haunted by the ghost of Lady Elinor
(Samantha Gates), who usually appears to her victim outside the place and
asks him (or in rarer cases her) to carry her over the threshold into the
mansion, then possesses her victim until he or she dies (though I don't
know from what) without ever having left the mansion again. Only when
someone else dies before him/her in the mansion can the curse be lifted. Anthony
Fairfield (Peter Machin), a guest of the Ampleforths, has never heard of
this curse, so when he finds a limping girl outside who asks him for help,
he carries her into the mansion - and is soon taken by some weird, rare
illness that gets worse by the day. His fiancée Maggie (Carol Royle) is
soon worried sick, especially since she knows about the curse, but nobody
wants to believe her stories about a ghost having caused Anthony's state -
and thus, in her despair, Maggie plans to kill herself to save the man she
loves ... when a plane crashes on the makeshift landing strip just
outdoors, and the dying pilot is brought into the mansion. The next day,
Anthony is feeling as if nothing has happened ... Pretty much a
by-the-numbers ghost story, not bad because all the plottwists are in the
right places, but sadly lacking the element of surprise. Likewise, the
directorial effort is fittingly old-fashioned, which might be in tune with
the anything but modern sets, but also bland and uninventive. At least the
cast is pretty good. In all, this is not the worst thing you have ever
seen, not by a longshot, but it's also nothing you haven't seen countless
times before.
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