If you have any familiarity with Mark Gatiss' work, it's usually quite strange, and the quality is often all over the place. Additionally, he always manages to wander on the set at some point, sometimes with dubious results. Unfortunately, Crooked House checks both these boxes, and squats uncomfortably in the lower tiers of his work. It's a predictably nasty horror story, or rather, three of them, but they never come together as a satisfying whole. Instead, we are treated to two disjointed and barely related historical runarounds, and a contemporary finale which bears little semblance to either. One minute, the wall is bleeding, and then there's a bride with no eyes, and then a evil door knocker. Supposedly, it all ties together with some nonsense that Mark Gatiss, the flavor of the week twist villain, was doing, but it never comes together in particularly effective way. Additionally, the characters are bland (sorry, Mark Gatiss, but that includes you), the scares are cheap, and the atmosphere is generic, all of which does nothing to help the disjointed plot. Ultimately, Crooked House is a deeply unsatisfying way to spend an evening, an nothing more.
Review of Crooked House
