Best movie of this year hands down!

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Apparently the real Harry Price was a well regarded paranormal investigator who had a reputation for exposing fakes.This ITV made for television film had all the hallmarks for being a potential pilot to a series. However the very poor ratings it received over the Christmas period makes any series very unlikely.Rafe Spall played Harry Price dragged out of self exposed exile in the 1920s to look into the case of a leading politician's wife who is displaying bizarre behaviour and having haunting visions of a drowned child in a big house they recently moved into.Harry Price is adamant that their is a rational explanation to all this. The smarmy politician, who seems to be based partly on David Cameron with his 'we are all in it together' quip near the start of the programme has other motives in engaging Price to look into his wife's strange condition at a politically sensitive time for him.Well I was not sure what to make of the husband's own behaviour because the character was so badly written which to me lessened a lot of the mystery. He does not want Price snooping around, he does not want him to talk to his wife. He will not even engage medical doctors to treat his wife. Given the way he was behaving over his wife's condition why did anyone reckon he was potential Prime Minister was beyond me!Price with the assistance of the household's combative maid delves deep onto this mystery but really it was rather shallow, plodding and over-long. When Price is not moping around with memories of his own dead wife or the soldier who killed himself in front of him displays the whizz bang of the modern day Sherlock (I noticed the film had a cameo from David Burke who was Dr Watson version 1 in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series) and the demystification of Jonathan Creek without the humour and agility.

Okay, maybe it was rather predictable (I certainly wasn't surprised to learn who the culprit was, despite the red herrings thrown in the path). Maybe it was corny. At times it was inconsistent. BUT it was very creepy (I spent a lot of time with my hands over my eyes) and at times rather moving in its exploration of mental illness. I also liked the period sets and costumes.I thought Rafe Spall was excellent and his character made an attractive focus for the action. I'll be intrigued to see how they manage to expand it into a series (assuming that's the intention) as there is limited scope for the title character to exercise his skills.

I thought this was excellent, and would love to see a series come out of it.Everyone has been saying that Rafe Spall looks nothing like the real Harry Price, but does it matter in the scheme of things??? I just thought it was an excellent story, and would love to see more.I love ghost stories, real ghost stories that is, not horror, blood, guts and gore, so this was just perfect for me.I think if you want to see a true to life programme, go to the biography channel or look up Harry Price online, there are lots of details on his website.I for one thought Rafe was excellent, and would love to see more programmes like this instead of the usual reality housewives/singety sing song sing drivel.Well done ITV for once.

As another reviewer has noted, HARRY PRICE: GHOST HUNTER has absolutely NOTHING to do with the real-life paranormal investigator. It gets the era right but that's about it. What we have here is the usual lefty period drama nonsense, with a miscast and poorly acting Rafe Spall full of the usual mannerisms and the like but failing to convince for a second as the real Price.I would have enjoyed this immensely had it followed some of Price's real-life cases, like the mongoose or Borley Rectory. Instead, we get involved in some nonsense involving a guy's wife who keeps having ghostly visions. They also shoehorn a black guy into the story in a ridiculous show of tokenism. The plotting is slow and dull and the characters are quite laughable, but the biggest regret is that Price is so unrecognisable. Spall looks nothing like him and acts nothing like him, so why they bothered pretending that he was Price I don't know. Without the Harry Price hook I probably would have rated this higher, but as it stands it's a kick in the teeth for any fan of the supernatural.