Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I was enticed from the moment I saw the eerie opening credits. I can't fault this series, every minute I was gripped with a new twist, amazing performances and a remarkable story line. Although some twists were cliché; you can easily forgive and forget, thanks to something new and exciting happening within the next minute. I read in a bio that the series was classed as a "drama", and a drama indeed it was. If you were expecting a gory horror I'd turn away now. As this series should be engaged with the expectations of a great story line drama... Even if the series still managed to spook me in parts and have me on the edge of my seat nearly all the way through.The story line was truly captivating. The juxtaposition was easy to follow and fun to see a new time period. The only reason for me not rating the series a '10' is simply because I wanted to know a little more about the boy, for which the bio of the series stated was one of the main focus points.A must watch for everyone!

I purposely hadn't watched this series, based on the mainly negative reviews I'd read, but a dark miserable wet day and it went on, if I wasn't miserable enough before, I certainly was about fifteen minutes into this. The story itself is dark and disturbing, but the way in which it was produced it was overly macabre and grim. An very good opening episode, a sound second, and a rather disappointing conclusion. It all fell apart a little at the end. The best thing that can be said about this drama is the acting, it is fantastically well acted, Suranne Jones, Tom Ellis, David Warner, Sarah Smart etc all really good, Douglas Henshall is great as the creepy Augustus Cribben, but it's the wonderful Olivia Cooke that gave the most endearing performance as Nancy Linnet, she was great.Worth a watch I guess, but if you've read it I fear you may be a little disappointed in it. 6/10

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday MorningGabe (Tom Ellis) and Eve Caleigh (Suranne Jones) re-locate to the West Country from London a year after the disappearance of their son. They set up home in Crickley Hall, an old residence that used to be a boarding house for evacuees during the war. But it is this fact that holds the secret behind some ghostly hauntings, and a terrifying truth behind what now possesses them.It seems that in the case of a fairly lengthy novel, the format best favoured in many cases for adaptation is to turn it in to a serial drama rather than go all out and just make a feature length adaptation, which may test the viewer's endurance. But Joe Ahearne's approach, with his adaptation of James Herbert's The Secret of Crickley Hall, somehow manages to do this anyway, over the course of three episodes shown over three weeks.There's no doubt the first part opens well, establishing an effective atmosphere and air of suspense, which even someone who's already read the novel and pretty much knows what is going to happen can see. But somehow, even by the second episode that AOS doesn't feel as strong. Spacing each episode out over the course of a week probably doesn't help, dragging it out too long and doing the opposite of keeping you in suspense. Aside from this, certain segments inevitably get lost in translation going from novel to film, and the constraints of being a TV film inevitably creep through. I said 'inevitably' twice in that sentence, and that's sadly what an adaptation of a novel is always going to be: an inevitability. Something that is doomed not to be as good as it's source material from the start, even if it has a bigger budget and goes to theatres, where I think this may have worked better.The performances are probably the best thing in it. Jones shows promise she may be more than another ex Corrie actress, avoiding a future in panto or cheap reality shows, showing an emotional intensity and depth as a mother wrapped up in guilt for the loss of her boy. Ellis isn't bad, but somehow isn't quite as good, except in certain scenes where his character really gets dealt a heavy blow. Douglas Henshall has an undeniable presence as the villain, but his accent is so thick it's sometimes really hard to understand what he's saying. He's at his most unnerving in quieter, more subtle moments, like when he's holding the little boy over the well or is nearly caught whacking him with a cane in his private room.It's all too well made and sincere to even verge in to Sunday Night territory, and even Herbert himself said he thought it was pretty good. If only the whole thing had stuck together more solidly, and not come off so naff compared to the book. ***

Now the series made many changes to the original book including minor ones such as the family dog was called Chester and not Clyde, but why change the ending so that Nancy fancies Augustus? She detests him and that never happened in the book. Also, Stefan was supposed to have been killed by Augustus, the BBC instead decided he should go on until October 2009. Now i know that in the book Augustus was supposed to have chopped of Stefan's private parts and caused him to bleed to death but the BBC could have just depicted Stefan being hit to death. Why change such a big detail? It made the story worse! The series was fantastic but I must say that the ending just made it undignified. Such a shame as I thoroughly enjoyed the story until then.