Blackwater Lane

You can't really blame Horace Walpole. When he wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764, how was he to know that all the conventions he would set in place for the Gothic novel - the madness, the ghostly deceptions, dark prophesies fulfilled as bitter jokes, and conspiracies at the expense of the innocent – that he'd be responsible for so many braindead whodunnits. Gothic drama requires either a certain sardonic wit or absolute straight-faced earnestness, not just some ill-defined spookiness Most importantly, aside from Rebecca and Scooby Doo, there is no excused for plotting so convoluted that it requires the protagonist to become the narrator just to make sense of the ending. Ever.

Unfortunately, lackluster mansion house murder mystery Blackwater Lane has all the worst and none of the best aspects of the genre, as a lifeless Minka Kelly sleepwalks through all the predictable tropes as she tries to find out who murdered her friend, and whether she's going mad or not. Lumpenly adapting the potboiler thriller from B.A. Harris, scriptwriter Elizabeth Fowler turns every scene into a disinformation dump, with private school teacher Cass staring blankly (which is pretty much all Kelly does) as the next deceptive plot point is delivered to her, either by her suspicious-acting husband Matthew (Mulrooney), or her suspicious-acting friend Rachel (Grace), or her suspicious-acting workmate (Johnson), or the suspicious-acting student (Cousin) who may have a crush on her, or the suspicious-acting police officer (Simpson) who turns up at the most inconvenient moments. Who could have killed Jane (Blouet), the woman found murdered in her car on Blackwater Lane? Was it one of them? Or was it Cass herself, increasingly convinced that she may be her own unreliable narrator? Or is that what the actual killers want her to think? Mwahahahaha!

These would all be valid questions if, at any level, you could be induced to care. Yet journeyman director Jeff Celentano's desperate attempts to resurrect the Penny Dreadful (emphasis definitely on the 'dreadful') just rehashes the most hackneyed of cliches on the way to a needlessly convoluted and completely unconvincing resolution of schemes, reveals, and counterschemes. Possibly this would have been a little more intriguing if Kelly had at least shown some of the charisma that she displayed in the equally unwatchable Single White Female rip off The Roommate. Instead, she drifts through scenes in which every other cast member is hamming it all up – well, except for Mulrooney, who at least tries to give a little vigor to the idea that there’s something deceitful going on. That's the problem with having too many red herrings around. Eventually, the whole thing just ends up a little stinky.