The Wellingborough and Kettering Film Society is holding one of its occasional midnight film presentations in a theatre that is shortly to be turned into a multi-storey car park. After the trailer for the forthcoming The Killer Tomatoes, it's on to the main feature, The Phantom Gobstopper, a 1901 silent horror classic by Gunter Von Earwig. Things take a turn for the terrifying when the film starts to go wrong. Gloria the popcorn-fixated usherette steps through the screen, and a 19th-century factory worker, possessed by a restless, tormented spirit from beyond the grave, steps out.
The first 10 minutes of this collaboration between Forkbeard Fantasy, whose surreal and dotty attempts to mix film and theatre began long before such ideas were fashionable, and writer Sean Aita, is so funny, spooky and inventive that the show seemed destined to become a theatre classic for family audiences. Unfortunately, the first 10 minutes is as good as it gets in an evening that turns into a cross between RL Stine's Goosebumps series and a lecture on the power of the imagination and storytelling.
Aita mines a good comedy-horror vein, with plenty of groan-creating moments of the "There's no 'arm in it" variety when a character appears to lose a limb. Throughout, the special effects and the giant puppets have a brilliant over-the-top tackiness. There is beauty too: at one magical moment a miniature ship appears to float across the stage as if in the dream of a dying man.
But for all its visual appeal, the show is let down by writing that's never sharp enough to be a spoof on the appalling writing of the horror genre, and it lacks any depth or subtext. Audibility is also sometimes a problem. For such a simple story, in which the powers of evil must be defeated by recalling a story from childhood, coherence is an unexpected problem, and the audience participation is much too childish for an audience that is more sophisticated and more open to real substance than perhaps Aita realises.
The cast perform with larky high spirits and, as ever, Forkbeard Fantasy amaze with the clever way they operate at the interface of theatre and film. But while this is good fun, it is not nearly fun enough to turn young people on to theatre.
• Until Saturday. Box office: 020-8858 7755.
