Well, stick a 'For Sale' sign in my garden and call me Amityville, if it isn't another one of those haunted-house yarns "based on actual events".

No sooner have we exorcised Emily Rose than we're confronted by the Bell Witch of Tennessee, the subject of 35 books and - it says here - "the only documented case in American history where a spirit caused the death of a human being". (So vodka never killed anyone?)

Lots of peep-though-the-fingers potential here, then. But from the yawn-inducing title and leaden script to the predictable direction, unspooky lighting and so-what special effects, this is a remarkably uninspired affair.

Donald Sutherland plays John Bell, an 1818 landowner whose dispute with a witchy neighbour marks the beginning of a spate of supernatural goings-on at his property.

John is beset by strange visions and his health starts to deteriorate. His wife Lucy (Spacek) investigates weird noises by creeping around to a musical score borrowed from an unsubtle episode of Scooby Doo.

With the younger children being ignored by both script and ghost, the worst of it is reserved for adolescent daughter Betsy (Hurd-Wood), who is slapped around her bedroom by an unseen force.

James D'Arcy looks justifiably embarrassed as a sceptical schoolteacher, while a black wolf and the mandatory ghostly little girl (little boys being less scary) pop up and disappear whenever there's a lull in proceedings.

Notes to the director: (i) an endlessly swooping and circling camera simply makes people queasy, not frightened. (ii) White contact lenses now have roughly the same fear factor as orange-peel teeth.

Inevitably, there is a dark secret at the root of it all. Take out the unsavoury revelation and this still wouldn't pass muster as Sunday-evening TV horror.

Youngsters defying the 15 certificate might jump now and then, but most viewers will have given up the ghost long before the daft present-day ending. Rubbish.

Elliott Noble