The Cottage

Having thoroughly impressed with his low-budget gritty debut 'From London to Brighton', director Paul Williams has taken something of a left turn with this comedy-horror hybrid. The plot sees two vastly different brothers kidnap the step-daughter (Ellison) of a well known gangster and hold her for a ransom, but one of the brothers is a thoroughly emasculated moron and thus messes up their dim-witted plans, by generally acting in a counterproductive and annoying manner. Proceedings take a gory twist about two-thirds in, when a farmer who looks like Sloth from The Goonies on steroids inexplicably appears and starts killing people. Horror/comedies are strange things; it seems all they have to do is excel at one of the two and offer a semi-proficient bash at the other, and they're branded a success. The Cottage is a film that does neither particularly well. The main problem is the three protagonists, all of whom are so annoying that you'll be praying for the promised bloodbath to ensue with as much pain as possible inflicted on the grating leads. The narrative moves at such a languorous pace that you almost give up on the horror aspect, so when it finally arrives you may find yourself half-asleep in a bucket of overpriced popcorn. Sure, I could even accept an utterly tedious opening hour, if the horror aspect was delivered properly with some flair - alas, a blander monster you are never likely to see. His rubbery prosthetics look like something obtained from a joke shop, while the backstory (lazily inserted through paper clippings... and a diary!) makes very little sense, and doesn't even begin to explain why he likes slapping folk around with the pointy end of a pickaxe. To be fair, one or two of the 'kills' are particularly satisfying, but that may be just because you hate the characters so much that their death signifies an end-of-sorts. Aiming for early Peter Jackson, The Cottage plays more like Black Sheep without the bloodthirsty sheep, leaving us with bad effects and tedious dialogue.