Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams follows his much admired debut LONDON TO BRIGHTON with an agreeably silly slapstick horror picture that comes complete with the age old standing-on-a-rake gag and a key character who suffers cruelly funny start-to-finish physical abuse. (This character is played with a relishable combination of girlie screams, inept comb-over and extreme moth phobia by Reece Shearsmith, a key player in the BBC’s uniquely horrific black comedy “The League Of Gentlemen”). The pic somewhat apes the structure and midpoint tonal change of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN : starting off as a dark comedy caper about clumsy criminals, it eventually segues into a rural splatter flick – with grisly make up effects by Paul Hyett – and becomes a kind of UK variant on the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE format.
Pussy-whipped coward Shearsmith and hot-headed Andy Serkis are bickering brothers who hole up in the eponymous remote cottage after kidnapping the mouthy daughter (Jennifer Ellison, providing substantial cleavage and a constant stream of obscenity-laden insults) of a prominent club owner. When the requested ransom of £100 K fails to materialize, and Ellison feistily fights back, the siblings’ lofty plans crash and burn. Things go from bad to worse when they also unwittingly attract the attention of a deranged, disfigured farmer who wields a mean pick-ax and possesses Leatherface-esque characteristics, including a collection of peeled-off faces.
Williams pulls off the notoriously tricky balance of character banter, over the top gore and straight suspense in a likeable movie highlighted by a very effective shock in a room full of severed heads and a bloody denouement featuring a money-shot cranial bisection with a spade. The performances are suitably broad and help make the lengthy build-up an engaging waiting game, while the “monster”, when he finally appears, is suitably grim-looking and brutish.
What prevents THE COTTAGE from scaling the heights of recent Brit horror comedies like SHAUN OF THE DEAD and SEVERANCE are crucial scripting weaknesses. Forming part of a sinister group of villagers warning of what goes on in “these parts”, one-time Pinhead Doug Bradley appears so briefly that his role comes off as an afterthought. While Serkis, Shearsmith and co make for an amusing ensemble of bumbling grotesques, the lack of sympathetic characters of any kind (so important to the impact of SHAUN) is a factor that keeps the audience at a distance when the gore hits the fan. Most disappointing, however, is the punch line : just as the film really gets going, it ends on an abruptly unremarkable note suggesting an exhaustion of ideas.
Still, for all its flaws, THE COTTAGE delivers good gruesome fun in a dry period for full-blooded horror movies and, at its best, delivers satisfying cringe-laced laughs.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
