The Cottage

ok ish film nothing wonderful but ok to watch+even have a laugh at

If you liked Sean/Severence etc you will love this! A fabulous comedy horror is a rare beast but when it works it's a delight. All of the actors are wonderful -who knew Jennifer Ellison could possibly be so good - but Serkis and Reece Shearsmith are note perfect! Enjoy!

The Cottage starts promisingly, as brothers Reece Shearsmith and Andy Serkis turn up at a remote cottage with their drugged kidnap victim, only for their extortion plot swiftly to unravel and their ‘victim’ to prove herself anything but.

From then on, though, things go seriously wrong as the plot veers, witlessly, into ‘Texas Chainsaw’ mode via the League of Gentlemen. What could, just conceivably, still have had some comic possibilities is entirely undermined by the overall grimness: somehow it just isn’t possible to laugh at grisly mass killing.

While my liberal sensibilities baulk at the suggestion that any film ought not to have been made, I do object to the use of public funding for awful productions like this. Curiously, some of the cash seems to have been from an organisation called Film Yorkshire. It is hard to see how anyone there who read the screenplay might have thought this film would stimulate positive interest in that excellent part of the world. Perhaps it was at their request that the location, inexplicably, is said to be somewhere off the M3.

Truly awful. I couldn't even watch it all. The violence is all shown in upclose, prolongued camera shots and is particularly gratuitous. Saw no point to the film at all.