The Cottage

Horror-comedy; words to send creeping chills of dread down the spines of the most battle-hardened of film critics. At their gory, cranked-up, rambunctious best they can be a crowd-pleasing joy. But when they fail, golly gee, do they ever. And so to The Cottage, a tonally skewed, quite spectacularly misjudged example of this genre hybrid, featuring stubbly small-time crook Serkis kidnapping velour-tracksuit-wearing Ellison and roping in his moany younger brother (Shearsmith) for some ransom-demanding. They hang around in the titular cottage for a while, desperately trying to shoot for the lackadaisical everyday ineptitude of blokey Brit horror-coms like Shaun of the Dead, before deciding it would be a good idea to pay a neighbourly call on any disfigured psychotic hillbilly farmers in the vicinity. Or something like that. Grisly goings-on pad out the latter half, but we've given up hope somewhere between the introduction of the Crazy Asian Assassins and the revelation that Disfigured Psychotic Hillbilly Farmer has his own tragic back-story. Hard to believe this is from writer/director Paul Andrew Williams, whose relentlessly grim but brilliant London to Brighton showed such promise. [Laura Smith]