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REVIEW - ‘THE COTTAGE’

By Dave Loftus ⋅ March 9, 2008 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Horror and comedy may seem like strange bed-fellows but when their relationship works, boy does it work well. Although Scary Movie attempted to weld together the two seemingly incongruous genres, it was little more than jokey spoof and it wasn’t until the British excellence of Shaun of the Dead that humour and terror gelled together so beautifully that you wondered how they had ever survived apart. On March 14th another British horror-com, innocuously titled The Cottage, ruptures onto the silver screen, decapitating bodies and tickling ribs in a barrage of hilarious murderous onslaught. I was lucky enough to see it at a preview screening attended by the director and cast, comprising of Reece Shearsmith, Andy Serkis and Jennifer Ellison. You could tell they had had a great laugh making it.

The first portion of the film follows gruff mobster David (Serkis) and hen-pecked husband Peter (Shearsmith), two bickering brothers who have kidnapped the daughter of a powerful club boss in order to get a huge ransom. Finding a cottage in the isolated countryside from where to do the deal, things quickly plunge out of control when their mouthy hostage Tracey (Ellison) manages to escape, taking Peter with her. David is soon in pursuit and soon the threesome wind up at an eerie farmhouse whose rooms are stalked by a deranged lunatic. Although owing a lot to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the film’s pitch black humour means that even scenes of visceral dismemberments and a house filled with body parts are likely to get you laughing and praising the heavens that you are more physically intact than the characters onscreen.

There’s nothing funnier than watching two clueless people struggling to stop a rapidly deteriorating situation from getting even worse and because of this, Shearsmith and Serkis make a hilarious partnership, arguing constantly as the bodies pile up around them in increasingly gruesome ways.The fact that they are outside the law to begin with means that you remain fully aware that rescue cannot come soon for the witless Peter, David and Tracey and so the film barrels towards a fantastically grisly ending which will prevent you from visiting the countryside for a long time.