THE COTTAGE
UK, 2008, 92 minutes, Colour.
Andy Serkis, Reece Shearsmith, Steve O’ Donnell, Jennifer Ellison.
Directed by Paul Andrew Williams.
An innocuous title for what is certainly not an innocuous entertainment.
Paul Andrew Williams received quite some critic acclaim for his debut film, the small-budget drama, London to Brighton. What to do for a second film which many warn will not live up to the first film? The answer with The Cottage seems to be to go for broke – or beyond!
It begins semi-quietly enough with an abduction and a ransom demand. David and his timid brother, Peter (Andy Serkis and Reece Shearsmith) seem to have it all covered. However, our potential criminals are not the best planners in the world and become the victims of Murphy’s law. Everything goes wrong and more wrong than they could imagine.
Then it gets worse.
The gangster boss whose daughter they have taken is alert to what is going on and has sent two Korean goons to dispatch them and his stepson (who is even more accident-prone). That doesn’t happen. Worse – and the eerie villagers do warn David but who listens to such eccentrics out in their dressing-gowns around a public telephone?
When they move out of the cottage where their abductee has now vanished from with Peter, the film becomes creepy with scary happenings and death in the woods. It is night, of course!
When the girl and Peter ignore trespasser warnings and go into a cottage with lights ablaze, we know that something is afoot (well, not exactly because Peter loses half one of his). It looks like a haunted cottage – but there is a trapdoor and a cellar and the director wants to prove that the UK can do an equivalent of Texas chainsaw massacring kind of terror show. And, then, it becomes a ‘gasp-they-couldn’t-go-any-further’ gorefest. If that appeals (and there are a lot of laughter-inducing moments despite oneself and a lot of tiresome, witless swearing), then go ahead. If it doesn’t, you might not last all through the final section. And, if you have gone to see it – but, if you are one of those who as soon as writing appears at the end and credits roll compulsively leave the cinema, you will have missed some final minutes and the whole of Steven Berkoff’s performance apart from a few words he spoke on the phone earlier!
1.The impact of the film? Audience response to the gore fest? To the comedy?
2.The screenplay: events overnight, an eventful night? The various strands and developments of the screenplay from kidnapping, to eerie, to horror, to blood and gore. The musical score?
3.The title, the cottage for the kidnapping? The cottage for the mad farmer? The night, the environment, the houses, the woods?
4.David and Peter, arriving, their bickering, brothers, the issue of the family home? The discovery of Tracy in the boot of the car? Keeping her? The ransom demand? Their awkwardness? Peter and his giving away the name, the phone call? Andrew’s arrival? His being followed? Tracy seeing his face? Her head-butting and escape? David and his exasperation, going to the village to phone? The elderly people around him, their warning?
5.The comedy, the two brothers, the contrast, David and his comments on Peter’s wife and family? The photos in the wallet?
6.Tracy and Peter, going through the woods? Discovering the dead Korean? The Korean stalking them? The other Korean dead in the house? Their going to the cottage, ignoring the warning against trespassers? Searching the house, the smell? The editorial shocks for audience-jumping? The cellar?
7.The emergence of the mad farmer, the information about him, the photos? The pursuit of Peter and Tracy, Peter’s foot? Tracy, her fighting back, decapitated?
8.David and Andrew, going to the cottage, Andrew and the pursuit, his head and spine?
9.David, the pick in his leg, finding Peter hanging? Their struggle, the confrontation with the farmer? Deaths?
10.The farmer, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre overtones? The brutality? The blend of comedy and gore?
11.The boss arriving after the credits, his comments about what went on – and the reappearance of the farmer?
