Wonderful character development!

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is much better than reviews would suggest. On a scale of 0-10 for flawed films where 0 = The Wicker Tree (flawed and bad), 5 = Ginger Snaps (flawed but good), 10 = Dellamorte Dellamore, aka Cemetery Man (flawed but brilliant), this rates 5 +/- 1, depending on what you think of the acting.The film itself is well shot, well conceived and well executed. Compared to utter crud like Jeepers Creepers, this is in a different league when it comes to intention and execution. If Amicus produced Midsomer Murders, it could be something like this.There are annoyances: poor dialogue, clichéd characterisation but also pleasant surprises: my heart sank a little when the film began with a girl (our heroine, a "final girl" right from the start: she just doesn't realise it) getting out of a car that won't start on a country lane. Nicely subverted when she walks a little distance and is home.It is a first feature and has maybe a few too many references but, on the whole, its sly humour works well. I've watched an awful lot of crap horror in the so-bad-it's-good category: this is not one of those.It's a proper film and is worth a look.

The titular character is a wannabe detective and spends her days with her best friend, smoking marijuana and spying on her very eccentric neighbours.The Gammons move in, and despite their eccentricities, are affable, and Elfie grows to like the man of the house.Soon though, things start happening, and people start to go missing, and Elfie assumes that the Gammons have something to do with this....It's a really strange movie this one, and you really have to be in the right frame of mind to see this, because it doesn't know what it wants to be, Horror, Comedy, Drama, even parody.It's as if The League Of Gentlemen had written an episode of Midsomer Murders and injected an element of the seventies to it......and it works to an extent.The cast are okay, and as usual Winstone is brilliant, she is one of those actresses you could watch anything in, she has a brilliant screen presence.On the whole though, it really is an oddity, very eccentric to begin with, and the final third goes very sinister and leftfield.Not for everyone, but a curioso piece nevertheless..

You've got a low-budget British flick that takes it's cues and inspirations from Hammer's B-grade psychological thrillers of the sixties, Pete Walker's grisly seventies output and hip indie nouveau noir 'tec stylings like Rian Johnson's BRICK.What that combination gives you is a quirky, oddly engaging mid-level chiller with some nearly fulfilled aspirations towards being a cool, self-deprecating "cult" article with teen appeal. The problem with films that aspire to being cult items is they are mostly doomed to failure in that aim. Cult films are not intentionally made, not defined as such by their creators, rather they become that way after they are made and by what happens next in terms of public and fan responses.Difficult to know who this film will satisfy. Hardcore splatter fans will be underwhelmed, whereas the gore in the last act might repel the more tender souls. It's not atmospherically creepy or unnerving to any great degree, like, THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and it's not a bombast-infused psycho-sledgehammer like THE SHINING. Although it features cannibalism as part of it's raison d'etre, it's not HANNIBAL or FEROX. It is a sort of oddity, but one I feel was designed to be that way. A forced approach, a deliberate attempt to make something eccentric, off-key, a manufactured curate's egg of a filmBottom line, though, I enjoyed it in a way that lived up to my low expectations - maybe even a bit above and beyond them. I thought the characters were nicely observed and acted. Jaime Winstone's Elfie is a bottle-blonde brat with a chip on her shoulder and a sort of rainbow warrior/grunge fashion style thing going on. Her performance strikes the right balance between impulsivity, ego, stoner-confusion and vulnerability. As her sidekick, whose love for her is unrequited, Aneurin Barnard's Dylan is a nicely rendered foil. Looking and sounding like a Welsh pot-smoking version of Harry Potter once puberty has passed and the real world is trying to impose itself, he gives a very human and well-judged performance.Jaime's dad - Ray - is on hand in a broad and hokey pantomime cameo, probably as a favour to his little girl who also co-produced, but it's nice to see the two interacting on screen together.It's a fair effort with clear limitations and flaws, worth a look if you fancy something a bit different from the horror genre. I can see it being a moderate hit on DVD amongst the teen demographic, but it's not going to set the world alight or shake anything up significantly.And that's about it, Elfie.

The film follows a pair of detective-wannabe stoners who begin investigating a suspicious family who move into their sleepy hunting village in England. While billed as a horror film it's actually more of a quirky coming-of-age story that just so happens to feature cannibalism and gratuitous violence. The story is overshadowed by the vivid characterisation and splendid performances from the cast. Jamie Winstone and Aneurin Barnard are engaging and likable as the oddball pot-loving duo at the centre of the film while the bizarre family of Gammons provide comedy and terror in equal part.Elfie Hopkins is a B-movie story with fully-fleshed and precisely portrayed characters that is entertaining, heartwarming and occasionally rather gruesome, with a hilarious cameo from Ray Winstone. It takes elements of cult cinema and mixes them with slick contemporary filmmaking to make the ideal midnight movie and a promising debut from a new young director. As Elfie would say, "skin up", sit back and enjoy.