Tales from the Lodge

I wasn't expecting much when I stumbled across this title, but have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Quirky offbeat humour with a few laugh out loud moments and an absurdity that enhances, rather than detracts, from this mash up of camp-fire story telling, and comedy suspense. Definitely worth the watch and worthy of a better rating than it has on IMDB.

A group of old friends gather at a remote lodge by a lake to scatter the ashes of their friend who drowned himself there 3 years earlier. They pass the time telling each other horror stories.

Oddly enough the 'big chill' element of old friends coming together is more enjoyable than the admittedly intended lighthearted horror tales, which are pretty weak. When away from this the cast aren't half bad and make good company pending the inevitable real horror which will follow - which, when it comes, is a bit of a stretch but not bad. I've seen a lot worse.

"Tales from The Lodge" is a British Horror Comedy that I found on Amazon Prime. Not quite a portmanteau film, as the overarching story is more involved than just a framing mechanism, the film still tells a number of shorter horror tales within the runtime.

Six friends, Married couples Joe (MacKenzie Crook) and Martha (Laura Fraser) and Emma (Sophie Thompson) and Russell (Johnny Vegas) as well as Paul (Dustin Demri-Burns) and his new girlfriend Miki (Kelly Wenham) come to a remote farm house to commemorate the passing of another friend, who drowned there three years early. As the friends get drunk and tell each other ghost stories, the increasingly isolated Miki decides to leave but then returns a few hours later having been attacked in the woods by a stranger.

Generally, the film is more successful as a comedy than it is a horror film. Five of the six stars gets to direct their mini-stories and though there's not a particularly spectacular one amongst them, they all work in the context of the film. I really liked how those stories interacted with the voice overs telling them, with the characters pausing or changing actions depending on how the narrator changed the telling. The best is probably Johnny Vegas' Zombie/Lost Boys one, which includes animation and visual effects - as well as some fourth wall breaking Zombie make up moments.

I don't like spoilers in my reviews, so I'll dance around the details here. I felt the resolution of the overall story let the film down a bit. I did see some of the twists coming and when you look back on it, the stories that the characters tell are often revealing about themselves. This whole final section doesn't quite nail the right tone, getting the mix of comedy and violence a bit wrong.

On the whole it's a bit slight and has a few missteps, but to say this was Writer/Director Abigail Blackmore's first feature, I'd say it shows some promise.

The cast are great including Kelly Wenham who I hadn't heard of before, as is the scene setting, but the stories they tell are absolute rubbish. The comedy element works well, it's just those stories..

Watched on Amazon Prime, and had real trouble hearing a lot of the dialogue, had to put headhones on as I had to turn it up to levels where the sound effects rocked the room just to hear the dialogue otherwise.

I watched the UK TV premiere of this but found it disappointing, both as a comedy and as a horror anthology. The only two actors that I had heard of is Mackenzie Crook and comedian Johnny Vegas. I find Crook's acting rather lacklustre, I wasn't impressed by his Worzel Gummidge either. Johnny Vegas, with his foul language and fart gags, is funny when doing TV sketches but his comedy doesn't work so well on the big screen. The short stories are rather lame, the best of a bad bunch has zombies and Vegas looking like Keifer Sujtherland from Lost Boys. The only thing that really made me laugh is when some ashes of a friend are thrown towards a lake but a sudden gust of wind blows them back and all over a group of mourners. Beware of fake reviews!