Cherry Tree Lane

Another hoody film.

A boring couple have their home invaded by some scumbags looking to exact revenge on their son. The usual tying up and degradation of the main characters takes place. The problem is I didn't care about them. The characters were so clichéd and one dimensional that I felt nothing for them.

The lead thug is just a ridiculous ball of unthinking testosterone that he's unbelievable. Couple this with his sidekick thug with a heart and it just gets stupider. I spent the whole film just hating the main thug, which I suppose was the intent. But I was just waiting to see him die and had no interest with anything else. Then just when you think the limits of believability can't be stretched any further, the thug's girlfriend shows up with her little brother in tow to watch. I think even an idiot would doubt a school child's ability to keep his mouth shut about witnessing the events which take place, but they let him stay all the same.

I'm not really a fan of the this kind of film but I had enjoyed the directors other films so I thought I'd check it out. Now I've seen it I never want to see it again.

I was tricked into watching this film by a review, so I feel obligated to give my own so there will be no more casualties..!

This movie can not really be called a thriller: there is no real suspense and nothing is surprising;you can tell how things will evolve from the first minute that the actual "plot" starts.

I actually fast forward it many times and compelled to rerun it, only to find that nothing had happened in between.

All in all, this was a wooden, disturbing presentation of a lower class youth, with a completely unsuccessful attempt to portray a dysfunctional family, lacking all definitions of any meaning of film.

Doing a bit of channel hopping tonight and we came across this movie. My other half almost instantly wanted to change channels as the description of a psychological slasher piece involving some revengeful teenagers didn't appeal to her on any level. I protested and said let's at least watch the start and see how it develops. And I'm so glad we did.

It's a quite tense and edgy piece that could easily be a stage show, all very contained. The acting is pretty good, the script is basic but it does the job, the plot is nothing more than you'd expect. Yet somehow the whole thing is greater then the sum of its pieces in my opinion.

Even though I don't have any great affection for the characters, I found myself rooting for them, or laughing with them, or sighing with them. I think this film does moral terpitude very well, I think it largely avoids cliché, even though the subject might feel that way sometimes. I don't know how I missed this three years ago, but I'm glad to have caught up with it now.

Elements of Straw Dogs perhaps, although this feature manages the central dilemma of that horror in a much more intelligent fashion. I think that's what I enjoyed the most really, the way it did horror through implication.

Cherry Tree Lane is a 70 minute Funny Games/Eden lake-esque 'horror' that sees a bunch of teens terrorising a not-very-happily married couple in North London. Despite the ridiculously short running time, Cherry Tree Lane is LONG. Too long. I found myself drifting in and out of consciousness listening to the pointless conversations that this film includes. Moments include the leader, shall we say, eyeing up 42-year old Christine, telling her to stand up "to see how fit she is" whilst her husband, gagged on the floor, is yelled at "don't look round at me, blud!" So basically, it's a group of chavs armed with knives, stealing credit cards and biscuits. They aren't JUST after money though, they want the couples son who's apparently not been able to keep his mouth shut about someone cousin...or something along those lines. There were some nice slow motion shots, but other than that, it's a very simple film with the only location being the house, well, the living room. There were a handful of tense moments that had me remotely wondering what was going to happen, however, it's all rather predictable. I didn't REALLY care what was going to happen at the end, although, I did hope the couple would execute some revenge if they were to escape. Overall, it's not the worst film in the world, but it's definitely not the best of it's type; Eden Lake and Funny Games are a lot better..and the teenagers seem too stupid in Cherry Tree Lane to carry out anything too horrific.

Like hoodie-horror Eden Lake before it, Cherry Tree Lane attempts to scare the viewer by tapping into their innate fear of the yob generation, depicting a law-abiding, middle-class, suburban couple at the mercy of a vicious gang of 'yoofs' (before the tables are eventually turned for a brief but satisfying slice of retribution).

Writer/director Paul Andrew Williams handles the material confidently enough (certainly better than the dreadful black comedy of his previous film The Cottage) and commands solid performances from his cast, young and old, but while I cannot deny that the film packs a powerful emotional wallop, largely thanks to its unsettling sense of realism, I do feel that the extremely thin plot isn't quite strong enough to sustain an entire feature film. Even at a scant 74 minutes (according to my DVD), there's a fair amount of padding; the movie would have been more successful had Williams added a bit more 'meat' to his narrative, or if the whole thing had just been a bit shorter.