Elfie Hopkins

I came across this title in one of the horror magazines I read and having a child called Elfie I saw this laying for a dumping price at a sell out of one of the HMV stores in London. What I did know was that people hated it or loved it. In between didn't exist.

Elfie Hopkins (Jaime Winstone) lives in a boring village on the country side and the only thing she does is getting a fight with her step-mother and doing investigations with her friend Dylan Parker (Aneurin Barnard) throughout the town and getting stoned together. Suddenly new neighbours appear, the Gammons and people disappear in the town. Both they start to do their homework on the Gammons.

What the film delivers is a lot of blah blah. It's only at 1 hour that we see what the Gammons really are. It's also the moment that a bit of black humour comes in with the severed ear for example or the waving with the arm but for many it will be too late to save this slow moving flick. It takes maybe 3 minutes and we move further into a lot of blah blah because nobody believes Elfie.

You can easily spot that Dylan is in love with Elfie and that takes an important part too throughout Elfie Hopkins. There isn't any gore or nudity to spot. It's just about two friends involving into a story they couldn't see coming.

Did I like it or hate it. It's hard to tell because it isn't for everybody due the talking and it do has a severed head here and there. On the other hand it isn't like Twilight were nothing really happens except whispering towards each other. And it isn't also an arty horror. Just one of those flicks that stands alone, maybe forget the first hour, it's from that point that it turns into a nasty thing.

Gore 1,5/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 1/5

If you like the dark humor of the Seth MacFarlane animated sitcoms, perhaps you will like this. It was described as a horror movie in the TV listings I saw, but it's not really a horror movie. More of a creepy comedy/mystery. Toward the end it does become quite violent and the laughs stop. Not everyone is going to survive to the end, and as is often true with horror movies, even someone you care about is not safe.

Despite her "whatEVER" attitude toward everything, I had to like Elfie. I know nothing about Jamie Winstone but there's something adorable about her, despite her hate for the world and lack of concern for her looks, though somehow she looks sort of pretty.

Aneurin Barnard I have never heard of, but Dylan was very likable. I did find one thing strange: Dylan is a computer genius but this movie was made in 2012. If it was set at that time, why is Dylan using 1992 computer technology? He uses what is essentially the Internet but gets there the way geeks did when people in general started using PCs.

Rupert Evans as the mysterious neighbor shows quite a range, going from friendly to downright creepy in a humorous way.

Ray Winstone is memorable as a butcher who is also a creepy storyteller.

Either one actress is either really good at pretending to be still or someone really talented recreated her head. You might either love the scene for its humor or be totally repulsed by it.

Is it good? Well, I did enjoy it as long as it was funny. The ending is effective if not pleasant.

If you love films with literally no redeeming features, then Elfie Hopkins is for you. If, on the other hand, you are like me, and you enjoy written, well shot and well acted cinema then avoid like the plague.

The film focuses on angsty teenager Elfie Hopkins, played by sour faced 26 year old Jaime Winstone, who lives in a sleepy village in the depths of Wales with her father and step-mother. Her days seem to be entirely comprised of bickering with the step-mother and then smoking weed with Elijah Wood look-a-like Aneurin Barnard. When the village welcomes some new arrivals, the peculiarly named Gammons, Elfie's curiosity is piqued - are they all that they seem? What goes on behind the door's of this seemingly charming and cosmopolitan foursome? And why are the village's inhabitants steadily going missing?

The more relevant question is, why should we care? The answer, revealed over the course of what felt like 2 and a half torturous hours, but what was in fact just 89 minutes, is: we shouldn't.

The film opens with the eponymous Elfie driving her beat-up old car down a leafy Welsh Lane. We know she's cool because she's wearing John Lennon glasses and a knitted woollen hat. She finds a tree branch blocking the road, so gets out to move it; finding the car won't restart, she mutters an expletive under her breath and lights a cigarette. I've already forgotten that this is a woman at least 8 years older than the character she's supposed to be playing because everything about this scene is so real. The Gammons swoop by in their expensive looking 4x4 - they are sinister because their car and hair is black.

You know when adults try to write dialogue for teenagers and it feels like all those times that you and a friend were in the car with your dad and he kept using the word 'cool' and doing Ali G impressions? This is like an hour and a half of that. We are asked to believe that Winstone and Wood are the best of friends, bonded by their mutual love of weed and claustrophobic existence in this Welsh backwater, but at no point does their relationship seem convincing, and their conversations make the film feel like one long episode of skins. The chemistry is non- existent, and their scenes together only serve to enable to writers to introduce clunky plot- devices into the narrative ("Cripes Dylan, I can't believe I found this letter of acceptance to London University of London City in plain view on your desk and you weren't going to tell me about it?!").

There is only a token effort at characterisation: the step-mother is a cardboard cut-out of a succubus; Elfie is haunted by the demons of her past (including her dead mother); Elijah Wood is a nerd with glasses and curly hair; the Gammon man is a suave city-type who does yoga and wears lots of black; one of the Gammon children also likes black and shooting wildlife, while the other is kooky and dresses like a doll. None of these characters are likable because none of them are fleshed out beyond two-dimensions. They exist only to be a part of badly written dialogue and a poorly conceived narrative.

What I particularly enjoyed was the way that stuff was routinely shoe- horned into the film in the most hideously awkward way. Example: When a party guest of the Gammons is seemingly haunted by disembodied voices on his walk home and comes dashing back down the road screaming, Elfie, apropos of LITERALLY NOTHING, decides she needs to begin one of her investigations into the Gammons. Oh right, yeah, Elfie's an amateur detective: apparently everyone except the audience already knew this. When the 'investigation' fails to turn up any meaningful leads, the Elijah Wood character just announces that he has hacked into the computer systems of police stations in villages where the Gammons have lived. Of course we should have realised that he had that capability; he has glasses and curly hair, and a Packard Bell PC from the mid 90s, so it's on us to make those kind of assumptions.

Ray Winstone also makes a cameo appearance as a butcher who can't decide whether he is from East London, the West country or North Yorkshire, and ends up sounding like a cross between Ronnie Kray and one of the Wurzels. Try as Ray might however, there's simply no saving this train- wreck.

The film is at least shot in a beautiful part of the world, and autumnal colours prevail throughout, but personally I think the opportunity to use those colours to make the film more stylised and ethereal was completely missed. An other-worldly quality would have enhanced the film no-end, and made the unoriginal and tiresome twist, (which is thrust into the story with all the subtlety and finesse of Ray Winstone in stiletto heels) entirely more appropriate. Moreover making a remote Welsh village seem oppressively small is surely like shooting fish in a barrel, but at no point in the film is that sense of claustrophobia adequately conveyed. Finally the final scenes are gory and unpleasant, and are accompanied by incredibly jarring and inappropriate violin chords.

Basically this film doesn't know what it wants to be; it's not a teen comedy, or teen horror nor is it a twee indie flick; in the end the makers seem to have settled on that genre affectionately known as 'straight to DVD'.

I wanted to like ELFIE HOPKINS but wasn't really sure what to think. The film itself is a misguided little mystery mixed with horror and blackly comic overtones. The main problem it suffers from is that Jaime Winstone is a pretty poor and unlikeable lead actress and the supposed comedy double act of her and her pot-smoking friend doesn't come across very well, these characters feel desperately like they want to be an likable awkward hero a la SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD but they just feel irritating and self-centred.

Otherwise the small-town mystery is built up nicely and I particularly liked the kooky members of Gammon family, lead by the dastardly Rupert Evans (a guy well versed in playing baddies after this and his turn in the TV miniseries WORLD WITHOUT END). But ELFIE HOPKINS is better at building atmosphere than it is incident, and the action when it hits is very poorly handled and cheap-looking. This is particularly noticeable in the climax, which should be a large-scale and exciting set-piece but instead which comes across as completely lacklustre and disappointing thanks to indifferent direction. CGI blood effects don't really help either. This film is an interesting stab at doing something different but it's only semi-successful in my opinion.

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.