Little Evil

The trailer for "Little Evil" was hilarious. Unfortunately, there isn't enough material here to sustain a feature length film. Forty minutes in I found myself looking at my watch ... and I don't even wear a watch. I was hoping for "Zombieland" but alas, I got "Krampus".

If you like the supernatural horror genre and horror/comedy mashups in particular, "Little Evil" is still worth a viewing, not least to catch the abundant allusions to "The Omen," "The Shining," et al. All others should pass this one by.

Everything is technically fine here. Good acting, surprisingly solid special effects and it looks pretty good. But the actual content of this is quite tiresome. It doesn't want to go fully goofy like Hell Baby but also doesn't want to be a full-on horror. It wants them both and that's when it started to grate on me.

This part they want to be funny, this part is supposed to be scary and then we're supposed to care about the characters. Perhaps someone could or has pulled off these tonal shifts successfully but this movie does not. It's boring, predictable and neither funny nor scary.

I'm starting to feel like Netflix wants more original scripted movies but isn't doing a very good job of deciding what is actually good. Don't watch this. It's not terrible, it's just not worth anyone's time.

I was browsing through Netflix when I found Little Evil, which had come out recently. It seemed like a fun horror comedy, perfect for the day, so I decided to watch it.

There are many things I like in Little Evil, but it doesn't go above average. Of course the idea isn't original, isn't this a play on very typical stories about kids who seem to be the spawn of Satan. Most of them are actual horror movies, though. Little Evil mixes that horror story with the theme of being a stepparent in a humorous way, which itself is fresher than the movie might feel when you read the summary.

But in the end the story doesn't go where you'd want it to go. Of course some of the plot points are good, and the movie is fun and light, and there's something very special about it. But in the end the only thing this movie ends up being is somewhat funny. Everything else is actually quite superficial, and let's be honest, the humorous side probably wouldn't be as good if you watched this movie several times.

So definitely worth seeing once, if you're not too serious for horror comedies, but that's all.

I'm not going to lie; I was kind of disappointed with this one. I had such high hopes for another Tucker N Dale Vs Evil type horror comedy. It's not a bad film, but the laughs were a little too few and far between for me. It had its moments but just wasn't consistent. I will say there are a few genuinely touching moments though, which I wasn't expecting, so it had that going for it.

Part of me thinks this one might get better upon repeat viewings. I'm not really sure why I feel that way, maybe it's because I wanted to like it more than I did.

Worth a watch, but if you were as excited as I was to see this one, lower your expectations.

My Rating: 5.5/10

The first thing to say is that the first two acts of this movie really struggle to truly find the line between horror and comedy. It tries to find comedy in a normal person reacting to a devil child, but that is pretty much every possession horror ever so there isn't much new ground there, and the attempted comedy often falls flat while also taking away from the potential actual creepiness of the scene. It's easy to rule this out as a failed attempt at recapturing the Tucker and Dale vs. Evil vibe.

But then the third act happens and the movie really comes into its own. The humour and tension are amped up and instead of being a shadow of dozens of horrors and a shadow of dozens of comedy it becomes its own movie and is much better for it. There is even a great message about the difference between nature and nurture and there are some good original ideas that make it much more enjoyable.

Overall it is a shame you have to wait for the third act to get going, especially since they show the catalyst for this momentum shift at the very beginning. You could argue they need the first two acts to set up for the third, but if so then they should have focused more on the comedy since there are way too many evil/possessed child films to care about getting that part right. Still though it's hard not to recommend this movie since the third act is really enjoyable, I just wish they could have gotten there sooner. Maybe just skip to that point.