'There's Something in the Barn'

I had fun with this movie. It will all depend on your tolerance for this sort of silliness, but this is a dumb fun time from the beginning. Oddly enough, it sort of feels like a real family film at first, but then the daughter says 'fuck' once or twice, and then after the first violence begins it starts to get very, ludicrously bloody.

The plot is that this family movies to Norway to inherent and old family property after the great Uncle, or whoever it was, died trying to light the barn on fire. We know it's because of violent little elves that live in there, but they don't. The daughter, son, and step mom all have some level of tension with each other and the patriarch played by Martin Starr, who does his best to guide the tone of the movie the whole way. He's light and chipper and a dork, and maintains that throughout the movie. Then they, and some of the other Norwegian neighbors, most of whom are pretty funny and enjoyable, piss off all of the elves during a party. and then those little fuckers attack. By the time the step mom and daughter are filling large christmas ornaments with moonshine to create explosives to fight the little elves off you will already know whether or not you're on board.

On paper this is far from great and not much better than some of the things I've watched like this, but after having just seen The Mean One it's clear that this is in another class than some of these low rent movies. It's produced by Sony, and looks like it was made by real professionals. It's amazing the difference that better make up, music, and sound effects can make. Some of those crummy, low budget movies do a decent job of making their production quality look a bit better visually, just in the camera department, but everything else is obviously done by relative amateurs. This, on the other hand, just feels like a real movie, even if it's pretty small... The real actors help a lot too.

Anyway, it's brisk and fun and ultimately pretty forgettable, but not boring and doesn't overstay it's welcome.

One odd thing is that this American family clearly includes 2 Norwegian actors. The step mom and daughter obviously have the same Norwegian accents that everyone else in town does as they dialogue progresses. These actresses obviously told the filmmakers that they could do American accents, but the more you hear them the more it doesn't convince you. Maybe the fact that the producers and the director are Norwegian means that they couldn't really hear the difference, but they couldn't convince anyone from America.