Elfie Hopkins (2012)

That was an excellent one.

Strong and Moving!

So much average

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

In a village in England where people hunt, Elfie is not doing much with her life and she has this "whatEVER" attitude toward everything. Her father and stepmother want her to do more than just smoke pot with her friend Dylan, and she is almost resigned to the idea she will be a beautician, though that's not she wants. Elfie's mother died in a hunting-related accident when she was 12, but to this day she is convinced it was murder, and she blames herself because her mother was searching for her. After investigating what happened to her mother, Elfie became an amateur sleuth. Elfie wears too much makeup and has blonde hair that can't possibly be a real color, and how much of it is green varies between scenes and sometimes within the same scene. One person who dresses fashionably says Elfie looks like someone vomited clothes onto her. Her taste in "music" isn't much better. Her latest case with Dylan involves the Gammons, new neighbors who live in a fabulous house. Everywhere they go, people disappear. At the beginning of this movie, a hunter mysteriously disappears. The Gammons got rich from their travel agency--only it seems people they send on trips don't come back.Still, Elfie becomes friendly (in a completely innocent way) with the father Charlie, who is faithful to his wife even though Pippa wants to seduce him. Elfie taunts Pippa by suggesting Charlie prefers her. Dylan makes friends with the creepy daughter Ruby, to the dismay of Elfie, who won't admit she has anything more than platonic feelings for this geek (her word). Ruby is described as dressing like dolls. In one scene I would say more like a cast member from the musical "Chicago".As is often the case with movies like this, Elfie gets on the nerves of the local police. She accuses people of things they may be innocent of, because of evidence that isn't there when the cops arrive. The title of this movie kind of gives away a secret that Elfie finds or at least thinks she has found. Meanwhile, Elfie worries her friend will go off and leave her because his parents want him to go to university, though he doesn't. 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 attitude, 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.

An aspiring teen detective (Jaime Winstone) stumbles into her first real case, when investigating the mysterious new family in her neighborhood... are they cannibals? I really have no review to put here because it just is not a film that captured my imagination. I do not want to say it was good or bad, because it never really amounted to much one way or the other. I felt like there was potential, but it just did not try hard enough.To properly review this I would have to watch it again, which I have no intention of doing. I cannot recall ever being so apathetic concerning a title ever... which is pretty bad. Typically there is something that jumps out as great or terrible... I guess I really liked the music in the third act, but that is not saying much.

Just been to a preview screening of this film, and i hate to say this but within 5 minutes into the film you can just sense its crap.89 Min's later and i was proved right but hoping it would get better. Not sure were to start but Ray Winstone token performance was wasted. Accents by British actors were rubbish, you could moan more if it was Americans trying to do accents, but god forbid it was Brits doing it. The acting was wooden most of the time the plot was tired and predictable and i could carry on in this way but i can't be bothered :( Overall do not see this film even drunk it would look rubbish, but as i always say you have to see some turkeys to appreciate good stuff!

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'.