Elfie Hopkins (2012)

Another movie which is very under rated! Elfie is a very interesting and different type of girl! I found her very refreshing! The movie left me thinking, "What a great heroine for a new series!" I am really surprised there are no books or anything else on Elfie Hopkins! It's such a catchy name and a wonderfully different character. I think a lot of girls who don't like fitting into the social norm would relate well to Elfie. It is a well done movie, like most British films. The acting is great! Definitely not in the B movie category. This is a movie I would have gladly paid to have seen! If I were a writer I would grab this Elfie Hopkins character and start my own series of books! Thanks to the producers and writers of this movie for a breath of fresh air!

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.

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

You've got a low-budget British flick that takes it's cues and inspirations from Hammer's B-grade psychological thrillers of the sixties, Pete Walker's grisly seventies output and hip indie nouveau noir 'tec stylings like Rian Johnson's BRICK.What that combination gives you is a quirky, oddly engaging mid-level chiller with some nearly fulfilled aspirations towards being a cool, self-deprecating "cult" article with teen appeal. The problem with films that aspire to being cult items is they are mostly doomed to failure in that aim. Cult films are not intentionally made, not defined as such by their creators, rather they become that way after they are made and by what happens next in terms of public and fan responses.Difficult to know who this film will satisfy. Hardcore splatter fans will be underwhelmed, whereas the gore in the last act might repel the more tender souls. It's not atmospherically creepy or unnerving to any great degree, like, THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and it's not a bombast-infused psycho-sledgehammer like THE SHINING. Although it features cannibalism as part of it's raison d'etre, it's not HANNIBAL or FEROX. It is a sort of oddity, but one I feel was designed to be that way. A forced approach, a deliberate attempt to make something eccentric, off-key, a manufactured curate's egg of a filmBottom line, though, I enjoyed it in a way that lived up to my low expectations - maybe even a bit above and beyond them. I thought the characters were nicely observed and acted. Jaime Winstone's Elfie is a bottle-blonde brat with a chip on her shoulder and a sort of rainbow warrior/grunge fashion style thing going on. Her performance strikes the right balance between impulsivity, ego, stoner-confusion and vulnerability. As her sidekick, whose love for her is unrequited, Aneurin Barnard's Dylan is a nicely rendered foil. Looking and sounding like a Welsh pot-smoking version of Harry Potter once puberty has passed and the real world is trying to impose itself, he gives a very human and well-judged performance.Jaime's dad - Ray - is on hand in a broad and hokey pantomime cameo, probably as a favour to his little girl who also co-produced, but it's nice to see the two interacting on screen together.It's a fair effort with clear limitations and flaws, worth a look if you fancy something a bit different from the horror genre. I can see it being a moderate hit on DVD amongst the teen demographic, but it's not going to set the world alight or shake anything up significantly.And that's about it, Elfie.