A couple of travellers find themselves in the midst of a group of inbred hicks in the English countryside.
British horror needs more quality output these days, for every gem ("Lighthouse," "Shaun of the Dead") there are your duds ("Creep") and more often than not, the low budget attempts are in the latter category. So I didn't hold my hopes high for "Small Town Folk." It's a good job that I didn't because it unfortunately wasn't anything new or exciting. It's main mistake is that it bills itself as a horror comedy, but it's just not funny. The jokes are so cringe-worthy that you don't even laugh at how bad they are, and attempts at splat-stick also fail with the gore level only low to medium.
This was a shame because the set-up was promising with echoes of a "Wrong Turn" set in England, but whereas the bad guys in that film were genuinely frightening, the titular small town folk in this movie are laughably un-scary, and in some cases, quite annoying. There are however two interesting bad guys who wear Slipnot-esque masks and actually provide the best moments of the film. If the hicks had been limited to these two and the attempt at comedy left out, then the film would have had a better effect as a straight horror film.
 
The other characters in the film are also infuriatingly stupid, doing things such as standing still for inordinate amounts of time even when they know a bad guy is behind them, and trying to open car doors with sticks before trying the handle. I'm sure that most of this stupidity was meant for comic effect, but it really wasn't needed as the comic effect wasn't achieved, it just came across as annoying.
The other strange aspect to this film was the use of a green-screen effect for some of the back-drops and an over reliance on CGI for no reason. This really emphasised the lack of a big budget and when some of the locations were used for real, the use of an obvious green-screen effect wasn't needed. It worked in "Sin City" because that had a large budget, here it was needless.
There were some good points however, for example one character was actually quite funny, but he was killed off way too early in an admittedly funny scene. As I've said before, the two masked characters were also good, and as a whole the acting wasn't too bad for a low-budget production.
It's a shame that I didn't enjoy this film because I really wanted to, I always want to like British horror, but this film just didn't do it for me. Give it a try if you like British horror and maybe you'll find it funny, hopefully you will.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2007
DIRECTOR: Peter Stanley-Ward
WRITING CREDITS: Natalie Conway, Chris Musselwhite
GENRE: Horror, Comedy
CAST: Chris R. Wright, Dan Palmer, Warwick Davis
COUNTRY: UK
RUNTIME: 90 min
RATING: 4/10
Small Town Folk Website/IMDB Click here
Small Town Folk Trailer
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