| I watch a lot of horror films. Even outside of the website, I have spent a good portion of my life just swallowing up the genre, like a snake devouring a mouse. I have literally dislocated my jaw and swallowed my Nightmare On Elm Street DVD box set whole. Unfortunately, this also means I have faced a lot of duds because I always give a genre picture the benefit of the doubt.
The Direct-To-Video market is always a tragic crapshoot, but I take the chance anyway, because sometimes, just based on logic alone, eventually you’re going to hit a minor miracle. "Minor miracle" in the Direct-To-Video market means "competent," by the way, and oh my god, The Cottage has "competent" written all over it, in delicious cake frosting. Competent writing, acting, directing, visual style… Passable special effects – it’s almost like a real movie!
With the film set up into two distinct "setup" and "punch line" halves, ala From Dusk Till Dawn, the first half of The Cottage is a quaint, almost whimsical bumbling hostage flick – two argumentative brothers (Andy Serkis and Reece Shearsmith playing David and Peter, respectively) have kidnapped the local nightclub-owner-slash-underworld-crime-boss’ daughter Tracey in hopes of securing a hefty lump of cash. While David might be competent to an extent, Peter is just a quivering mound of neurosis, which isn’t a good combination when faced with Tracey, who has a mouth like a longshoreman and the ability to beat Peter with her hands literally tied behind her back.
 Due to a level of incompetence that could be described as legendary (you probably shouldn’t use your real names in a hostage’s presence. While said hostage is on the phone with their father. And you work for their father) Peter and David are on the run from underworld lackeys – that’s bad. Oh, and there’s a psychotic, cannibalistic, deformed murderer on the loose in the countryside, too – that’s worse.
This is where the film takes a drastic turn for the worst, or best if you’re sick and/or evil, because the film doesn’t fuck around when it comes to the horror. While the humor is more pronounced than, say, the fetishized snuff of an Eli Roth film, The Cottage makes its characters suffer, and suffer big. If characters aren’t being directly killed, they’re at the very least dismembered to an extent – left to hobble away from the freak show murderer with a bit of foot missing, or an iron bar through their gut. I say the seriousness of the gore helps keep the humor from coming off as precocious, but you might feel differently.
 What really keeps the film afloat throughout its genre switch is the acting. You might not have expected it, but Andy Serkis is an excellent straight man, even when he isn’t decked out in a leotard covered in Ping-Pong balls. Ready to take on Serkis’ mugging is Reece Shearsmith who, after spending years with the gruesomely funny League Of Gentlemen, knows how to balance the like-minded material. In fact, The Cottage plays like an offshoot of The League Of Gentlemen: you never know whether to laugh, or stab yourself in the chest and vomit in the open wound.
The film, by the way, does feature a man stepping on a rake, hitting himself in the face. The people who made The Cottage are good people, as far as I’m concerned.
Presentation
Well look here, even the disc is competent! This 2.35:1 widescreen image positively screams "budget constraints," but that doesn’t stop the film from being stylishly shot, and the DVD displays the style nicely. Night scenes, bathed in a blue glow, feel natural. The film positively screams day-for-night shooting.
Audio is presented in an array of flavors: English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The English soundtrack knows how to exploit its over-the-top score, and while it might feel a little overbearing at times, that’s due to the nature of the film rather than the actual mix itself. Ain’t nothin’ wrong here.
 Extras
It’s too bad because I can imagine that there’s some awesome special edition of The Cottage that exists over in the mysterious land known as Region 2, something with audio commentaries and special effects make-up tests and making-of segments, but nooo – what we have is a few deleted scenes, some outtakes and a storyboard gallery, not adding up to much. The allure (I guess?!) is that Sony has included the ability to download a digital copy of the film, which I have not bothered to do. I just assume that it’s wrapped up in a million layers of DRM, and therefore isn’t worth the hassle. Good idea, bad execution.
I forgot – there’s the usual array of previews for other direct-to-DVD films. Starship Troopers 3, what.
Overall
The Cottage is kind of smart, kind of funny, kind of gross, and kind of wild, piling enough good tidbits to make a satisfying, Jambalaya-like film. The disc isn’t going to sell you, and the digital copy craze is clearly more gimmick than function, but we’ve got a film that manages to astound by simply not sucking. And I find that idea fairly reasonable.
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