Vicious hoodlum David (a marvelously ruthless portrayal by Andy Serkis) and his bumbling wimp brother Peter (ably played to the sniveling hilt by Reece Shearsmith) decide to abduct Tracey (a fabulously feisty performance by Jennifer Ellison),who's the abrasive and foul-mouthed daughter of a powerful mobster. However, things don't go as smoothly as planned.

Writer/director Paul Andrew Williams keeps the entertainingly off-center story moving along at a zippy pace, mines lots of laughs from a wickedly funny sense of pitch-black humor, delivers a few dandy and surprising macabre twists, and tops everything off with a handy helping of excessively gruesome gore. Serkis and Shearsmith display a winningly spiky chemistry as a pair of radically contrasting siblings; their spiky rat-tat-tat-tat sarcastic exchanges are an absolute hoot to behold. Steven O'Connell also excels as hopelessly inept bag man Andrew while Doug Bradley has a nice bit as a suspicious villager and Steven Beroff pops up in a cracking cameo at the very end. The sharp cinematography by Christopher Ross makes inspired use of the widescreen format. Laura Rossi's jaunty barnstorming score hits the spirited spot. A good'n'ghoulish blast.

THE COTTAGE starts out as a variation on the kidnap thriller THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED before turning into a WRONG TURN sequel around halfway through. It's an unwieldy and low budget little black comedy that appears to think it's cleverer than it really is. Given the small number of cast members, films like this either win or die on the calibre of their scripts and unfortunately the one for THE COTTAGE isn't so great.

I like films set in single locations but they have to make up for the lack of background variety with truly great dialogue and THE COTTAGE fails to achieve that quality. While Reece Shearsmith and Andy Serkis both put in good performances and build a genuine chemistry in their many scenes together, it's not quite enough to make this particularly watchable. Jennifer Ellison's character is too intentionally annoying to work and the ultimate reveal of the film's true villain is something straight out of a US B-movie.

In a bid to remain shocking there are some moments of extreme gore and bloodshed on offer here but to be honest they come across as rubbery. They're also overly reminiscent of the much better BRAINDEAD by Peter Jackson, which this film seems to be trying to imitate in places. They needn't have bothered - there's only one BRAINDEAD after all!

When David (Andy Serkis) and his clumsy brother Peter (Reece Shearsmith) kidnap the daughter of a powerful gangster, they bring Tracey (Jennifer Ellison) to a cottage in the countryside in the trunk of their car. Peter calls Tracey's father and asks a ransom of one hundred thousand pound to be delivered to her step-brother Andrew (Steve O'Donnell). When the bag is delivered to the moron Andrew, he does not check the content and is followed to the remote location by two Chinese hit-men hired by Tracey's father. When the abductors discover that the bag has only paper, David drives to a nearby village to make a phone call to demand the money. When he returns, he finds Andrew fainted and later that Tracey had reverted the situation and escaped with his brother as hostage. Meanwhile an insane and deformed farmer has just killed the killers and Tracey and Peter are heading to his farmer seeking a phone to call her father.

I had a great expectation with "The Cottage" but I found it disappointing. The black-humor never works except in the two very last scenes (in the end of the credits there is a last one). The characters Peter and Andrew are stupid and annoying and the psychopath serial-killer is a rip-off of Leatherface. In the end I found this movie only reasonable and my vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Cabana Macabra" ("Macabre Cottage")