There’s Something In The Barn Movie Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Christmas horror movies provide the perfect antidote to all the candy-coated festivities of the holiday season and there have been quite a few good ones in the past. We’ve had David Harbour as an axe-wielding Santa in Violent Night, Anna and the Apocalypse brought us a zombie Christmas musical, and who could forget the daddy of them all, Gremlins.

There’s Something In The Barn follows in the footsteps of those movies and takes an innocent Christmas tradition and turns it into a blood-soaked terror. In this case, it’s the Nisse from Norwegian folklore,  small gnome-like mythological creatures who guard barns and really, really don’t like it when people mess around with their stuff. Enter stage left an all-American family who have inherited a remote house in the hills, complete with a barn.

Headed up by Bill (Martin Starr) and Carol (Amrita Acharia), the couple have brought two children with them, sulky teenager Nora (Zoe Winter-Hansen), and her younger, curious brother, Lucas (Townes Bunner).  Whilst there are formulaic story beats about an American family trying to adapt to new way of life it’s clear all the cast know exactly what sort of movie they are in and play the laughs accordingly. Lucas manages to befriend the single Barn Elf in the barn by feeding him cookies and in return the family find the snow has been cleared from the drive overnight.  However, the rest of the family are unaware of their guest and the parent decide to throw a massive party in, you guessed it, the barn.

I think it’s fair to say Gremlins has been a huge influence on this film, from the introduction of the Barn Elf where he seems a cute, loveable creature, to the drunken party echoing the bar scene in Gremlins, there is even a key plot point