Comedown

COMEDOWN is a low rent British horror film set entirely within the confines of a deserted tower block. The gritty realism and the setting made me hope for something along the lines of TOWER BLOCK or ATTACK THE BLOCK, but unfortunately this is nothing like those two (great) movies. Instead it's a cheap slasher, almost entirely devoid of imagination.

Headlining the cast is Jacob Anderson, best known to audiences for his role as Grey Worm in GAME OF THRONES. Anderson and his buddies, including a pregnant girlfriend and an obnoxious type (Adam Deacon, playing firmly to type) hole up in a run-down building to help run a pirate radio station, but their drug-fuelled highs come crashing down when a killer starts picking them off one by one.

COMEDOWN must feature one of the least menacing bad guys ever, and when you learn of his motivations you'll laugh out loud, they're that slim. The kills, which are what most horror fans will watch this for, are relatively tame, and there just isn't much in the way of suspense built along the way. It doesn't help that the dialogue is moronic throughout and that every twist in the script is well-choreographed. Add in some quite terrible cinematography, meaning 95% of this takes place in near blackness, and you have a quite unworthy film.

Some people just need to get off their high horse. This is a new generation of good British Drama. It's the emergence of a younger generation cultivating their own language, therefore the dialect is true to type of certain communities. Traditionalists are in denial that this section of society exists, and that their language has found its way into the movies.

The movie hosts a mix of teen crime, mischievous behaviour, youth cult and culture. It's the result of all growing up in a Tower Block in the same area, where the likelihood is that they all attended the same schools and went through the UK schooling system, and gang warfare - but these were not gangs - these were just a group of friends with 'attitude'.

I watch a lot of horror/slasher films and most of them I get about half way through before I turn off. Comedown had absolutely nothing new to add to the genre and the characters were pretty unlikeable, yet I found I managed to sit through the whole thing without actually turning it off.

A bunch of pretty horrible teenagers break into a condemned London tower block in order to set up a pirate radio station. However, there's the obligatory psycho happens to already be living there. And, unsurprisingly, he doesn't take too kindly to their intrusion. What follows is the typical 'hunt 'em and kill 'em' scenario.

Although the killer looks like he's already starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer, he's played by Geoff Bell, an actor who always puts in a good performance (even if he does only just squeak in this case!). The rest of the cast are basically 'killer-fodder.' You won't find yourself shedding too many tears when they start getting hacked to death. One girl is pregnant and her boyfriend is a reformed convict, so I think we're supposed to root for them. Jessica Barden, who plays a particularly 'chavvy' young lady, actually puts in a pretty good performance.

There's nothing new here and what little budget the film had seems to have been wasted on using computers to add extra blood in. Personally, I'd rather they'd have simply squirted a couple of bottles of tomato ketchup here and there, as the computer effects look a little bit too fake.

Like I say, nothing too new here, but strangely watchable and quite good fun in its genre.

Comedown is a horror movie filmed in the UK about a group of teens who go into an abandoned apartment tower and end up being terrorized by a killer. The film starts out pretty slow. It takes about 30 minutes for something to finally happen, which seems to be consistent with most of the horrors I've watched in the past few weeks. As much as I love movies and television that comes from the UK, sometimes the accents are really hard to understand. This is one of those movies. Although Comedown takes a while to get going, it gets better, but not by much. It's your basic "trapped in a place while a killer as he picks off all the characters, one by one" type of films. Some of the killings are pretty good, but it still falls pretty short of originality. I did appreciate the scene where one of the girls fights back really hard, that was probably my favorite scene, although it was pretty short. I would say that Comedown is a "take it or leave it," type thriller/horror. Overall, it's just OK.

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... Makes another deeply unpleasant film that borders on being unwatchable

Yes the director of KIDULTHOOD is back and this time he tries his hand at horror in an inner London setting . This type of horror has been done before in ATTACK THE BLOCK , a film I personally despised because the anti-heroic protagonists deserved to get eaten by alien hordes . This film is no different and is a film I despise for the same reason as ATTACK THE BLOCK

If you're going to have a film where the protagonists are going to be fighting for their lives at least craft some type of characterization that will have the audience empathize with their predicament . Here I didn't know anything about the villain in the background stalking the teenagers . All I knew was that he was probably doing the gene pool a massive favour

Some commentators have criticised the " Estuary English / chav speak " dialogue but if we had the Royal Shakespeare Company speaking in pedantic Queens English this wouldn't have made any difference because most of the dialogue is downed out in a poor sound mix with some very dire muzak on the soundtrack just to remind the audience that this is a horror film

In summary this is one of those films that will alienate and outrage everyone from the most rabidly right wing reader of The Daily Mail to the most left leaning Guardinista . When you're watching a horror film and the most likable character is the villain that must be seen as a fundamental failure