Wake Wood (2011) - 2.5/4

An Irish couple's little girl accidentally feeds herself to a dog. Not the brightest kid, but her parents grieve anyway. They grieve so much they move to Wake Wood, a town of about 40 people, one of whom is Timothy Spall in frumpy fat guy clothes. Turns out Spall's one of those folk wizards who always seem to know an inordinately complicated series of actions that will result in raising someone from the dead, cursing an ex-boyfriend, or making that prostitute who fell on your cat after drinking too much gingerbeer lose a leg to leprosy. In this case, it's raising the dead, namely Little Miss Dogfood 2010. Unfortunately, mommy and daddy, trained, as medical folk, in incomprehensible prescriptions, are incapable of following instructions and so bring forth a monster in a little girl's body--and I don't mean in the hentai sense.

I suppose Wake Wood earns the peculiar distinction of being the goriest evil kid movie thus far. I guess Hammer wanted to make a comeback with a bang, so they have a lot of gooey birthing sequences, organ-removal, mutilated animals, corpse mutilation, and more. It's not just gore, it's weird gore, with strange and compelling wounds, goo, and violations. I think this was a wise decision, as the film is a bit slow-paced, with many of the early deaths being pure accident, and has a plot guessable to anyone who has seen, heard of, or buried a pet since the release of Pet Sematary. The only way to make such a film work is strong atmosphere or going wild with the grue. David Keating aims for a little of both.

As for atmospherics, Keating offers small town Irish folkiness by day and torch-lit rituals by night. The folkiness works well enough as a fantasy of Irish small towns. Of course, it's not inconceivable that this fantasy could be real. These folk wizards walked the lands, even here in Canada, within my mother's memory. I still remember tales of these folk wizards. Like the time a man fell extremely ill, baffling the doctors, and was near death. In came the bumpkin wizard with the pronouncement, "COD LIVER OIL!" "A thimble-full?" someone wondered. No! A shot glass? No! A tea cup? No, no, no! A whole goddam pitcher of the stuff! Jesus Mary and Joseph alone know how many codfish livers were squished between a rock and the dry heel of a gouty sailor to get all that oil, but it was going to be pumped down this sick man's throat whether he liked it or not. If he was going to die, it'd damn well be in a puddle of cod liver oil he sweated through his own skin. And y'know what? It worked. So, the folkiness works too. The torchlit rituals also work. They're both attractive and frightening at once, like a Goya painting or Christian Bale.

So, what Wake Wood is lacking in narrative originality it makes up for in its style. And ultimately it's always style that counts.