Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Cortechba Overrated

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Sankari_Suomi This British dark fantasy film was based on Catherine Storr's Marianne Dreams, which it vaguely resembles. The cast includes Ben Cross (Chariots of Fire) and Gemma Jones (Sense and Sensibility, Bridget Jones' Diary), but the lead role is played by little-known Charlotte Burke, in her one and only big screen appearance.Burke stars as Anna Madden, a troubled girl whose alcoholic, emotionally distant father works overseas. Her mother (an awkward, wooden-faced Glenne Headly) with whom she shares a spiteful love/hate relationship, is a business professional of some description, and has little time for Anna's angst.Burke was actually 14 years old at the time Paperhouse was made, but her small face, short stature, and immature body allowed her to pass for the 11 year old Anna. Incredibly, we still get a bath scene in which she is briefly shown topless.Anna's mother smokes like a chimney, casually flicking ash and half- finished cigarettes out the window of her Saab while exchanging insults with her daughter and agonising over her frayed relationship with her husband. At one point she slaps Anna across the face, and Anna barely reacts. This is a family in which domestic violence is part of everyday life.In an unrelated scene, Anna chats with her slutty school friend Karen (a frisky Sarah Newbold, who eventually found her way back to cinema in 2004 as assistant supervising producer for Juliette Soubrier's La Dernière Visite) while they both try on makeup and discuss the merits of snogging (Karen boasts that she's had four different boys in one night).Having established that Anna is an irritating little bitch, the movie takes a U-turn and asks us to sympathise as her life is disrupted by supernatural shenanigans. She enters a dream world where she meets Marc (a languid Elliott Spiers, who looks like someone who's about to die in the next 6 years, which he actually did) and discovers that her actions in the real world affect events in his.Marc and Anna hit it off surprisingly well for two kids who aren't very likable (I kept hoping that Anna would push Marc out the window, and even offered to do it for her at one point) and together they try to solve the mystery of their curiously intertwined existential dilemma. Resolution is possible, but it must come at a terrible price. Who will pay: Anna, or Marc? (By this time I was hoping it would be Marc, because he's a boring little scrote whereas Anna is quite cute once you get past her bitchiness and 1980s hair).The movie works on a number of levels: psychological, philosophical, and societal. The overarching theme is of course the onset of puberty, and the trauma this inflicts on Anna's damaged psyche. A secondary motif is Marc's helplessness, counterbalanced by a disturbingly Oedipal theme in the third act, where Anna's father makes a surprise entrance in a manner not conducive to filial piety.Paperhouse is far from perfect, but the remastered 1080p print corrects the inconsistent 'dark wash' palette of the original, boosting saturation levels to decent values and rebalancing the skin tones. Director Bernard Rose was a little too fond of the so-called 'scratch cut' technique (which initially gives the impression that you're watching one of those dreadful Scott Shrosbree films) but it somehow works better than expected.I rate Paperhouse at 24.97 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as a perky 7.5 on IMDb.

Leofwine_draca PAPERHOUSE is an immersive and interesting British horror/fantasy film of the 1980s that has enjoyed some measure of cult success since it was first released nearly 20 years ago. It's certainly an oddball movie, low budget and rather slow-paced, but my advice is to stick with it because it's a journey that does pay off. This is an imaginative tale about a girl who goes on a psychological journey into a make-believe world with some very odd characteristics.It's one of those films which would be spoilt by saying too much about it. The main thing I can say is that this is classic British 'weird' - a genre with a fine literary tradition - and the titular construction is very well realised and memorable. The young cast give naturalistic performances, backed up by old-timers like Ben Cross, and the spooky atmosphere is second to none.

hazells518 *SPOILERS** Probably everywhere!... Quirky little film but for once I was grateful for other reviews which helpfully teased out niggling questions raised. One could take it at face value as a psychologic/horror thriller or elect to pick it apart by analysing each scene - but I don't think I'll bother. Thank goodness for DVDs where you can re-run scenes to catch action or dialogue you missed - which at least managed to defer my opinion that this one had totally sunk in the mire. It did have some redeeming features. Both children carried the film, however played by much older actors than the children they were meant to portray. The characters of the 2 adults and their performances were weak as dishwater. I didn't even recognise it was Ben Cross until halfway into the film! Gemma Jones, bless 'er, redeemed it by being normal and as always was the most professional. The boy Elliot and the female lead Charlotte Burke actually did a good job, but as 'Anna' she became intensely irritating after a while. Burke's general deadpan expression did nothing to make her sympathetic and was especially grating when she was continually rude and demanding to the grown-ups who took the unexpected treatment meekly. What was this child's true angst - Daddy simply being away? Did I miss some explanation of why? Glenne Headley as the mother was completely miscast and you can see when they are having soup in her room that her voice is dubbed (although apparently it is by the same actress having to disguise a North American accent). While you could empathise somewhat with the fruition of Anna's drawings in her feverish dreams, when awake she didn't seem to think the results of her scribblings were in any way odd. She seemed too selfish to ultimately care about the boy in the dream house. What on earth was the greenish gloop being dispensed from a machine in the hallway of the paperhouse? Ice cream? The interior of the flat (representing a London council or housing association block no doubt- from the rickety old lift and the mansion finish outside) seemed far too modern and "chi chi". And what was with the weird wall mounted "radio" in the house on the hill - looked a bit too techno even for Anna to draw? The later snogging episode was totally inappropriate and unnecessary.***GOOFS*** Blink and you miss it! Once again we have X-rays in a hospital hanging on a lighted viewing box behind the nurse's head displayed the WRONG WAY ROUND. No doctor or health professional would look at them that way but it happens in film after film with monotonous regularity, almost too often for logical statistical probability. 'Though credits frequently list medical 'advisors' not one of them ever seems to catch these glaringly obvious errors! NB: Normally chest Xrays are viewed the same way as if you were facing the subject - ie: the heart shadow on the (seeming) RT hand side of the viewed piece of film. Plus, here we are in a Children's ward yet the images shown are of Adult chests which in itself is ridiculous. There is also a single view of an adult forearm hanging on another viewbox with no sign of the 2ndary image(usually a lateral view) anywhere. Both of the chest X- rays are clearly out of some X-ray department's box of embarrassing rejects. Each one is useless diagnostically as the lung bases of the left side of the chest are 'cut off' (in Radiology parlance) and the second image is 'underpenetrated'. Light boxes equally should not stay on all the time due to glare and heat.

ccthemovieman-1 This was a disappointing horror film about a snotty young girl and her nightmares. For a horror or "thriller" film and hype, it's way too tame. There are only a few tense moments in here, not anywhere as near as many as should have been for a film of this genre. Even those "tense" scenes weren't much. The music made them more dramatic that they actually were.There is a lot of symbolism in here, so the elitist critics label this "a thinking person's horror film." Well, if they think about it, I'm sure they will come to the same conclusion I did - a waste of money at the video rental store.Summary: a yawner that offers an unlikeable lead character and generally poor acting. Vastly overrated and certainly not what it is advertised.