Troll Hunter at Fright Fest

I do hope the people behind Norwegian film The Troll Hunter had their tongues firmly in their cheeks when they were making it.

Bought a ticket on a complete whim when I found myself at a lose end in Leicester Sq at 10.45 this morning (head into town to get day seats for a play and end up seeing a film at the Film 4 Fright Festival). I had vague recollection of a trailer  with people running around in dark woods in a Blair Witch-style but other than that knew nothing about the film.

Now I scare easily but fortunately having spent a chunk of my life going to rock and heavy metal gigs, the presence of a predominantly male audience mostly wearing black didn't worry me. What did were the trailers - some french horror torture flick had looking into my lap almost immediately. The Woman in Black trailer seemed positively Disney after that but a worrying thought did start dancing through my mind: 'What the hell have you booked to see?'.

With visions of having to be enticed out from under my seat with a bag of marshmallows at the end I gritted my teeth and prepared to be scared.

But despite the fact that a large part of the film is set in woods at night - one of my biggest nightmare scenarios - I quickly started to wonder what nature of film I was actually watching.

It's mockumenatry style about a group of student film makers who stumble on national cover up, that there are trolls living in them there hills and there is one man, the troll hunter, who is employed to keep them under control, killing them if they get too close to civilisation.

They persuade the troll hunter to let them accompany him mainly because he's got fed up with the long, unsociable hours of troll hunting. Do you see where this is going?

Mark Kermode qualifies a comedy as having at least five laughs and Troll Hunter has them. The reason for my opening statement about being tongue in cheek is that I'm not entirely sure it is supposed to be humourous.

What makes me unsure is that the story is so elaborately and earnestly set up and the scenario so potentially scary that when you do see a troll for the first time it's so unscary as to completely baffle. They look like something out of a cross between the Muppet's and Never Ending Story.

The laughs come at first from laughing at the film and its seeming ridiculousness but there there are one or two quite funny bits of dialogue which subsequently seem to invite you in on the joke.

So was this scaredy-cat scared? Not a bit. But I did have a good handful of chuckles, the problem is I'm not sure whether I was supposed to or not. I also can't fathom why its an 18 certificate. It's getting a perplexed 57% from me.