The titular character is a wannabe detective and spends her days with her best friend, smoking marijuana and spying on her very eccentric neighbours.The Gammons move in, and despite their eccentricities, are affable, and Elfie grows to like the man of the house.Soon though, things start happening, and people start to go missing, and Elfie assumes that the Gammons have something to do with this....It's a really strange movie this one, and you really have to be in the right frame of mind to see this, because it doesn't know what it wants to be, Horror, Comedy, Drama, even parody.It's as if The League Of Gentlemen had written an episode of Midsomer Murders and injected an element of the seventies to it......and it works to an extent.The cast are okay, and as usual Winstone is brilliant, she is one of those actresses you could watch anything in, she has a brilliant screen presence.On the whole though, it really is an oddity, very eccentric to begin with, and the final third goes very sinister and leftfield.Not for everyone, but a curioso piece nevertheless..

From the DVD cover it seems like a gruesome slaughter fest of a movie. But that is far from it, in fact I needed to sit through a very slow paced mundane amateur detective plot to get to those scenes. And even when it got to it, there really isn't any shock factor. The cover for the DVD case for this movie is false marketing. It has two guys with shot guns next to the female protagonist and they aren't even pivotal to the plot. The nerdy sidekick in the movie is with the protagonist most of the way through, helping her with her own investigation and crap. But I guess they didn't put him on the cover cause they wanted the movie to appear all badass. The build up is just plain dull and bored me to tears and the protagonist Elfie is just not very likable. And I personally didn't care what happened to her. A character that is brash and smug can be somewhat likable but that isn't the case here. The story is basically about a mysterious family moving into the neighborhood and that family looks like they came off the set of "Twilight". With a husband that acts like a vampire, to a Gothic wife, to a vampire wannabe son that is into shooting and hunting, and a daughter that dresses up like a doll and collects Japanese stuff. And when Elfie sees couple of oddity inside the mysterious family she decides to stick her nose in. And goes about it in a very amateur way. Nothing is entertaining, clever or thrilling about this movie. There are no twist and you can literally predict how everything is going to play out for the most part. And the climax is just plain dumb. In fact a lot of stuff in this flick and scenarios doesn't make much sense. It was just almost unbearable to sit through the build up and the climax isn't even worth it. There is better mystery thrillers so pass on this one. Not even worth the rent. The movie is about a hour and a half long but felt way longer when it came to the running time. Oh the sidekick reminded me of Elijah Wood and he was alright but as for the main protagonist not so much.2/10

Now before i start i must say that I bore no grudge towards anyone or anything to do with this film before I endured it! .So where do i begin i randomly choose a film to watch one night and unluckily the hand of fate fancied giving me a dry slap because it was a film called Elfie Hopkins. Elfie Hopkins is a black comedy, horror, thriller about a teenager and her male mate Parker getting stoned and wanting to be detectives. Elfies main desire to be a gum shoe is due to the accidental death of her mother when she was younger and Parkers desire to be a detective is just because he Fancy's Elfie YAWN. So anyway new family arrives people start disappearing and as you can imagine its all very predictable. Jaime Winstone is just plain annoying with all her face pulling and trying to copy her dads mannerisms in the main role and most of the acting is done with little to no enthusiasm or conviction its like the actors didn't even be-leave that this project was any good so did not bother to act. Ray Winstone turns up as the local butcher on two occasions making the film almost credible but as soon as his 4 minutes are over you remember that your watching a unimaginative piece of dry rot. The film plods on with the introduction of Elfies feuding posh neighbors and it all just seems so pointless it almost hurts, the ending is so transparent from the beginning I thought to myself well maybe the characters and twists are going to be good but I was wrong there are no twists and the characters are painfully stereotypical. With a running time of only 89 minutes I figured at least it will all be over soon but no it felt like I was watching it for 3 hours I have always prided myself on never giving up on a film and turning it off but I came very close with this one. I am sure the director Ryan Andrews may of thought he was making a quirky Black comedy with a great sense of teen angst combined with humor but this is not the case. The humor is near non existent the horror elements are dire the directing shows no charisma or personality at all. Its a paint by numbers story with poor direction from start to finish. SPOILER ALERT ha ha as if you can spoil this movie by revealing and plot twists because their is none the whole film is pointless crap made to keep Ray Winstones daughter in a job do yourself a favor don't watch this crap and if you are tempted don't say i did not warn you this film is drivel.

If you love films with literally no redeeming features, then Elfie Hopkins is for you. If, on the other hand, you are like me, and you enjoy written, well shot and well acted cinema then avoid like the plague. The film focuses on angsty teenager Elfie Hopkins, played by sour faced 26 year old Jaime Winstone, who lives in a sleepy village in the depths of Wales with her father and step-mother. Her days seem to be entirely comprised of bickering with the step-mother and then smoking weed with Elijah Wood look-a-like Aneurin Barnard. When the village welcomes some new arrivals, the peculiarly named Gammons, Elfie's curiosity is piqued - are they all that they seem? What goes on behind the door's of this seemingly charming and cosmopolitan foursome? And why are the village's inhabitants steadily going missing? The more relevant question is, why should we care? The answer, revealed over the course of what felt like 2 and a half torturous hours, but what was in fact just 89 minutes, is: we shouldn't. The film opens with the eponymous Elfie driving her beat-up old car down a leafy Welsh Lane. We know she's cool because she's wearing John Lennon glasses and a knitted woollen hat. She finds a tree branch blocking the road, so gets out to move it; finding the car won't restart, she mutters an expletive under her breath and lights a cigarette. I've already forgotten that this is a woman at least 8 years older than the character she's supposed to be playing because everything about this scene is so real. The Gammons swoop by in their expensive looking 4x4 - they are sinister because their car and hair is black. You know when adults try to write dialogue for teenagers and it feels like all those times that you and a friend were in the car with your dad and he kept using the word 'cool' and doing Ali G impressions? This is like an hour and a half of that. We are asked to believe that Winstone and Wood are the best of friends, bonded by their mutual love of weed and claustrophobic existence in this Welsh backwater, but at no point does their relationship seem convincing, and their conversations make the film feel like one long episode of skins. The chemistry is non- existent, and their scenes together only serve to enable to writers to introduce clunky plot- devices into the narrative ("Cripes Dylan, I can't believe I found this letter of acceptance to London University of London City in plain view on your desk and you weren't going to tell me about it?!"). There is only a token effort at characterisation: the step-mother is a cardboard cut-out of a succubus; Elfie is haunted by the demons of her past (including her dead mother); Elijah Wood is a nerd with glasses and curly hair; the Gammon man is a suave city-type who does yoga and wears lots of black; one of the Gammon children also likes black and shooting wildlife, while the other is kooky and dresses like a doll. None of these characters are likable because none of them are fleshed out beyond two-dimensions. They exist only to be a part of badly written dialogue and a poorly conceived narrative. What I particularly enjoyed was the way that stuff was routinely shoe- horned into the film in the most hideously awkward way. Example: When a party guest of the Gammons is seemingly haunted by disembodied voices on his walk home and comes dashing back down the road screaming, Elfie, apropos of LITERALLY NOTHING, decides she needs to begin one of her investigations into the Gammons. Oh right, yeah, Elfie's an amateur detective: apparently everyone except the audience already knew this. When the 'investigation' fails to turn up any meaningful leads, the Elijah Wood character just announces that he has hacked into the computer systems of police stations in villages where the Gammons have lived. Of course we should have realised that he had that capability; he has glasses and curly hair, and a Packard Bell PC from the mid 90s, so it's on us to make those kind of assumptions.Ray Winstone also makes a cameo appearance as a butcher who can't decide whether he is from East London, the West country or North Yorkshire, and ends up sounding like a cross between Ronnie Kray and one of the Wurzels. Try as Ray might however, there's simply no saving this train- wreck.The film is at least shot in a beautiful part of the world, and autumnal colours prevail throughout, but personally I think the opportunity to use those colours to make the film more stylised and ethereal was completely missed. An other-worldly quality would have enhanced the film no-end, and made the unoriginal and tiresome twist, (which is thrust into the story with all the subtlety and finesse of Ray Winstone in stiletto heels) entirely more appropriate. Moreover making a remote Welsh village seem oppressively small is surely like shooting fish in a barrel, but at no point in the film is that sense of claustrophobia adequately conveyed. Finally the final scenes are gory and unpleasant, and are accompanied by incredibly jarring and inappropriate violin chords.Basically this film doesn't know what it wants to be; it's not a teen comedy, or teen horror nor is it a twee indie flick; in the end the makers seem to have settled on that genre affectionately known as 'straight to DVD'.