Gnomes review – Asa Butterfield takes on murderous garden ornaments in pulpy horror-comedy
Rightly described as ‘Gremlins meets Hot Fuzz’, this fun series has the high-spirit and gusto one hopes for in a show about evil killer gnomes
One can never trust marketing materials to accurately describe a movie or TV series, but I’m pleased to report that Gnomes’ official synopsis gets its tone right: “Gremlins meets Hot Fuzz.” This six-part horror-comedy series indeed feels like the kind of rambunctious, high-spirited production that’d be right up the alley of Joe Dante and Edgar Wright, directors of the aforementioned films. Particularly in its air of barely controlled chaos, staged with a slight wink to the audience but never too self-consciously.
It’s also – without a doubt – the greatest television series ever made about murderous garden gnomes awakened by an ancient evil.
In the small town of Nompton, there is – to paraphrase a line from another tonally comparable production – something strange in the neighbourhood. Not ghosts per se, but activated garden gnomes who get very stabby-stabby, very killy-killy just as the community is gearing up for a special “Gnome-a-Palooza” festival. Mayor Lachlan Morrison (the always entertaining Darren Gilshenan) insists – like the mayor in Jaws before him – that the town stay open, no matter the risk. Though in his defence, Morrison isn’t fully across the whole “possessed inanimate objects going gnome-icidal” thing.
From the start, Gnomes – created by Joel Kohn and written by Tegan Higginbotham and Paul F Verhoeven – has the kind of fun, pulpy tone one hopes for in a series about a gnome apocalypse. It opens with a William Castle-esque horror-homaging prologue, set in a castle on a dark and stormy night – with an eye patch-wearing Nazi to boot, before jumping forward and settling into Nompton.
Key players include senior constable Arnold Kipps (Asa Butterfield, best known as Otis from Sex Education) and fellow constables Josie Leeds (Higginbotham) and Devon Raki (Matt Okine). The team doesn’t have much actual policing to do, attending kids’ parties and faffing about. And the powers that be have cottoned on, sending Kipps’ ex-partner, constable Ellie McKay (Megan Smart), to relay the news that all but one of them will lose their jobs due to a dramatic downsizing.
When shit hits the fan, of course, it’s all hands on deck, with the death of poor old Luke McGregor’s DVD-shop proprietor signalling the crossing of a narrative threshold. Early on, Morrison informs Kipps that locating the missing “Gnome Queen” is hugely important, because he spent all the council’s money acquiring it from a museum. Later, this quest becomes significant for a different reason: get the queen and you take out the hive. A group of teenagers (Leigh Lule, George Rayias, Oliver Edis and Mila Hourmouzis) also help out, their presence feeding into the show’s slightly retro tone, 1980s horror-comedies (Gremlins, The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, for instance) often putting youngsters at the centre of the action.
You have to wait a few episodes for the real mayhem, though each is a punchy half-hour and the show is consistently entertaining during its buildup – which is often a good acid test, a sign the essential elements are in place. A fairly average zinger delivered at one point by Okine (“you don’t break the rules, the rules break you”) made me wonder if the script could’ve done with some better one-liners, and whether a “get off my lawn!” gag was ever on the cards. The cast do a good job keeping a straight-ish face while recognising the silliness of it – particularly Butterfield, who walks around with the right amount of phoney bravado: just enough to communicate he’s in on the joke.
It’s energetically directed – by Matthias Hoene, Sian Davies and Kohn – and given a midnight-movie look by cinematographer Matthew Temple, who recently shot Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ instant classic Late Night with the Devil. The team understands that with this type of production, you can be many things – over the top, outrageous, etcetera – but you should never be boring. This inevitably requires telling a fun story, with characters you either like or want to see spectacularly dispatched to that great big garden bed in the sky. Gnomes pulls it off with pulpy gusto.
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Gnomes is on Stan in Australia now, and on Disney+ in the UK from 16 October
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