Ankle Biters: Review

16th November 2021

Sean Chase (Zion Forrest Lee) is a Canadian hockey star, although he’s more infamous for nearly beating a rival team’s player to death. Then he meets Laura Haywood (Marianthi Evans) and it was love at first sight.

A whirlwind romance starts and then Laura introduces Sean to her daughters – all four of them. Unfortunately, Laura’s daughters don’t take too well to Sean and are suspicious from the start without even knowing about his violent past. However, when they see a video of Sean and Laura engaging in a bit of rough play during sex, they decide to hatch a plan. They need to get rid of Sean and murder is on their minds.

Ankle Biters is a horror comedy written and directed by Bennet De Brabandere with a story from Zion Forrest Lee. Whereas the premise of such a film is interesting in its concept as it has the potential to be a comedy of errors with a dark twist, the execution is not as good as it could be.

Using children in horror is a difficult task, on the one hand if they’re the victim then they are more than likely to survive, but if they are the villain then there must be some kind of twist to exonerate their actions. Unfortunately, it seems that Ankle Biters takes itself far too seriously and where there is potential for comedy, horror takes over.

Perhaps cleverly casting real sisters in the film adds to the authenticity of their performances because the Reid sisters all do very well, although there is little to distinguish them in terms of their personalities. This leads to an unbelievable situation becoming more traumatic and disturbing than funny though. This is because there’s not much of an indication between them that what they’re doing is a bad idea.

Similarly, although the movie does start to paint Sean in an ambiguous light at the beginning, he soon becomes a victim to the mischievous little girls’ plans and the audience may stop laughing.

Ankle Biters would have been better if it were played more for laughs and if the film didn’t go so dark. However, it seems that the lust for blood overshadowed the laughs.

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