31 Days of Horror – Movie 15: Cherry Tree Lane

Living in the UK I always see the scare stories from papers like the Daily Mail about the out of control youth in the UK. Some of it’s not scare stories of course as the “youth” in this country can be nasty little buggers when they want to be, but I’m lucky enough never to have been in a position where I was in danger. Cherry Tree Lane is a movie that uses the youth of out of control idea and extends it into the youth attacking the older generation.

The movie is simplistic in its set design really; it all takes place in one house. This adds to the intensity of what is going to happen. Everything starts of kind of boring to be honest, a middle aged couple having an evening meal and talking about their son, wondering where he is. There is a knock on the door and suddenly their home is invaded by their son’s friends. These people are no friends of their sons though, now they are out for revenge for “grassing” on somebody. The mother and father are then held hostage until the son turns up, and we as the watcher have to sit and wait along with them until the son finally comes home and the movie reaches its conclusion.

Cherry Tree Lane at its heart is a movie about the conflict between different generations. The director is almost highlighting this fact by showing Night of the Living Dead continuously on the TV. The zombies in this movie are the teenagers, not as actual zombies but as intruders in the older generations (the parents) home, their own little world. When we enter our homes we feel safe between those walls, they are a protection against the world outside which can sometimes be a scary place. What Cherry Tree Lane does is to invade that safety and show that the dangerous world outside can sometimes break through those walls and can be in our own personal safe places, and we can have no defence against this.

One thing that makes this movie effective is the acting quality. There are no major stars in this movie, but all the actors make their characters believable, which of course adds to the intensity of what we are seeing. One interesting actor to note is Jumayne Hunter, he is good in this movie and was also in Eden Lake which is a movie very similar to this one, and hopefully he has a bright future in his acting career.

This movie is a ride through suburban hell, it’s the fear of all the middle class families that their little bubbles of safety will be burst by the evil youths they read about in the newspapers and see on TV. It’s a movie that plays on fear that we all have really, that we cannot protect ourselves from the outside world and when it comes to it our families are put at risk and we cannot protect them. It also is a movie about how far we can be pushed to protect those families and what we would do in self-defence, subtly asking how far we can go in that self-defense before it becomes nothing but mindless violence which in itself makes you as bad as the people you were defending yourself against. It gives us interesting questions from an interesting movie. There are better movies than this that handle this subject with just as much intelligence but it’s still an interesting watch and at times thought provoking. I will say though, Eden Lake was better and had an ending that still haunts me.

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