09/11/2012 13:15 | By Neil Smith, contributor, MSN Movies

Review: ParaNorman

A young boy’s sixth sense comes in handy when his small town is besieged by undead zombies.


Paranorman - 3 stars

Release date: 14 September 2012
Certificate: PG
Directors: Sam Fell, Chris Butler
Voices: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Casey Affleck, Anna Kendrick

What's the story?
Bullied by his classmates for talking to the dead, Norman (Smit-McPhee) has the last laugh when he becomes the only person who can save his town from a witch's curse.

What did we think?
Crafted with care and directed with love, this stop-motion horror romp will entertain adults more than children with its genre in-jokes and ghoulish sense of humour. Next to Tim Burton's animations or its makers' earlier film Coraline, however, it feels more of a derivative homage than its own distinct entity.

As Haley Joel Osment found out in The Sixth Sense, it's not easy being a kid who can see dead people. But at least 11-year-old Norman Babcock has his love of horror films to sustain him when he's being ostracised at school and ignored at home.

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The last thing he expects, though, is to find himself in a horror movie for real when an ancient curse is reawakened and his little hamlet of Blithe Hollow becomes overrun by reanimated corpses. It's up to him then - assisted by his airhead sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick), his rotund friend Neil and Neil's muscle-bound older brother Mitch (Casey Affleck) - to placate a vindictive witch still aggrieved about being burned at the stake 300 years earlier.

Arriving in cinemas ahead of two other Halloween-season animations - Tim Burton's Frankenweenie and Sony's Hotel Transylvania - this lively, surprisingly dark 3D toon is sure to please genre fans with its nods to vintage creature features, '80s slasher pics and the zombie classics of George A Romero. Strip all this away, however, and you're left with an extended Scooby Doo episode - complete with van - with characters that wear out their welcome before we have a chance to warm to them.

3 stars


Verdict: Death Warmed Up.

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