{"id":639251,"date":"2026-10-07T16:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T16:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/639251\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T16:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T16:14:09","slug":"gnomes-review-asa-butterfield-takes-on-murderous-garden-ornaments-in-pulpy-horror-comedy-australian-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/639251\/","title":{"rendered":"Gnomes review \u2013 Asa Butterfield takes on murderous garden ornaments in pulpy horror-comedy | Australian television"},"content":{"rendered":"

One can never trust marketing materials to accurately describe a movie or TV series, but I\u2019m pleased to report that Gnomes\u2019 official synopsis gets its tone right: \u201cGremlins meets Hot Fuzz.\u201d This six-part horror-comedy series indeed feels like the kind of rambunctious, high-spirited production that\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also \u2013 without a doubt \u2013 the greatest television series ever made about murderous garden gnomes awakened by an ancient evil.<\/p>\n

Garden gnomes get \u2018very stabby-stabby, very killy-killy\u2019. Photograph: Narelle Portanier\/Stan<\/p>\n

In the small town of Nompton, there is \u2013 to paraphrase a line from another tonally comparable production<\/a> \u2013 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 \u201cGnome-a-Palooza\u201d festival. Mayor Lachlan Morrison (the always entertaining Darren Gilshenan) insists \u2013 like the mayor in Jaws before him \u2013 that the town stay open, no matter the risk. Though in his defence, Morrison isn\u2019t fully across the whole \u201cpossessed inanimate objects going gnome-icidal\u201d thing.<\/p>\n

From the start, Gnomes \u2013 created by Joel Kohn and written by Tegan Higginbotham and Paul F Verhoeven \u2013 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 \u2013 with an eye patch wearing Nazi to boot, before jumping forward and settling into Nompton.<\/p>\n

Key players include senior constable Arnold Kipps (Asa Butterfield, best known as Otis from Sex Education<\/a>) and fellow constables Josie Leeds (Higginbotham) and Devon Raki (Matt Okine). The team doesn\u2019t have much actual policing to do, attending kids\u2019 parties and faffing about. And the powers that be have cottoned on, sending Kipps\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

When shit hits the fan, of course, it\u2019s all hands on deck, with the death of poor old Luke McGregor\u2019s DVD-shop proprietor signalling the crossing of a narrative threshold. Early on, Morrison informs Kipps that locating the missing \u201cGnome Queen\u201d is hugely important, because he spent all the council\u2019s 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\u2019s slightly retro tone, 1980s horror-comedies (Gremlins, The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, for instance) often putting youngsters at the centre of the action.<\/p>\n

\u2018The cast do a good job keeping a straight-ish face while recognising the silliness of it.\u2019 Photograph: Narelle Portanier\/Stan<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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 (\u201cyou don\u2019t break the rules, the rules break you\u201d) made me wonder if the script could\u2019ve done with some better one-liners, and whether a \u201cget off my lawn!\u201d gag was ever on the cards. The cast do a good job keeping a straight-ish face while recognising the silliness of it \u2013 particularly Butterfield, who walks around with the right amount of phoney bravado: just enough to communicate he\u2019s in on the joke.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s energetically directed \u2013 by Matthias Hoene, Sian Davies and Kohn \u2013 and given a midnight-movie look by cinematographer Matthew Temple, who recently shot Colin and Cameron Cairnes\u2019 instant classic Late Night with the Devil<\/a>. The team understands that with this type of production, you can be many things \u2013 over the top, outrageous, etcetera \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One can never trust marketing materials to accurately describe a movie or TV series, but I\u2019m pleased to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-639251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}