When was it decided that if you wanted to write a children’s book, you had to kill off the parents and have a psychopathic murderer chasing the orphans? I don’t remember Nancy Drew being chased by Freddy or the Hardy boys running from Leatherface. Sure Elmer Fudd tried to kill Bugs Bunny but had he wiped out an entire warren of related rabbits in the back story?

Forget Encyclopedia Brown trying to get back your paper route money from the neighbourhood tough. Now there is a guy in a bell tower trying to shoot the left eye out of your head.

After a false start about a happy elf, Jude Law stops the story to explain that the movie we’re actually going to watch is full of murder and treachery. A perfect Christmas theme. Thanks very much guys.

Is this a Quentin Tarrantino production? Is Santa going to have his arm hacked off by a chick in a yellow ninja suit?

And another thing….How many movies has Jude Law been in this year anyway? Is “all of them” a number?

Well as I said earlier, the movie opens by explaining that a horrible house fire has killed the very wealthy parents of the Baudelaire clan, leaving Klaus (the bookworm), his sister Violet (the inventor) and their baby sister Sunny (who can’t talk but has a talent for … um… “biting things”) all alone in the world, heirs to an enormous fortune that they will inherit when they turn 18.

The film has a dark gothic look to it that’s a weird cross between “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Bettlejuice”. Imagine if Marilyn Manson was a city planner and you get the idea.

When the children are rounded up by the state and taken to stay with their evil Uncle Olaf (played brilliantly by Jim Carrey) he locks them in their rooms and forces them to spend their days scrubbing the floors and making dinner for his troop of drug addicted actors. It’s only when he tries unsuccessfully to kill the children that the state finally takes them away. It must be the Canadian Children’s aid society. You can force a child to live in a washing machine but we draw the line at leaving them on set of railroad tracks.

The children bounce around from family to family but every time they start to settle in and get comfortable “a series of unfortunate accidents” ends up killing their benefactor.

MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone!!

The movie has giant snakes, man eating leeches, babies in cages and a lot of corpses. How much more child friendly can you get than THAT?!!

Personally I kind of liked it, but I’m a twisted fuck.