THE OWNERS

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND MINOR WHO NERDDOM

Even as a Doctor Who fan old enough to remember seeing a lot of Classic Who (Tom Baker's second year onwards) on its original, and in many cases only, transmission, I have to acknowledge that there came a point when the show came badly off the rails, severely enough for me to stop watching it. Long after they ditched the Delia Derbyshire version of the theme music in favour of some Bontempi atrocity at the start of Tom's last run, and the unspeakable horrors of the Adric Era, I simply wandered off and thus have only the vaguest of memories of the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy seasons. Nonetheless, I have some weird affection for those latter years, and I even remember tuning into an episode of The Bill at some point simply because McCoy was in it (though even he couldn't enthuse me for the Hobbit films). In fact McCoy has been the main reason I ended up slogging through a couple of Richard Driscoll abominations - Conjuring: The Book Of The Dead (a film so slapdash they pronounce Necronomicon as Necromonicon not once but twice!) and the all-star-3D-comedy-western-musical-horror-spoof Eldorado (even if most of his appearance as a comedy neo-Nazi never made it to the final version).

Happily, if unsurprisingly, The Owners is leagues better: a tense if nasty 90s-set thriller that starts as a home invasion movie and ends with a genuinely unexpected but satisfying twist. Three hopeless idiots, along with the girlfriend of one of them (and the creepy crush object of another), break into local elderly doctor McCoy's house to crack the safe. But they can only trash the house before the owners return, and even under threat of extreme violence McCoy and Rita Tushingham (!) repeatedly refuse to give them the combination... Surely it can't just be a huge pile of cash they're protecting?

It's hard to feel any empathy when the bungling burglars' masterplan starts falling apart and the oldies get the upper hand over them, as they're led by an instantly despicable wannabe gangster and sociopath with a tedious fondness for the C-word, while the other two, despite their varying affections for Maisie Williams, are too weak and cowardly to stand up to him. Once two of the idiots are disposed of and the other two, less hateful, are trapped in the house, gassed and drugged, it teeters on the edge of being a bit silly, but the final moments are cruel yet satisfyingly horrible.

It's not a bad film by any means, though it's very hard to like in its early stretches, with sweary Gary being particularly tiresome and frankly I was glad when he got killed. Fortunately it does get better as it goes on, though the sudden change in aspect ratio in the third act is distracting (to the extent that I wondered whether it was deliberate and scrolled through all the ratio options on my TV). Watchable enough, if nasty in places, while it's on, but I've no desire to ever watch it again.

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