Review of Odd Thomas (2013) by John W — 02 May 2014

The title character, Odd Thomas, is a fry cook with the power to see dead people and then helps them find peace. While this story sounds like any dozen other films and TV shows, it does have some elements that distinguish it from most of it's ilk.

For one, hardly any time was wasted on telling Odd's origin story, Odd has already told people close to him about his power so there's no familiar scenes of Odd having to hide what he's doing, and Odd even has something worked out with the local police chief, Willem Dafoe, for when he solves crimes for this using his powers.

In this film, Odd is seeing a swarm of dark creatures hovering around a strange man, which tells him this man will be doing something really bad really soon. Although the film has sounds like a horror flick, it's more of a quirky comedy set in a horror film.

However, the film is not all that funny and although the set-up is fairly clever and unique, the story unfolds with a series of pretty familiar and cliched scenes of Odd investigating the new stranger in town and running into old friends throughout the film.

Based on a novel by Dean R. Koontz and adapted and directed by Stephen Sommers, who I used to always thought was a fun, clever writer/director until "VanHelsing" where he seemed to go precipitously downhill, reaching an all-time low with the "G.

I. Joe" films. Sommers seems to be going more of a low-budget independent route with this film and he tells his wacky horror story with a lot of vigor and energy. There's also a pretty likable and game cast of mostly unknown, which helps a lot too.

Addison Timlin as Odd's girlfriend is particularly good. Watching this film, it made me appreciate how well Peter Jackson balanced horror and comedy with the similar film "The Frighteners" or for a newer comparison, Don Coscarelli's "John Dies at the End" was a much better horror comedy mash-up with similar story about slackers saving the world from supernatural forces the rest of the world is completely unaware of.

I suppose this film held my interest, but it was unfortunately a pretty bland experience.