The Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse!

Looking like a perverse cross between Aardman and Camberwick Green with a double helping of the macabre Mad God, The Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse! I am very confident will never be shown on CBBC or any of the equivalents. The makers attempt to get a more child friendly 12A were wildly optimistic and are clearly doomed to failure.

Three siblings Aino, Priidik and Mart (variously voiced by writers and directors Oskar Lehemaa and Mikk Mägi) are dumped by their parents for their summer holiday with their grandfather out in the country. This sets up a clash between city and country folk that sees the kids’ mobiles slung away and them forced into farmyard chores.

These include milking the cow (for the insatiable milk loving villagers) cleaning out the pigs entailing getting covered on pig poop. And there’s an awful lot of poop and unpleasant substances that variously cover the members of the puppet cast throughout this film. There’s a bonkers storyline about the Old Milker trying to kill a cow that has escaped and not been milked. That happened to him many years ago and left him in wheelchair badly disfigured and with grudge.

Based on the popular Old Man web series (which I haven’t seen) the makers have taken them and extended to a feature film that is not going to be to everyone’s tastes. It is gross and puerile in the extreme, and at times appears unrelenting as each scene tries to out gross the next.

Having said that getting past the free splattering of bodily fluids across the screen, there are some pretty good jokes; the lusting tree spirit and the villagers craving for milk and stuck in their ways which could be traced back to the Soviet era.

The directors are pretty fresh from university and the film has an arch sniggering behind the hands approach that is annoying at times though it can’t be denied there is talent here.

The Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse! will be in UK cinemas from 2 June 2023