A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012) d. Mills, Crispian / Hopewell, Chris (UK)
As a deeply paranoid writer of children’s books, the usually infallible Simon Pegg shrieks and mugs his way through an exhausting 100 minutes that had me honestly flummoxed by the screaming gales of laughter around me. Seriously, it was one of those times where it felt like my fellow audience members were somehow watching a different, exponentially superior film than I, giggling hysterically every time Pegg (who also exec-produced) twitched this way or that. Things admittedly pick up in the final act with a laundromat sequence that literally spirals downward into surprisingly dark terrain, but for the most part it’s all frantic frenetics without the funny.
