Movie Reviews

Odd Thomas (Anton Yelchin) lives in the quiet town of Pico Mundo, California where he works as a cook in a diner and otherwise enjoys spending time with Stormy Llewellyn (Addison Timlin), his longtime girlfriend with whom he is destined to stay together forever. In short, life is good and without any complications. Well, except for the fact that the guy is called Odd and that he can see dead people. Rather than getting scared by them like the kid in The Sixth Sense, Odd helps set them free by chasing down those responsible for their deaths and then handing them over to the local police chief(Willem Dafoe) who’s in on Odd’s secret.

All this is something Odd himself explains in the opening scene while chasing down a killer. The voice-over tactic is used a lot here and to great effect. It immediately lends the movie a fun vibe, something director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Deep Rising) manages to keep up for 96 minutes.

Then shit starts happening. Odd has a vision of a whole bunch of people in bowling shirts being gunned down and the entire town is crawling with ‘bodachs’, creatures only Odd can see and who only show up when something terrible is about to happen. The next day a shady dude shows up in town called Fungus Bob Robertson (Shuler Hensley). He has bad news written all over him and it’s up to Odd to stop the guy before it’s too late.

Not having read the Dean Koontz book this movie is based on, I can’t tell you whether the movie is better than the book or if it’s the other way round. All I can tell you is that I thoroughly enjoyed Odd Thomas, a breezy, tongue-in-cheek horror comedy that is an excellent way to zone out for an hour and a half.