An international title for this Flemish spoken film might be "Panic in the Hotel". A literal translation for the title is "hotel on stilts" but that doesn't do the Dutch expression used in the title any good. Anyway, this is the first cinema film based around the characters of the Belgian children's series Samson en Gert in which the guy Gert living with his dog Samson goes to a series of adventures together with some of the other people in the city and it is in fact somewhat better than the average episode of the series.

The film starts when Gert's girlfriend Marlene calls to tell him her hotel is going to be demolished if it isn't repaired within a week. Gert, of course, wants to help out and brings everyone he can to the hotel to help out. Next to this red line of the story there are two crooks that have stolen a diamond some twenty years earlier and have hidden that in the hotel, and that want to get it back out again.

Being a children's film it never gets any more hair raising then doing groceries on an average day but it worked for the kid and thus it worked for me. The kid I took to see this film likes the series it is based on, and absolutely loved this film. No doubt due to the plethora of slapstick moments in it that are also prevalent in the series.

It's clearly no great work in the world of cinema, but for it works wonders for its projected audience - the kids.

8 out of 10 diamonds in the rough