Director: Prano Bailey-Bond
Starring: Niamh Algar, Michael Smiley, Nicholas Burns
Production: United Kingdom
None of the infamous video nasties can be considered as terrifying as the sight of Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher in quick succession.
A time establishing montage shows the gruesome twosome – a vile conservative activist and fearsome Prime Minister who supported apartheid and defended dictators – in their atrocious pomp.
It’s an unspecified time in the 1980s and Enid (Niamh Algar) is a prim, officious censor tasked with cutting out scenes of graphic violence from films with supposedly mind-corrupting influence.
Repeated viewings of blood-soaked eye gougings and axe murders clearly affect Enid who lives with an overbearing shadow which follows her with the relentlessness of a monstrous unkillable slasher villain.
Unable to erase the guilt of her sister’s disappearance as a child – despite her parents obtaining a death certificate after failing to locate her – she makes an unexpectedly emotional connection when rating an old film of a notorious director.
To compound matters she is blamed for allowing a violent movie to be released which the gutter press brazenly declare inspired a real-life murder.
Veering wildly down a darkly lit path like a helpless victim in a body count flick, everything goes completely awry in a final third which is played out in a shattered picture of hazy psychological grief.
As the lines between fantasy and reality are smashed to pieces Enid ventures into a fuzzy world of blurred boundaries in which she becomes the protagonist.
It’s ambitious and inspired, featuring clips film that were included on the banned list like The Driller Killer (1979) and Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) in its early moments and knowing nods to The Evil Dead (1981), Poltergeist (1982) and horror auteurs Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento among many others.
It also prompted recollections of the underrated classic Sleepaway Camp (1983) for some bizarre reason, despite having tenuous links at best with the low budget slasher that features an unforgettable finale.
Niamh Algar plays many roles in one and undergoes a startling transformation which defies all logic and expectation as protagonist Nina. Present in every scene she is a convincing force up until the last jarring image. Michael Smiley is excellent as a sleazy film producer and a supporting cast of familiar faces including Felicity Montagu (Alan Partridge) and Nicholas Burns (Nathan Barley) add a layer of extra gravitas.
Director Prano Bailey-Bond clearly spent countless hours poring over blood splattered genre classics and turns the concept of the final girl on its head.
She is to be applauded for creating such a distressing portrait of deeply embedded personal anguish in an era of misplaced suspicion about the power of cinema.
Although it left me with a lingering feeling of ambivalence, it will undoubtedly provoke a cornucopia of differing reactions and that is a testament to bold, inventive filmmaking.
Stephen Kasiewicz 