Here’s a bit of a peculiar one, a low-budget British psycho-thriller that comes across a bit like an exploitation version of Visconti’s The Damned. Well, if you use your imagination, anyway…
Poor Conrad (Craig Henderson) is looking forward to spending the Christmas holidays making maximium use of his flatmate being away and his playstation, but his girlfriend, Berenice (Claudine Spiteri) has other ideas, and drags him to visit her family for the seasonal festivities. Unfortunately, her family are an absolute nightmare: granny (Heather Chasen) is getting over the death of her husband; dad (Christopher Terry) is a pompous buffoon; mum Madeline (Sazanne Bertish) a predatory ageing vamp and younger brother Brian (Elliott Jordan) jealously protective of his sister. After having to deal with continual rows, some rather disconcertig visions and Madeline’s repeated advances, Conrad decides he’s had enough and it’s time to go home. Unfortunately, by this time Brian’s been sent right over the edge and, fearing that Berenice is going to be taken away from him for ever, descends into a psychotic rage.
This is all actually rather good fun. It’s not a particularly great film: the acting is extremely variable, some of the dialogue is incredibly stilted and the plot rather confused. But… at least it makes an attempt to be a little different. While it could have been a standard psycho movie, it incorporates a number of strange myths and hints of magic – not to mention some haywire psychology and numerous metaphors – that are surprisingly effective, . There’s a peculiar prologue in which the young Brian accidentally kills his hamster in a blender, and Berenice apparently brings it back to life, and the family also has possession of an amulet which seems to have some kind of supernatural power (either percevied or real). There’s a sinister fellow hanging around in the background (who represents madness, apparently), and an effective flash sequence showing the origins of the sinister ‘middlefolk’, killers that allegedly live somewhere on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk. A lot of this isn’t really developed as much as it could be, but it does help to create a rather different mood, which works much to the film’s advantage.
Given that it was made on an extremely low budget (approximately £100,000), it also looks pretty good. The locations are extremely well-used, and there’s some very effective second unit work that captures the bleak mood of the place. Director Paolo Sedazzari was a graduate from shorts, and he shows enough talent to suggest that he could go on to make something much better if equipped with a more organised script and a bit of money. The cast is mostly made up of unknowns, although older viewers may recognise Heather Chasen as a regular ‘voice’ on The Navy Lark, as well as several seventies sex comedies, and Suzanne bertish is a hugely respected theatre actress who also recently turned up in the TV series Rome.
There’s a neat website for the film that’s still up and running, which is worth checking out.
