This Michael Winner directed movie, adapted from a novel by Helen Zahavi, is not your typical Death Wish style vigilante movie. Despite the scenic surrounding of Brighton, it's not quite your typical domestic British drama/comedy either but falls somewhere between those genres. For me it's like a hilarious antidote to the usual type of British film we get nowadays. It's almost like the main character in a British film like Happy Go Lucky (a very good Mike Leigh movie) or a similar film like Amelie was watching too many action movies and started carrying a gun around to solve her problems for the second half of the movie.
Unlike the typical vigilante plot, where the character is avenging an attack or rape on themselves or a loved one, this film merely has a succession of thoughts and events lead the main character Bella (played by Lia Williams) to simply wake up one morning and decide that she's had enough of being a mousy victim. No deaths of loved ones and after her first victim, no particular group of villains to seek out one by one. The start of the movie could almost be a domestic drama or comedy and could easily be about how a young woman finds love or makes peace with herself by moving to Brighton and making a new start, after another failed relationship with a self loving man. Soon though, it starts to take a horror or thriller twist when Bella discovers a peeping tom watching her intently from the building facing her back room. The situation begins to escalate, with threatening and sleazy phone calls and the pervert (played by Rufus Sewell) even sitting beside Bella on a park bench, threatening to break her hand in broad daylight. Bella's troubles with the peeping tom make up about the first half of the film and include her visiting a Iranian clairvoyant called Nimrod (played by Ian Richardson!) and becoming more confident to the point where she works out a very Rorschach style solution to her problem.
Then the film starts to become more like a random series of encounters with different and eccentric characters. The scene where Bella picks up a very overweight businessman in a hotel bar and goes back to his room, certainly isn't something that we'd have seen in the average vigilante movie (neither is the scene where Bella parades in her underwear pretending to fire her gun and get shot - like kids playing cowboy and Indians - although that part did remind me of a scene in The Harder They Come). This is also where the movie begins to get even more over the top and it's black comedy comes to the fore. Bella's encounters include David McCallum as a very sleazy and disturbed dentist (Little Shop Of Horrors homage?) and a group of yuppie thugs and would be rapists (in a scene that reminded me of A Clockwork Orange) whose number include Christopher Ryan (Mike from The Young Ones) and Sean (son of Jon) Pertwee, as well as a serial killer (previously mentioned in the film in passing).
It's a curious movie in some ways, stuck between genres and not quite what you'd expect from either. It reminded me a little of the Hammer House Of Horror TV series in tone or maybe some of the old Amicus movies. If you're expecting the typical vigilante movie then you may be disappointed that there's not enough conventional action or a group of baddies to be tracked down and eliminated (and the vigilante part of the movie only begins to come in about half way through the movie). I think it works best as a hilarious counterpoint or send up of the typical Mike Leigh, Bridget Jones or Four Weddings And A Funeral type of British movie. I had seen trailers for this film when it first came out but only recently decided to track it down. I hadn't realized it had been banned for two years in the UK. The DVD region 2 DVD release is cut (with the hammer murder being reduced to just one or two blows for instance). I loved this movie and thought it was a riot (and in some ways the fact that it wasn't quite the usual Death Wish clone was a pleasant and interesting surprise). I suspect some will just see it as a train wreck movie and will either hate it or find it "so bad it's good" for those reasons. Now I want a sequel where Bella takes her killing spree to Nazi occupied Paris, hee hee!
Unlike the typical vigilante plot, where the character is avenging an attack or rape on themselves or a loved one, this film merely has a succession of thoughts and events lead the main character Bella (played by Lia Williams) to simply wake up one morning and decide that she's had enough of being a mousy victim. No deaths of loved ones and after her first victim, no particular group of villains to seek out one by one. The start of the movie could almost be a domestic drama or comedy and could easily be about how a young woman finds love or makes peace with herself by moving to Brighton and making a new start, after another failed relationship with a self loving man. Soon though, it starts to take a horror or thriller twist when Bella discovers a peeping tom watching her intently from the building facing her back room. The situation begins to escalate, with threatening and sleazy phone calls and the pervert (played by Rufus Sewell) even sitting beside Bella on a park bench, threatening to break her hand in broad daylight. Bella's troubles with the peeping tom make up about the first half of the film and include her visiting a Iranian clairvoyant called Nimrod (played by Ian Richardson!) and becoming more confident to the point where she works out a very Rorschach style solution to her problem.
Then the film starts to become more like a random series of encounters with different and eccentric characters. The scene where Bella picks up a very overweight businessman in a hotel bar and goes back to his room, certainly isn't something that we'd have seen in the average vigilante movie (neither is the scene where Bella parades in her underwear pretending to fire her gun and get shot - like kids playing cowboy and Indians - although that part did remind me of a scene in The Harder They Come). This is also where the movie begins to get even more over the top and it's black comedy comes to the fore. Bella's encounters include David McCallum as a very sleazy and disturbed dentist (Little Shop Of Horrors homage?) and a group of yuppie thugs and would be rapists (in a scene that reminded me of A Clockwork Orange) whose number include Christopher Ryan (Mike from The Young Ones) and Sean (son of Jon) Pertwee, as well as a serial killer (previously mentioned in the film in passing).
It's a curious movie in some ways, stuck between genres and not quite what you'd expect from either. It reminded me a little of the Hammer House Of Horror TV series in tone or maybe some of the old Amicus movies. If you're expecting the typical vigilante movie then you may be disappointed that there's not enough conventional action or a group of baddies to be tracked down and eliminated (and the vigilante part of the movie only begins to come in about half way through the movie). I think it works best as a hilarious counterpoint or send up of the typical Mike Leigh, Bridget Jones or Four Weddings And A Funeral type of British movie. I had seen trailers for this film when it first came out but only recently decided to track it down. I hadn't realized it had been banned for two years in the UK. The DVD region 2 DVD release is cut (with the hammer murder being reduced to just one or two blows for instance). I loved this movie and thought it was a riot (and in some ways the fact that it wasn't quite the usual Death Wish clone was a pleasant and interesting surprise). I suspect some will just see it as a train wreck movie and will either hate it or find it "so bad it's good" for those reasons. Now I want a sequel where Bella takes her killing spree to Nazi occupied Paris, hee hee!