To Hunt A Victim (1992)

D. George Armitage
Colour


I’d say that right now Micky Rourke is our most endurably eccentric movie star. The long hair, the ludicrous muscles, the fact his face resembles a teak cabinet which has unaccountably learned to speak, the army of Chihuahuas he keeps to do his unholy bidding. All of this adds up to an impressive hand of quirks which I don’t think anyone still making major motion pictures can match. But even in the more handsome, early nineties, tail-end of his heyday, his eccentricity was always really close to the surface. Here he is as a Los Angeles detective, one of those guys in a not so good suit and a not so good car, trying to make a decent living as a knight in shining armour. He is a modern day Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer. (Actually, the young Mickey Rourke would have made a great Lew Archer, and a new Lew Archer is something the world needs. After all, if you take on Philip Marlowe you have to contend with Humphrey Bogart, but with Lew Archer you only have to go toe to toe with Paul Newman.) His name is Peter Locque, and he works the mean streets of Los Angeles. Except Locque has a crucial difference to set him apart from Marlowe and Archer, he hails from Provence, and that allows Rourke to spend the whole film working on the most ludicrous French accent heard since Peter Sellers’ passing. As I said, the eccentricity has never been that far from the surface.


Rourke is hired by the widow of a California land owner, Diane Ladd, to find her wayward daughter, Sherilyn Fenn. This being an early nineties Micky Rourke film, it isn’t long at all before things are getting very hot and heavy, with Rourke and Fenn finding themselves nude and locked in slow-mo artful love-making of the most soft focus kind. And that’s before her troubled friend, Erika Eleniak, gets involved. Fenn is tied in with hard-nosed gangster, the great J.T. Walsh, and it isn’t long before murder occurs and Rourke has to move quickly to clear her name. Amongst those who Rourke has to face off against on his search for the truth are such semi-forgotten luminaries as George Segal, Valerie Perrine, George Takei, Sandra Lockhart and most surreally of all, former Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy – who is great fun as a particularly cantankerous Scottish librarian. Possibly his appearance is there just to balance things out; saying to the audience that if you think the guy playing the detective is eccentric in this movie, wait until you see who’s in charge of the library.


All the way through Rourke gives us “bonjour”, “merci”, “mon cheri” and even a camply enthusiastic “ooh la la”. The result is to make his detective seem part Lew Archer, part Philip Marlowe, but with a sizeable dash of Hercule Poirot. Probably the presence of the far superior ‘Angel Heart’ persuaded Rourke to take this direction with his accent, to differentiate it from the earlier film. If we’re honest ‘To Hunt A Victim’ isn’t a patch on ‘Angel Heart’, but what could have been your bog-standard early 90s noir thriller – with the predictable lashings of nudity and violence – becomes in the crisp and clear direction of Armitage, and the wonderful over the top eccentricity of the star, something really strange and special indeed.

 

Stamped Overdue (1994)

D. Robert Harmon
Colour


Just as Steven Seagal once furthered his action hero career by posing as a chef, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became a cop at a kindergarten, here Jean Claude Van Damme takes on a seemingly normal sounding job and brings added explosions and gunfire to it. For the small town library in the New England hamlet of Shakespeare has itself a new librarian, but this is no fusty middle aged spinster, it’s the mussels from the Brussels himself. He is Jacques Duvall, bibliophile, qualified librarian and French Foreign Legion commando. (I’m not exactly sure if commando is a rank one can attain in the Foreign Legion, or why this man – who is otherwise portrayed as French – was allowed to join the French Foreign Legion in the first place. But, please, this film really doesn’t invite too many questions.)  Coincidentally, a legendary and incredibly valuable diamond is being displayed at the museum attached to this library, and villainous James Woods and his gang of criminals are set to steal it. The stage is set for car chases, automatic gun fire and explosions in this sleepy, leafy little New England town. As the one thing this gang hasn’t counted on is the librarian.


Few films have such commitment to being mindless, adrenalin soaked fun as ‘Stamped Overdue’. It’s almost as if the writers (six of whom, incredibly, are credited), worked out a whole list of elements which JUST HAD to be in their action movie/library combo. Will the hero have a gunfight in the middle of the library, gunfire shooting books from the shelves so that they explode in charred sheets of paper? Of course he will. When the hero runs out of bullets, will he use a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to beat a foe into submission before making a tired semi-literary quip? Without a doubt. Will the hero be able to save himself by pulling the bookshelves on top of him and letting the books absorb the gunfire? Yes, because resourceful is his middle name (and books seemingly only disintegrate under gunfire when he needs them to). Will the bad guy make some sneering remark about those who like books being wimps? Absolutely. And will the young librarian assistant, so tightly wound and frigid in her bun, finally relent to the hero’s charms to undo her hair and reveal what a gorgeous face and hot bod she has? Please, this isn’t just an action movie, it is poetry!


Of course this is all magnificently stupid stuff. You truly have to admire the filmmakers’ commitment to being so absolutely, fantastically, moronically stupid. They set out to make a big, dumb film and succeeded in making a film so lacking in IQ that even that year (the year of ‘The Specialist’ and Van Damme’s own ‘Streetfighter’), it was the idiot child sat in the corner trying to suck its own thumb but somehow failing. But my problem with this big, brash film where the hero is a bibliophile librarian and the villain professes to hate reading, is that a lot of books do suffer. As a bookish man myself, it distresses me to see all those broken spines and flying leaves. By the end, when half the library is on fire, all this destruction just seems like a hell of a shame and one which doesn’t merit the big heroic flourish in the music. As for all the lead character’s stated love of books, the message of this film seems to be: books are good, but martial arts and blowing things up are way cooler – especially when the things you’re blowing up burn as easily as books. And surely that’s not the message a film set in a library should send.

Pig Suckler (1994)

D. Olaf Signussen
Colour
I’ve been trying to work out how big a deal Tony Blair was in Scandinavia in 1994. As this film, made the year Blair became leader of the Labour Party, features an actor who looks like a taller, blonder version of the man himself. Anders Lindqvist seems to have spent the rest of his career in Swedish television or theatre, but for one brief moment in 1994 he was able to capture the future British Prime Minister in a way which is so physical and so precise it’d give Michael Sheen nightmares. But how deliberate is this? Surely Blair at this point was just one of many overseas politicians who wouldn’t be that a big noise in another country. He didn’t even become leader of his party until halfway through the year. So unless this film was put in rapid development, to try and capture a hitherto obscure overseas politician for a domestic audience (which I admit, seems a tad unlikely), then this is a case of fate and karma playing deliciously weird games. As the politician at the centre of this film not only looks like Blair, he could actually be Blair.

The politician we have here is smiling and obsequious to a fault. We follow him on the campaign trail as he meets supporters, debates with opponents, shakes hands and kisses babies. Throughout he is smiling the kind of big grin which would make you think twice about any used car salesman you encountered, let alone a bloody politician. He has a glint in his eye as he wheedles and obfuscates, telling people what a good man he is and how trustworthy; while at the time telling them exactly what they want to hear with lashings of snake oil. He is forever telling the world what a righteous man he is, what a committed churchgoer he is, but he is forever compromising and bending the truth backwards and forwards and even wiggling it side to side. Whatever his loyalists want to believe, he tells them; whatever the more unconvinced need him to do, he will do. Of course, he frequently tells one person X and another person Y, and the two things are mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t matter as he is one of life’s good guys and you can trust his word and he is someone you can rely on. As the campaign goes on, he demonstrates this incredible need to win, to get himself to a position of power.

Of course the title gives away where all this is going to end up, and that does mitigate against the shock somewhat. But it’s fascinating to watch the process whereby this Tony Blair figure glides by on his charm, states again and again how good a man he is and what a successful leader he will be, and in the face of cynicism performs this incredible demonstration of how far he’ll go to get the voters’ support. As this film ends with the lead character’s shirt undone and a piglet attached to his male nipple, but he still keeps grinning and talking and trying to tell the world what a good and trustworthy guy he is. He doesn’t actually say “pretty straight sort of guy”, but it’s close enough to send a shiver down the spine of anyone alive in Britain from 1997 onwards.

Tony apparently liked ‘The Queen’, I wonder if he ever saw this?

The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities (1994)

D. Marco Webber
Colour

So it’s five minutes past St David’s Day and so we really should take the opportunity to peek at a couple of Welsh movies, visit the land of my birth, the land of my fathers. It’s time to pin on a daffodil and type furiously whilst singing ‘Sospan Fach’ at an irritatingly high volume. Actually compared to the other corners of the British Isles, Welsh cinema exists in the kind of shallow pool that your average algae would move out of seeking somewhere more spacious. Whereas Scotland has some undoubted classics (‘Local Hero’, ‘Trainspotting’), Northern Ireland a whole series of films inspired by the troubles (most recently the hugely impressive ‘Good Vibrations’) and Ireland was given a grand cinema tradition by John Ford which it either embraces or pushes violently against – the Welsh shuffle nervously at the edges, occasionally lobbing something forward before scuttling back to hide behind the settee again.

 

Which makes the ambition of ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’ all the more impressive. If you can imagine a magic-realist Mike Leigh movie, with a fantastically bright palate, dream sequences full of brilliantly crummy special effects, the occasional Welsh folk song, Catherine Zeta-Jones pouting in a tiny outfit, while Ruth Madoc sports a beard – then you have something approximating ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’. This is a magical and ambitious movie, but also a provincially small Welsh film that thinks nothing of having whole scenes where characters just pass the time of day in almost incomprehensible Wenglish. It’s a day in a life of this extra special circus, which never travels anywhere, but has the world come to it. It’s the trials and tribulations of its performers, where nothing really happens beyond everyday moments of drama. It’s an odd film, which like laverbread is far from everybody’s tastes, but some people genuinely love.

 

We have Jonathan Pryce as the ringmaster, pattering away in a gorgeous singsong accent, and using force of personality to dominate the ring and the world around it. If you ever needed someone to lead a group of stilt-walkers into war, Pryce would be your man. There’s Owen Teale as the circus strongman who can lift any weight placed in front of him (including, as we see in montage, a double decker bus, a rather startled looking rhinoceros and a picnic table full of pensioners who don’t let such an occurrence interrupt their tea). The object of both their desires is Catherine Zeta-Jones. Words are not adequate to describe how ravishing la Zeta-Jones looks in this movie, dressed as she is mostly in a tiny black bikini, underneath a glittering almost sheer wisp of material – both of which seem to fluctuate in size and shape from scene to scene. To be honest it’s a ridiculously poorly written role which doesn’t require much more than pouting and smiling, and could no doubt have been played by a slightly more expressive than normal shop mannequin. It’s an odd use then for this future Oscar winner’s talents, although in the post ‘Darling Buds of May’ lull she was probably just happy to get the work. (Allegedly though, this is the first film in which Michael Douglas ever glimpsed her). Elsewhere we have Michael Sheen as the skinny stable boy, a very young Ruth Jones as his comically curvy squeeze and Antony Hopkins deigning to cameo for about for about twenty seven seconds as local gentry who is entranced by it all. While narrating the whole thing we have Ruth Madoc, in the only role I’ve ever seen her in outside of ‘Hi-De-Hi’, wearing the kind of luxurious and voluminous beard you could easily hide geese in.

 

If anything represented The Tafia in action, it’s this film. I think it’s marvellous, a real psychedelic treat. This is a motion picture I love dearly, but undeniably it’s an example of the Welsh film industry taking careful aim and shooting itself in the foot. As let’s be fair, it’s difficult to see where a large audience for such a film would come from. Yes it looks great, yes it is in parts brilliant – but soap opera mixed with Angela Carter, performed by a cast determined to exaggerate their Welsh accents to ludicrous effect, is not the kind of movie that will get them queuing around the block at the multiplex. I’m sure even at Cineworlds in Rhyl, Aberystwyth and – yes – Carmarthen, seats would have been very easy to come by.

 

Sexy Goth Girls Take on the World (1999)

D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”


Noted rock critic T.S.Eliot understood the path of the rebellious rock phenomenon. Be you Elvis Presley or The Rolling Stones or The Sex Pistols or Madonna or some sexy goth girls, you start your career as an affront to everything decent and good, but end up a respectable shadow of what you once were.  It’s a fixed and unalterable law – a rule which is true in nature, physics and life. Some processes are faster than others. Elvis was singing to an actual hound dog on The Steve Allen Show within a year of his breakthrough, and the Sexy Goth Girls were appearing in ‘Sexy Goth Girls Take on the World’ within two and a half years of the first film’s release.


Let’s begin at the beginning. The first Sexy Goth Girls film was a plucky little indie with the skimpiest of plots, that just revelled in hanging out with some really sexy goth girls. Yes, there was a murder at some point, but it wasn’t trying to be a crime drama, it was something totally different; a film that luxuriated in life, that was quirky, fun, alternative and – yes – sexy. The sequel arrived surprisingly quickly and already a change was noticeable. Suddenly murder plots were something the sexy goth girls did. In fact they were sanctioned to fight crime and help the innocent. They were super heroes now, there to save the world. It was all very strange. Clearly the sexy goth girls had lurched towards the mainstream, and the mainstream wasn’t a place that suited the sexy goth girls. So in the third film that lurch would be corrected, right? The sexy goth girls would return to the alternative, quirky style we all loved?


Well, the short answer is no. This is a film decidedly intent on the mainstream. Indeed it is knocking the mainstream over in the street and binding it with a leather muzzle and harness and making the mainstream its bitch. (Actually, no, that’s far too weird an image. It’s actually walking up to the mainstream and giving it a nice big  cuddle and saying that if you look past all that goth stuff, these girls are just as lovely as you – only a bit more sexy). This is a sexy goth girls film you could take your grandmother to see. This is a sexy goth girls film you could take your children to see. Do you have a maiden aunt and would like to show her some sexy goth girls without making her cover her eyes and issue frightened squeaks about what passes as decent entertainment these days? Well, come right this way.


Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the sexy goth girls Christmas movie.


Here’s the plot: the President of the United States (Robert Vaughan) is kidnapped by right-wing Christian fundamentalists (led by Randy Quaid) who are disturbed by the decline of morality in today’s America. Government agent Mr Lazarus (Quentin Tarantino, in what is little more than a cameo) gets his operatives, the sexy goth girls – led by Liddy D’Eath – on the case. They team up with the President’s twelve year old daughter to track down the President and rescue him using their sexy goth girl skills (which consist, as far as I can see, of black leather weapons and feminine wiles) and various adventures, escapades, and scrapes ensue. Suffice to say there is a lot of running about in dangerous looking heals. The President’s daughter is suspicious of her new companions at first, but eventually learns that the key lesson of being a sexy goth girl is (apparently) to be yourself. And by being herself she helps them rescue her father and they’re all together for Christmas. Hip-hip Hooray!


It’s hard to put into words how crushing a disappointment this film is. It’s hard to put into words how wrongheaded a film this is. It’s totally different in tone to the previous entries, with none of the slow-motion leering or perviness, but also none of the smart and sassy dialogue. Instead this is a full blown assault on the mainstream, and like all self-conscious attempts to get in good with the mainstream it aims for the lowest common denominator. It’s obvious, sentimental, silly and often quite boring. But it still in no way belongs in that sunny, bland locale they call the mainsteam. Who after all would make a family friendly film with the words ‘sexy goth girls’ in the title? Who would create a kid friendly bunch of superheroes and dress them in suspenders with their cleavages all a-go-go? (Although I suppose we’re inured to not seeing Batman and Superman as the fetishists they so obviously are when they wander around in their nice, shiny tights). Who would really imagine that ending a film with a bunch of goth girl stood in the oval office with their leader’s arm around the President’s daughter wishing the audience a very Merry Christmas was in anyway an appropriate or good idea? It’s not, instead it’s ever so weird, on many levels – and none of them good weird.


So overall this trilogy is a tale of a group of girls who were there to be sexy and perved over, to have funny and foul-mouthed conversations, to be the epitome of rebellion. They were stars for a group of fans who didn’t want to see normal types of films, who wanted to fall in love with a different type of heroine. But their decline was quick and before long that quirky, fuck you, independence had been totally blown away, and without changing their clothes or even altering their make-up, the sexy goth girls were smiling big American smiles as they appeared in anodyne crap designed supposedly for the whole family.


This film was as successful on video as the other two (sexy goth girls fans are clearly not very discerning), but – really - where did it all go wrong?

Sexy Goth Girls Get the **** Out! (1998)

D. Otto Von De Mille
Colour


It’s amazing that the Sexy Goth Girls films are so tightly grouped together. Surely the first movie was cult, barely seen on release and in the normal course of things taking some years for the groundswell of support and goodwill for it (or in more brutal commercial terms, to give the impression there were enough suckers out there willing to pay good, hard money to see a sequel) to take the story forward. And yet a year after the original one limped into the cinema on a broken pair of six inch high heels, here was the second part. The Sexy Goth Girls were back and still looking sexy.


How could this be? How could this sequel have come so fast?


Well, firstly it’s still quite cheap. Noticeably the production values are not much higher than they are on the first Sexy Goth Girls movie. Much like ‘The Evil Dead 2’, this is a sequel/remake, but then Sam Rami’s film looked a damn sight better than his cheap original. Here we have the same flaws repeated all over again – the boom shows up in shot, there’s often no real sense as to where to put the camera and the acting has not improved one iota. However in amongst the various returning Sexy Goth Girls, there’s one actor who – while he doesn’t improve the quality of the performances by a single atom – does explain how exactly this film got made.


Step forward the big Q himself, Mr Quentin Tarantino.


I talked in my write-up of the first film of the debt it had to Quentin. Indeed the only thing that stopped it being a fetishists wet-dream (oh, all that naked young flesh, all that leather) was the Tarantino-esque ear for dialogue and love for the minutiae of culture and life. Clearly Quentin thought so too, as here he is in the key role of Mr Lucifer – a friend to the Sexy Goth Girls. It must have been a great thrill for Von De Mille (I’ve hunted online to see whether that is actually his real name, it’s inconclusive so far but my money is on probably not) when Quentin agreed to come on board. It was a blessing, an anointment that the first film did things right. But he’s also the biggest symbol of where this film is going wrong.


The aesthetic of the first movie remains, the whole Russ Meyer look of things. So we get Liddy D’Eath (very much the star here, rather than just one of the ensemble) in tight black shorts and a sheer top covering a studded bra. We get other girls with their cleavages crammed into the kind of leather bodices likely to suffocate, a group of girls bending over a pool table while shooting the breeze (and badly shooting pool), and two girls interrupted entwined together in what looks like a heavy canoodling session (or a money shot). Again it’s all very pervy, all very seedy. But what held together the first film – the very Quentin-ness of it – is more muted here. That’s odd as surely that was the thing Quentin liked and approved of the first time around, but here all that is much more in passing. Instead the murder plot that was an afterthought crammed into the end of the first film, is front and centre and the motor of the thing. As such it becomes a completely different animal, a thriller, with most of the cast in tight clothes and ripped suspenders with the occasional flash of great dialogue. It’s like the presence of the media star Quentin Tarantino (rather than director, Quentin Tarantino) gave Von De Mille the opportunity to aim at the mainstream, and he wasn’t going to pass it up. And the mainstream likes murder plots, not weird little pervy films which nevertheless revel in bizarre but hilarious dialogue.


And ironically there’s no bigger sign of this change of focus than the role Quentin is playing. He is Charlie to their Angels, Mother to their Emma Peel. He’s the one who tells them what’s happening, suggests what they should do, makes sure they have the equipment to do it. But hang on a second, aren’t goths a subculture? They’re not part of the mainstream, are they? Certainly they’re not part of some quasi-government agency tasked with fighting crime. In the first film they were just girls hanging out, but here they are almost super-heroes. Worse, they are officially approved super-heroes: Sexy Goth Girls who have the right licenses and papers. It’s all so depressing. As if Marlon Brando had shown up in ‘The Wild Ones’ with his Hells Angels licence stamped and counter-stamped.


It’s odd that someone would make a film with the phrase “Sexy Goth Girls” in the title and aim for the mainstream, but that’s what’s happening here.


And it will just get worse, as we’ll see next time.

Sexy Goth Girls Go “Huh!”(1997)

D. Otto Von De Mille
Colour


Even at the time it seemed incredibly unlikely that the 1990s was crying out for its own Russ Meyer. That seemed an aesthetic which had been lost to the age of Mondo movies, written up in psychotronic guidebooks, but really not part of a relevant cinema going forward. This was the 1990s after all and feminism had come a long way. Yes, Meyer’s women were strong and feisty independent ladies, but equally they were ludicrously busty sex symbols whom the camera just drooled over. They were soft-porn icons for the more discerning viewer, but still soft porn icons. That whole thing may have been the scene in the late 1960s, but definitely wasn’t the case in the more inclusive 1990s. And yet, the ‘Sexy Goth Girls’ films exist. They only had a limited cinema release, true, but they do have a cult following and I bet there’s a whole generation of people who revere these films but have barely even heard of Russ Meyer. They are loved, these sexy goth girls.


Part of that is down to the influence of another auteur whose fingerprints are as smeared over every frame of these films as Meyer’s grubby and calloused paws – the big Q himself, Quentin Tarantino. That is less surprising. Every independent film of the late 1990s seemed to have sucked hard at Quentin’s teet, trying to drink in the magic which took him from the ultimate cinema geek to a major force of cinema. Probably more than any filmmaker, his style was unmistakably and (for the most part) unashamedly ripped off, copied and homaged in the years after his breakthrough. Even now there are films which barely creep out where you see the love of dialogue about everyday things, the cool pop references and sudden bursts of violence. If the only films you ever watched were indie films that were released straight to the video store, you’d believe that Quentin was everywhere.


So a strange cinematic marriage of Russ Meyer and Quentin Tarantino, but how else could I describe this film? First and foremost it’s a chance to hang out with sexy goth girls, actually it’s an opportunity to hang out with some very sexy goth girls. There are lots of lingering shots of lovely curvaceous ladies spilling out of black and intense looking corsets, of shapely thighs in dark and torn stockings, of full lips plumped up by shiny black lipstick. Arresting, striking, dark and erotic images abound, and let’s be fair many of them are somewhat pervy. It’s hanging out with gorgeous women while they sit virtually in their underwear and don’t mind you trying to look up their (very) short skirts. But that’s where the essence of Quentin saves the day. We are hanging out with these girls and they are chatting away and these conversations are hilarious. The script is genuinely verbose and clever, with a great appreciation of the cadences of the Los Angeles accent, and so it’s a pleasure to listen in to the rhythms of the chat. Particular favourites include the top ten possible reasons as to how some baked beans could have possibly ended up down the back of the couch (none of them involve actually eating baked beans, well not in any traditional sense anyway), why sex shops don’t employ seniors to offer advice and wisdom in the bedroom “those old dudes must have literally seen EVERYTHING” and how supportive a boyfriend Freddy Krueger would actually be. It all crackles, it’s all immensely fun and that makes any watching man feel like he can dispense with the dirty brown raincoat and just enjoy this openly.


It’d be fair to say that since these girls were members of the LA goth scene, rather than actual actresses, the performances are variable. But in Liddy D’Eath (helpfully playing a character named Liddy) a fey blonde with incredibly long legs and the widest grey eyes, we do have what looks like a star in the making. Yes the whole thing is clearly filmed cheaply, and the murder plot that takes over the last half hour comes from nowhere and deserves the response ‘Huh’ – but what could be a very pervy film, becomes a somewhat guilty pleasure that shouldn’t make you feel too seedy.

Ms Honesty (1995)

D. Michael Lehmann
Colour

One of Jennifer Aniston’s first wild flails at turning her distinctly small screen charms into cinema success, was this oddly conceived, frustrating and actually quite infuriating little number. Ms Aniston plays Ms Honesty (Tracey Honesty, if you’re on familiar terms) who has a compulsion to always tell the truth. It doesn’t matter what the circumstance, how politic is it, or what offence she might cause, Ms Honesty cannot keep her honest mouth shut. Now an eight year old knows why a white lie exists, yet the fact that Ms Honesty doesn’t know and is so brutally honest is seen by the film as a loveable quirk. Her friends all adore her and her unfiltered opinions, strangers on the street are charmed by her frankness and her life glides by on a stream of happiness.

What’s even weirder than hanging a film around the shoulders of this guileless child woman who everyone loves, is that some of these ‘truths’ are really just a matter of taste (the clothes someone wears, for example), and when they aren’t immediately accepted with good grace, Ms Honestly has something of a meltdown. There are two such scenes in the film, both of which see Ms Honesty ranting and raving about the flaws of the person opposite her, furious that her opinion isn’t being immediately accepted. To be fair, Ms Aniston does manage to portray a truly psychotic bitch really well, but the film clearly doesn’t see her behaviour in those terms. Instead this ranting and raving is a good thing, a sign of at how intensely passionate she is.

I ask you, really?

Surely freaking out completely when someone doesn’t immediately agree with you (or even does agree with you, but has decided they are not going to alter their life just over one woman’s opinion), is surely the behaviour of someone mentally ill. No sane and rational person would feel the need to start screaming abuse at someone they knew (or didn’t know) just because that person doesn’t happen to share their opinion. It’s what a lunatic would do, an insane person, a – to use one of my dad’s West Country expression – barnpot.

And yet the film sets it up as somewhat charming, easily forgivable – enviable even. Ms Honesty just cares too much; is so passionate and only says these truths because they are in the other person’s interests (even when they’re clearly not) and besides she‘s as cute as the twenty-five year old Jennifer Aniston – so what’s not to love? And that’s the true message of this film, that Ms Aniston is really pretty and her character is the ultimate manic pixie dream girl we should all adore.  But it didn’t work on me. I just felt the urge to scream and pelt her with rotten fruit.

The plot – such as it is – sees Ms Honesty (is the title supposed to be a pun btw?) telling some home truths to her friend, Jason Lee. When these aren’t immediately accepted, she freaks out and tells him every bad thing about himself. They fight for a few weeks, then they calm down, realise that they’re in love with each other and live happily ever after – Ms Honesty keeping up with her honest ways.

Meanwhile the audience is left giddily disorientated and throwing up in corner.

If you want to know the real truth, this is one of the most disturbing and blood-boiling pieces of celluloid it has ever been my misfortune to witness.