Blutige Streiche

This little-seen and under-appreciated film accurately captures the bleakness and alienation of youth like few other films succeed in doing. It was shown on New Zealand television about 20 years ago and I've never had a chance to see it again. But I remember great direction, music, and atmosphere. Takes its place among the late-70s/early 80s British classics, the quality of which seems to be gone forever - see Meantime, Made in Britain, and anything in that period by Mike Leigh. To think that this was made by Stephen Frears who now gives us dreck like Mrs Henderson and The Queen is truly dispiriting.

Poliakoff (writer) and Frears (director) both have a fascination for the darker corners of urban life that most of us never see. Bloody Kids is early work for both of these great masters and has the rough edges one might expect from youthful experimentation. But this piece demonstrates the pace, momentum and lyrical qualities that Poliakoff can create and amazing visual imagery by Frears. Some of the work is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, but this piece has a quite unique presence of its own which I found both haunting and gripping.

Not the greatest work by either Stephen, but early signs of greatness and certainly worth a look.

A cute boy with a cold, manipulative, feckless demeanour convinces his friend to pretend to stab him at a football game with a penknife and a fake bag of blood. Unsurprisingly, he gets stabbed for real, and the boy goes on the run. While in hospital, the apparently psychopathic youngster spins tales about his friend being a budding Norman Bates, saying that he talks about hurting people and draws his violent fantasies.

Meanwhile, the fugitive meets a charming reprobate who takes him joyriding in a stolen car, vandalises a shop window, and in the movie's most bizarre scene, appears to attempt suicide.

The whole thing has a grim, depressing, aimless feeling to it. The movie never lets you into the minds of the characters, so you don't know what they're going to do next, nor do you understand why they did what they just did. The characters seem to live in a world without reason, and just make things up as they go along.

The movie is watchable, with impressive performances from the young leads, who surprisingly never did anything else.

Although an interesting snapshot of 2 days in the life of a couple of Southend scallywags, it's hard to find any message in all this pointless rebellion. Is that all the 70s were about, even in Southend?

What does make this movie worth 90 minutes of your life is the glimpse of the past it offers. To most viewers, I suspect, there are a surprising number of familiar faces in the cast, some from very early in their careers.

On a detached level, it offers an enjoyable tour of Southend as it was a quarter of a century ago. Aside from the retail ownerships, it looks to have changed little.

A lot of young lads have their fair share of monkey shines growing up, though perhaps nothing quite on this scale. An 11 year old future psychopath somehow convinces his naive buddy to pretend to stab him outside a football stadium during a packed match, while dropping a fake blood pack to make it look real. Only, the mad one forces his gentler friend to push the knife in for real, so it quickly ceases to become a game, especially when it emerges the 'victim' is planning to set up his mate as some kind of junior Norman Bates. With friends like this, who needs enemies, eh?

In the meantime, while the weird one wanders around the hospital spreading all kinds of false rumours, the innocent fugitive is taken under the wing of a group of Saturday night revellers, including a particularly disturbed individual who forces the kid to join him on a little crime spree including joyriding and ordering food then running off without paying. As you can see, this isn't a film full of what could be classed as 'role models'.

Neither is it a brilliant example of character writing or plotting as one random incident follows another, with no real attempt to tie them together into a cohesive whole. That I suppose, it part of it's appeal... despite being rough around the edges, there's little here which is predictable or expected, and the outrageous goings-on are never dull. An early effort for future acclaimed filmmakers Stephen Frears and Stephen Poliakoff, the potential shines through. Also, it proves that police today were just as useless as they were back then... 6/10