Voove

I recently found this film on DVD, after many years of being curious to see it. It's not a lost masterpiece. Very low-budget, it's visually flat and plain. Even at just under an hour, it's overlong, and would probably have been more effective cut to half that. With no characterisation or plot development in the conventional sense, the story reaches no real resolution, but just stops. Yet individual scenes stick in the memory and I've found myself watching them again. Musically, the Pink Floyd soundtrack is minor stuff, but unmistakable Saucerful Of Secrets period Floyd, and Arthur Brown's appearance at the party scene is the film's most riveting sight. (For those who remember Joy Division, his stage moves are like a forerunner of Ian Curtis...)

The trouble with commenting on a film like this is that if you say you found it offensive its makers might think they did something clever. They didn't. It's a thoroughly routine piece of Nineties film-making, a fourth-rate Tarantino swipe with side-grabs at Bound and Thelma & Louise. Its scenes of shooting up and gunning down and blood and sadism aren't shocking, merely disgusting and depressing: they don't challenge anyone's sense of moral order, just play to today's market. Not very well, however, since the film dropped dead at the box office - and no wonder. As a thriller it's inept from start to finish, with a storyline founded on coincidence and developed with extreme clumsiness.

I'd just like to point out that this film has been shown on British TV, on Channel 4 in the early Eighties - though that was its first showing, and I'm pretty certain the only one to date. I'd like to see it again, though as I recall it was hard to take seriously. (Sid James as a Chicago crook...??)