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1993 - UK Directed By: Michael Winner. Starring: Lia Williams, Rufus Sewell, David McCallum, Sylvia Syms, Michael Cule, Mark Burns, Sean Pertwee and Christopher Ryan.
Current Availability
Available on UK R2 DVD. Unfortunately the UK disc from Universal is one of the worst abuses of the format in recent memory! It would appear Universal simply could not be arsed to resubmit this film to the BBFC or present the film in its proper aspect ratio. Instead Universal have just released the same pan and scan, censored print released on VHS by Polygram back in the mid nineties, which is a disgrace when one stops to consider that this film would sail past the BBFC uncut now. In short this release is to be avoided at all costs.
Recommended?
Only for fans of badly made, sleazy trash. This is laughably dreadful stuff.
Review
While widely mocked nowadays former film director turned sometime newspaper columnist / TV car insurance hawker Michael “calm down dear it’s only a commercial” Winner in his day (and I say this with all sincerity) a highly proficient maker of hard-edged, commercial exploitation cinema. As conscientiously controversial as he was often outspoken, Winner ruffled feathers with the gritty violence and right-wing leanings of his classic Death Wish (1974), it’s first two (nastier) sequels and the trashy but accomplished horror effort The Sentinel (1976) with its exploitative footage of the genuinely deformed.
Unfortunately at some point during the eighties Winner began exhibiting a reverse Midas touch as almost every project he touched turned to crap. His stultifying, wretched but unintentionally hysterical Dirty Weekend is unfortunately no exception to this rule. Based upon a salacious novel by Helen Zahavi – who co-scripted the film with Winner, so presumably she’s never seen Death Wish II uncut? - Dirty Weekend represents an unsightly, lowbrow and frankly embarrassing British-made gender reversal of Death Wish which winds up every inch as disreputable as anyone familiar with Winner would rightly expect.
Lia Williams stars as the initially prim, uptight and repressed Bella, whom after being two-timed then spurned by her faithless boyfriend relocates to the Brighton. Bella’s generally negative view of males is reinforced when, shortly after moving into her new home she is targeted by a Peeping Tom named Tim (Sewell). Soon Tim’s terrorisation of Lia escalates to making a series of increasingly obscene and violent sexual threats.
One night Bella, at her wits end, takes it upon herself to kill Tim in a premeditated, cold-blooded act of murder. Now filled with an almost psychotic loathing for the opposite sex Bella opts to continue with her extermination of male predators. Having dressed (quite literally) to kill, Bella takes to stalking the seedy seafront bars and shadowy back alleys of night time Brighton using her allure to entice would be sexual predators, rapists and woman beaters then killing them.
“I could have done the decent thing. I could have filled my belly with barbiturates or flung myself from a tower block” intones Bella’s narration early on. Sadly however this turns out to be mere wishful thinking on the viewer’s part as we are subjected to the kind of film that did for British cinema what Pol Pot did for Cambodia’s tourist industry, arriving in the dark days of British cinema several years prior to its mid-nineties renaissance.
It is never 100% clear whether Winner intends for Dirty Weekend to be taken seriously or whether it is some sort of hideously misfiring attempt at black comedy. While the latter seems more likely, it is impossible to look upon Dirty Weekend with as much as an ounce of credibility either way. Essentially the film amounts to a tawdry and cynical rehash of Death Wish with tongue placed slightly in cheek but sadly for Winner the “wronged female turned vigilante” motif has been done myriad times before and better, most notably in Abel Ferrara’s excellent Ms.45 (aka - Angel Of Vengeance) (1981). On this level Dirty Weekend falls flat on its face almost straight away as Bella’s actions are neither believable nor justified. Are we really to believe that the breakdown of a stale relationship and a few dirty, threatening phone calls would lead to a prim and conservative young woman dressing up like a Soho prostitute and going on a random, gun-toting killing spree? Additionally the coupling of Zahavi’s ball-crushing agenda with Winner’s penchant for lowbrow distaste clashes horrifically on the screenplay meaning that the attempted, pseudo-feminist “all men are bastards” message winds up horribly botched onscreen. The fatal mistake is made of peopling the with caricaturised misogynistic males. Winner and Zahavi make the fatal error ofv taking a tiny minority of the male populace and representing them as the mean, thus there is not a single believable male character in the film – something that makes it therefore impossible to take seriously.
The film is not aided either by Lia Williams’ weak and expressionless lead performance. Initially a prim, sour-faced, sexless creature, it is frankly hard to really blame her boyfriend for seeking pastures new, yet it is almost impossible to imagine why Tim (a role in which Sewell gives the films only good performance) would take to stalking and sexually harassing her. Was her being sarcastic? Elsewhere a talented supporting cast including capable British hands such as David McCallum and Sean Pertwee is more or less wasted entirely.
When Bella opts to extend her murder campaign to include any male who she sees as much as leer at a woman (obviously she is required to don sexy lingerie and stockings beforehand) the film collapses into total absurdity with an emphasis on sexually debauched spectacle, albeit restrained somewhat by a typically reserved Britishness (no full frontal female nudity) as Winner lurches from one grotesque scenario to another. Viewers are treated to the graphic site of Bella being taken doggy style by a hideously obese executive (played by British television regular Michael Cule) who refers to his penis as “Percy”. When Bella mocks his premature ejaculation he begins to beat her, she responds by throttling him to death with a polythene bag. If this were not enough Winner follows it up with Bella being subjected to forced fellatio in an underground car park and the attempted gang rape of an elderly female tramp. One of the would-be granny-shagger’s happens to be played by Christopher Ryan – famous for this role as Mike in the cult eighties BBC sitcom The Young Ones. It feels as if these moments are intended as blackly comical but under Winner’s mishandling they wind up uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassing to watch. The morbidly obese Cule in particular is made to look an absolute fool.
The films unappetising flavour is only worsened by the Brighton setting. If it is not the colourless representation of leafy suburbia then it seems to be the rainy, fetid drabness of the towns out of season seafront. Could there have been a more singularly unappealing location for a film? As opposed to putting lipstick on a pig Winner and company, by setting the film at Brighton, take the ugliest specimen out of the sty and daub even more putrid excrement onto its porcine features.
An ugly blemish on the face of British cinema, Dirty Weekend represents a truly horrendous mishandling of its themes, laughable only in its sheer and unadulterated ineptitude. Despite the layering on of cynically disingenuous women’s magazine politics this is most assuredly no essay in female empowerment as Bella (dressed up like a harlot) is only allowed to eliminate the male scumbags she targets once she has been forcibly coerced into a lengthy and demeaning sexual predicament played for titillation. As Dirty Weekend unfolds it becomes increasingly hard to fathom just who this film could possibly have been targeted at. No matter how many pretensions Dirty Weekend makes about being a feminist power piece it is impossible to imagine the bra burning brigade appreciating Winner’s constant wallows in tasteless sexual scenario’s (the film actually incurred a minor backlash from women's groups at the time of its original UK cinema release). On the flipside it is unlikely the average male viewer will identify with the stereotypical and detrimental if somewhat wry presentation of manhood on display although some may tune in to see Williams put through her paces so to speak (she can fill out a pair of stockings fetchingly enough). So who is Dirty Weekend actually for then? My answer would be diehard aficionados of trash cinema. By any conventional standard Dirty Weekend is a dreadfully directed, grotty, dismal mess of a film, amusing for all the wrong reasons but at the same time with its unintentional hilarity, laughably false gender politics and gratuitous tastelessness Dirty Weekend has everything to keep lovers of sleazy, bad movies entertained and chuckling from start to finish.
Also Try… Death Wish / Death Wish II / Death Wish 3 / Ms. 45 / I Spit On Your Grave / The Wicked Lady (1983 Version).
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