Raindance Film Festival Review: Flick

The plot focuses on stuttering 50s Teddy boy, Johnny ‘Flick’ Taylor (he carries a ‘flick’ knife), a shy and awkward teen with an uncanny gift for dancing. When Johnny finally works up the courage to ask his sweetheart for a dance, things don’t quite go to plan, and violence ensues. He is sent to a watery grave in his Hillman Minx at the hands of the local bullies where he remains for 40 years. The car and Johnny’s decomposed body are then accidentally discovered by a fishing boat. Awoken by the tunes from a 1950s themed pirate radio station, Johnny sets out for revenge on those who wronged him.

Flick is clearly micro-budgeted but Howard employs a dizzying range of techniques from comic book stills to Sin City-style blood spurts, mixing live action with animation, and more than once recalling the excesses of Natural Born Killers. Various neon filters tinge scenes in pinks, greens and blues, as the camera pitches and weaves through the fictional northern town of Hobbs End. This 50s inflected alternate universe provides us with some truly bizarre moments; entertaining the notion of Mark Benton and Faye Dunaway dancing is in itself enough to make you feel like you’re in some twisted, but not entirely unpleasant dream. There’s even a sing-along dance number, complete with lyrics on screen – it feels a step too far, but top marks for invention. Liz Smith is expectedly superb as Johnny’s senile mother, providing some perfectly timed laughs, and Dunaway is an other worldly presence, managing to make the most of a largely clichéd role.

Whilst the visual creativity and bravado of Flick‘s ambitions mostly work, it does suffer in other respects. Most alarming is the unevenness of a script that has some staggeringly clunky dialogue. Within it’s B-movie context you can bypass this for a while, but on occasion you can actually see the highly capable cast wrestling a line from their mouths like a sour gooseberry. The make-up effects on Johnny are also somewhat compromised by the budget, likewise Dunaway’s prosthetic limb.

With it’s amiably retro styling and willing cast, it’s easy to be whisked away by the endeavour despite its failings. Not a great movie by any stretch, it does show wonderful ambition and creativity, and that’s more than can be said about the rotting corpses of Guy Ritchie’s recent output.

Related Links

• Flick Movie Website