A DAY OF VIOLENCE

What is it about Southerners? When they are not duelling it out with an infestation of bleedin’ zombies they are chopping off each other’s bollocks with blunt garden shears! No, what you just read is not some sort of cockney rhyming malarkey, but an actual ultra-violent sequence from writer and director Darren Ward’s aptly titled A DAY OF VIOLENCE.

The movie follows Mitchell (Nick Rendell) a burley debt collector who, due to his ruthless methods, is rather good at his job. But gathering overdue bundles of cash for loan sharks is a messy and unpredictable business as one job in particular proves. A relatively routine recovery of £2000 from a squalid flat belonging to a drug addled lowlife named Hopper (Giovanni Lombardo Radice no less), suddenly presents Mitchell with a predicament. You see, during little bit of torturous persuasion, the druggie discloses that there is in fact the vastly greater sum of £100k hidden somewhere.

The temptation is too much to resist so Mitchell duly helps himself to the life changing bundles of notes before reducing Hoppers desperate pleas to a blood curdling gurgle with a good ole fashion throat slash.

With his newly found, but temporary, financial freedom, Mitchell swaps one hard nosed boss for another. His new employer has an interesting first assignment. Yep, you guessed it. To recover £100k from a certain drug addled scumbag by the name of Hopper…

It’s now that things start to get very complicated and extremely violent…

A DAY OF VIOLENCE is a cracking little movie with a genuinely gritty atmosphere that will satisfy anyone with a high threshold for extreme visceral brutality. The gore is prominent right from the get go as Mitchell rightfully states that "Death is the only certainty in life", while the camera lingers on his disembowelled cadaver complete with flaccid penis incongruously on show.

From there on in, there is no shortage of hostile carnage as greedy gangsters chase the cash and of course dish out their own version of justice to anyone foolhardy enough to try and rip them off. Faces are beaten to a crimson pulp while teeth are ruthlessly removed via that sorely underused tool of dentistry – the chisel!

It all culminates in the movies stand out sequence that I alluded to earlier. Mitchell’s unfortunate pal, Smithy, is dangled upside down in a warehouse and is relieved of his ‘toilet area’ in a sequence that proved to be one of the most explicitly vicious I have ever witnessed.

The bloodshed looks realistic and the effects and editing work beautifully together. The intensity of the brutality was enhanced by a meaty soundscape that added a moody tone along with some bludgeoning explosions of sound to accentuate the violence.

Primal instruments of torture are one thing but you can’t have a gangster movie without an arsenal of guns and a lorry load of bullets. The climatic mayhem features both thankfully accompanied by traditional squibs as oppose to hackneyed CG effects.

Although the plot was a relatively simple one, the movie was not just a series of mindless violent set-pieces. Although the unfurling of the narrative was a little predictable and admittedly almost ground to a halt at the movies midpoint, it was at least powered by ferocity and helped by a revelation or two that tried to develop Mitchell’s character.

As you would expect from an inner city gangster themed picture, the quick fire dialogue was entertaining and laden with vulgarities and some wicked humour at times. In stark contrast to this though, were the closing scenes which stirred for a different reason. Helped by Emma Brown’s heart rendering, "Requiem" the movie closed by poignantly reminding us that that for all the glamour and easy cash, a life of crime has no shortage of losers.

If I had to level one criticism at the picture it would have to be at the acting. All too often it just came across as a little lethargic in places. Had it not been for the numerous slayings, the authenticity of the main characters may have been a little exposed. That said, given the liberal spilling of red stuff, I was essentially forgiving about this aspect!

Now I know for a lot of you this review, thus far, offers nothing revelatory seeing as the UK DVD has been available, fully uncut, for a while at a relatively budget price. Where the MVD disc featured in this piece is a different entity is when it comes to the "Extras". Where as the UK disc only featured around 23 minutes of bonus material MVD’s DVD features around 2 hours.

Firstly there is a MAKING OF segment which weighs in at a very healthy 78 minutes. It’s a behind the scenes look at how the movie was constructed on location in Southampton. It was intriguing to watch Giovanni Radice’s (Or John Morghen’s if you prefer) thoughtful input into creating his doomed character Hopper, especially considering how little screen time he actually was given. Stuart Brown and Scott Orr’s amazing special make up effects that were employed in creating the infamous ‘castration’ sequence are revealed in detail along with the background to some of the other sequences. It’s a great watch, packed with interviews, perspectives and an insight to how the crew gelled.

Also in the extras is an exclusive on-set 11 minute interview with Radice whose ‘bonus material’ appearances ironically dwarf his actual screen time in the main attraction!

Jonny also features in the ‘Casting a Legend’ featurette which focuses on the FX model cast of Hoppers neck for the explicit throat slashing sequence.

Completing the ‘Extras’ are some deleted and extended scenes which lean toward superfluous dialogue plus the mandatory photo gallery.

So all in all definitely worth checking out if you don’t already own the UK disc. But even if you do, depending on how interested you are in the legend that is Jonny Morghen or the edifice of realistically filmed scrotum removals, the Extras section alone may well justify a secondary purchase of a truly nasty movie.

Review by Marc Lissenburg