The prospect of a low-budget British rockabilly horror comedy, reputedly shot in just four weeks, makes one fear the worst, even with names like Faye Dunaway and Liz Smith above the title and a success at the Raindance Film Festival under its belt.
The story is the stuff of classic slashers – wronged weirdo comes back from the dead to take out his tormentors – but the treatment is another thing. Flick begins in a 1950s dancehall somewhere in Britain where shy Teddy Boy Johnny (Hugh O’Connor) plucks up the courage to ask for a dance with the girl he loves from afar only to be taunted and beaten up by a bunch of local lads. He ends up driving his Hillman Minx off the docks and spends the next 50 years asleep in the deep. Revived by the rocking sounds of an offshore pirate radio station, a water-ravaged and rotten Johnny goes home to his mum (Liz Smith) and starts taking revenge on the now adult bullies who pushed him over the edge, and searching for his long-lost love.
Enter Faye Dunaway (!) as Lt Mackzenzie, a Memphis detective on a ‘cop swap’ exchange programme, and her British partner Sergeant Miller (Mark Benton, of Nationwide Building Society ad fame), the typical odd couple who must bring Johnny to book. For some reason, Dunaway sports a prosthetic arm (her face doesn’t look too real either, after all the ‘work’), but she does her best with a silly role, as does Benton.
Visually, the film goes for a nostalgic, comic-book feel, its action storyboarded in a series of single frames. It’s an impression heightened by the use of over-saturated colours, wipes and sections where the story is actually told in comic book panels (designed by our very own cover artist Alex Tomlinson, no less). This relentless obsession with the past – though arguably the thematic core of the piece, replicating Johnny’s own perspective – threatens to overwhelm the present, and Howard’s vision of the 1950s is pure pastiche. Oddly, it also feels as if it was made – like its obvious inspiration, George Romero’s Creepshow – in the 1980s rather than 2008, possessing as it does an amateurish innocence quite out of place in today’s slick marketplace. In the end, though, Flick is neither funny nor scary, just amiable and old-fashioned; and this isn’t enough to save it.
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