ROGUE MALE : Julian Richards’ The Last Horror Movie [5/10]

Published on: May 6th, 2005

"We're trying to do something that hasn't been done before – we're trying to make an intelligent movie about murder, while actually doing the murders!" So says cultivated middle-class London sociopath-about-town Max in the fictional video-diary which forms the vast bulk of The Last Horror Movie. Looking like a cross between Hugh Grant and Pierce Brosnan, this 'straightforward kind o' guy' claims to have notched over 50 kills by the time he starts his "intelligent" movie, without attracting the attention of the police (a fairly plausible claim in a society which still bears the scars of Thatcherite atomisation). Aided in his "filming" by a homeless Scots "assistant" (Stevenson), the preening Max addresses camera in a series of monologues the questioning motives of his imahined "audience" – interspersed with quite graphic footage of his latest "hits".

The overarticulate Max strains desperately for originality, and so do Richards and his scriptwriter James Handel. But the subject-matter was rather more nimbly addressed some years back in Belgium's Man Bites Dog, Austria's Funny Games and, perhaps most famously, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (but not the dire film adaptation). 
Even the title has (kind-of) been used before: 1984's Cannes-set Caroline Munro vehicle The Last Horror Film. And this time the label isn't even that accurate: the picture actually works much better in its black-comedy moments (especially when ubermensch-ish Max is undercut by being placed in humiliating domestic settings with his own relatives) than when trying (rather too hard) to give viewer post-modern chills – as in clever-clever epilogue which only makes sense if the viewer has rented title from their local video emporium and is watching at home. 

Richards (Darklands) achieves some impressively stripped-down, convincingly unadorned (Man-Bites-dogme?) sequences on his reported  £50,000 budget, and plays some effective games with audience expectations. But the verbose, repetitive 'mad Max' monologues do end up bogging things down, and end result is too much like being alternately lectured to and ticked off by an insufferably smug braggart.

Neil Young
3rd May 2005

THE LAST HORROR MOVIE : [5/10] : UK 2004 : Julian RICHARDS : 80 mins
seen on VHS in Sunderland, 10th June 2004 – original review written 12th June, 2005

To read Jigsaw Lounge's exclusive interview with director Julian Richards click here