MY BLOODY BANJO

TWANGGGG!!!!!!!!! CONTAINS SPOILERS

It's always awkward when a film comes along that you ultimately don't like very much and you know the writer-director. How do you confess this without being insulting - or at least coming across as insulting? Do you try and intimate that the problems are with you rather than the film or with him? Do you straight up lie and say you thought it was marvellous? Do you focus on minor issues or trivial items like knowing the locations or spotting the influences and references? As one who's never been great at social interaction at the best of times, it's even more of a minefield than usual and now you've been given huge tin boots to go stomping across it.

Pelzer Arbuckle has always been bullied and persecuted: at school the only thing that got him through was his imaginary friend Ronnie, but people died as a result. Now in some unspecified office role at a paper distribution firm, he's still picked on and humiliated on a daily basis by bosses and co-workers, ramped up even more after an eye-watering sexual accident that Google informs me is a genuine thing. Not to go into details here but I'm not touching the damn thing ever again; all I can say is thank heavens for the Delete History option. Following the death of the one work colleague who wasn't a colossal bastard to him (Laurence R Harvey), Pelzer realises that maybe conjuring up Ronnie once more is his only remaining option....

An entirely British stab at Revenge Of The Wimp horror, My Bloody Banjo (originally just titled Banjo) may be set in the town of Henenlotter, but it's the Frank Henenlotter of the more uncomfortably sexual Bad Biology than the grindhouse grime of Basket Case, and in any case the tone is much more aligned to Troma films, none of which I've ever liked even a little bit. The Toxic Avenger, Tromeo And Juliet and Class Of Nuke 'Em High (and various sequels) I've always felt were mean-spirited, shoddily put together and revelling in the worst of puerile bad taste; Lloyd Kaufman (who has a brief cameo as a doctor, named after his Toxic Avenger directing alias) talks a good movie but has yet to direct even a tolerable one.

Sadly that's the tone of My Bloody Banjo: abortion jokes, HIV jokes, wildly overpitched performances, excessive gore. Now I'm certainly not against tacky splatter movies, and some of my all-time favourites could never be described as subtle, but the trouble is that this movie is very much all on one note, and there's very little in the way of light and shade. It doesn't give you any respite from the horrors of Pelzer's constant suffering, until the final turning of the worm where good and bad alike are slaughtered and the worst of the villains do not suffer nearly enough (it also never explains why he even works there and even throws in better reasons why he doesn't need to). Some of the gore is impressive (there's a nifty chainsaw-head interface, and kudos for the truly uncomfortable banjo incident itself, one of the most effective look-away moments in years), and Ronnie himself is kind of fun, but I could have done with a little respite from the horribleness.

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