THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF EXTREME BAD TASTE

It used to take a lot for a film director to get on my blacklist: for them to make movies so awful that I eventually didn't want to see any more from them because life's too short to put up with this rubbish. Peter Greenaway managed three before I said "enough", and Al Adamson and Ted V Mikels managed a mere two each, while the dreaded Lloyd Kaufman scored an astonishing seven before I finally gave up on him. Because of all those years wasted trying to watch every piece of hopeless junk available I waded through no less than 42 films by the legendarily abysmal Jess Franco (of which maybe three were actually worth the effort) before drawing a line in the sand for the sake of my sanity. The only director I can think of who I abandoned after just one is Ray Dennis Steckler, and that's because most of his "works" aren't available in the UK anyway. And now I can add Dasha Nekrasova to that very short roll of honour.

The Scary Of Sixty-First is a godawful little drama yoking in Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew for tedious and tiresome shock effect that thinks it's pushing boundaries and being cutting edge but is actually just crass and exploitative. Two young women (who are supposed to be long-term friends, which is the first thing I just don't believe) seem to have got lucky with a suspiciously good deal on a prime Manhattan apartment, until a mysterious unnamed woman (co-writer and director Nekrasova) turns up and reveals that it used to belong to Epstein. Before you know it, Addie (Betsey Brown) seems to be possessed by the spirit of a child who may have been killed there, and her roommate Noelle (co-writer Madeline Quinn) and the stranger start taking drugs and wandering around New York investigating the Big Conspiracy...

The anonymous stranger actually says "I'm not a conspiracy theorist" before launching into a stream of tinfoil-hat gibberish centred around Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the Royals and the Clintons, taking in MKUltra mind-control, tarot cards, pentagrams and Pizzagate. There is probably a great film to be made about Epstein, but it's a serious subject for a serious project, and this absolutely isn't it. Addie masturbating frantically over pictures of Prince Andrew and begging her boyfriend to "f*** her like she's thirteen", and a crass four-letter reference to the Queen which wouldn't get a laugh on Mock The Week even if she hadn't died a few weeks ago, feel misplaced, like they're mainly there for pearl-clutching shock effect. But you can't be shocked if you don't believe in what you're watching, and I absolutely didn't buy into a single frame of it. Certainly not the last act, when it just resorts to "strong bloody violence" and throws in an Eyes Wide Shut reference for the sake of it.

The Scary Of Sixty-First doesn't work as either shock or drama because it's completely unbelievable (why is the unnamed stranger so obsessed with Epstein and his legacy anyway?), and the bad taste material just feels like it's trying too hard to be offensive, like a casual 9/11 joke without a punchline. The result is a film that's uncomfortable in its use of genuine evil as the backbone for a thoroughly uninteresting film that gets steadily stupider and more unhinged as it goes along. Also, despite the title, it's not remotely scary: to be honest I was bored and irritated throughout. The real victims of those ghastly, despicable people deserve a lot better than this nonsense. Streaming on Shudder.

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