Review by Stuart Barr
Stars Viva Bianca, Hannah Mangan-Lawrence, Peter Docker, Stephen Phillips, Eamon Farren, Belinda McClory, Darren Moss, Freya Tingley, Anthony Phelan, Hazem Shammas
Written by Belinda McClory
Certification UK 18 | Australia R
Runtime 90 minutes
Directed by Jon Hewitt
High-class escort Holly (Bianca) is planning to get out of the life and pursue her dream of living in Paris. Her plan goes badly awry when a twist of chance leaves her a girl down for a threesome with a lucrative client. She chances over Shay (Mangan-Lawrence), a 17-year-old runaway newly arrived in Sydney, and persuades her to fill the vacant position. But during a champagne and drug fuelled tryst in a posh hotel their client is interrupted by a business associate arriving early. Told to hide in the bathroom, the girls then witness a gangland execution and go on the run through the dangerous and seedy streets of the city’s King’s Cross district pursued by a vicious killer with a special hatred of women.
Originally just titled X, the Night of Vengeance subtitle is a clumsy addition that makes this sound like an Asian martial arts film. It's not; this is, in fact, an extraordinarily seedy thriller. Despite a low budget (or perhaps because of it) the film is breathlessly exciting once the chase kicks off. Shooting on the actual streets of King’s Cross (known locally as the Cross) and using real strip clubs as locations gives the film an terrific sense of place. A strip of sex clubs, sleazy hotels that rent rooms by the hour, stripper bars, with prostitutes openly plying their trade, the Cross appears to be a 21st century version of the New York shown in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Glickenhaus’ the Exterminator. A non-stop cavalcade of filth and depravity.
The film is visually stunning, shot at night in vibrant colour the screen explodes with neon pinks and sickly artificial yellows. Director Jon Hewitt controls the depth of field to paint woozy glittering backdrops behind the characters giving the film the hallucinatory edge of a really, really bad trip. Editing is fast and kinetic, and there is great use of split screen effects to heighten the atmosphere. In its latter stages the film achieves the effect of a metaphorical and psychological descent into hell.
But it is a seductive sort of a hell. X is not a film designed to be taken as a gruelling expose like Uli Edel’s Christiane F or Darren Aaronofsky’s Requiem For a Dream. No, this is a prime slice of exploitation nailed to a solid framework of genre plotting. Hewitt’s artistic skills may be reaching for the stars but his eye is down in the gutter. The director clearly loves genre, his previous film was the horror Acolytes, and he is planning a gruesome sounding vampire film.
For all the scenes of abjection and violence every surface of X is coated with a lush sheen of sordid glamour. In the lead roles Bianca and Mangan-Lawrence both deliver strong and convincing performances, but they also look absolutely stunning (even after being punched in the face). There is a good 20 minutes of near softcore material, with an excruciating manual-stimulation-in-a-car scene that channels Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, before the thriller element of the film kicks in. Even then, no matter how seedy the strip joint or sex club the girls flee through, the background is stuffed with attractive naked flesh.
The script (which is co-authored by Hewitt’s partner McClory – she was Switch in The Matrix, fact fans) turns on a large number of chance coincidences that some viewers may find contrived in the extreme. However this is one of those “night from hell” films like Scorsese’s After Hours or Walter Hill’s The Warriors, where no matter how bad things are, they will always get worse. That the cumulative effect of each successive piece of bad luck pushes the film ever further into the realms of absurdity is a given of the plot structure.
This really is quite an eye-wateringly sleazy piece of trash, but it is directed with real verve, looks fantastic and is extremely entertaining. I wouldn’t recommend taking your mum (or even a date), but if it plays on a screen near you (hopefully at extreme volume) it will convert your World of Cine into a little piece of 42nd Street circa 1982 for 90 gorgeous minutes.