It's a bit of an odd one when you , as writer/director, create a film set in a period which you are not old enough to remember but which many of those who view it will. Prano Bailey Bond (who is described as 'from Wales', but clearly not Welsh) doesn't reveal her age on IMDB or Wikipedia, but I'm only just old enough to remember 'video nasties' being in the news, and I'm pretty sure she's younger than me. I don't know what makes her such an expert on moral attitudes of the 80s, but aspects of pop culture do encourage and enable violence - even as I write there is a machete killing in the news, inspired by Drill 'music' - and to deny it is as naive as to deny that the easy availability of guns multiplies the murder rate.
What Bailey-Bond does know about, apparently, is clunky dialogue and a heavy-handed political message, in a film that is packed with cliches and eventually disappears up its own metativity. It has visual style, though - a sort of Airstrip One, Tinker Tailor, Cold War vibe - and an effective sense of creeping dread. It needed a more coherent story, and to keep the politics out.
And by the way - British people in the early 80s didn't have answering machines. Well, maybe the Queen - nobody else.
What Bailey-Bond does know about, apparently, is clunky dialogue and a heavy-handed political message, in a film that is packed with cliches and eventually disappears up its own metativity. It has visual style, though - a sort of Airstrip One, Tinker Tailor, Cold War vibe - and an effective sense of creeping dread. It needed a more coherent story, and to keep the politics out.
And by the way - British people in the early 80s didn't have answering machines. Well, maybe the Queen - nobody else.