Tony

Made on a reputed £40,000 budget, with funds from Edinburgh’s Trailblazer initiative, director Gerard Johnson’s seriously creepy London serial-killer movie shows enough invention, skewed personal vision and filmmaking nous to qualify the worst excesses of its grisly and deadpan urban miserabilism. Actor Peter Ferdinando delivers a hearty turn as the socially inadequate, East End council flat-dwelling, Oxfam-shirt-wearing, Chuck Norris-watching, body-part-butchering title character.

In fact, his Tony is so affectless and lacking in corrective self-awareness that, set against the unadorned realism of the settings and the disconcertingly credible performances of the other cast members playing the various sleazeballs, prostitutes and drug addicts that constitute Tony’s social environment, he generates as much gruesome black humour as he does banal horror. Not a reassuring vision, for sure, and no tourist plug for Dalston, Hackney or Haggerston, but the film’s a fair calling card for Johnson’s talent.