Dirty Weekend

Is it too easy to say that Winner's version of Helen Zahavi's brutal feminist best-seller resembles the shoddier end of the Death Wish series? Could the director, perhaps, be playing a deeper game? Winner has cunningly shot whole tracts to resemble out-takes from local cinema advertising, which distances the audience from the material and indeed from wakefulness itself. The story is pie simple. Bella (Williams), sick of gropers and peeping toms, visits an Iranian clairvoyant (Richardson in cocoa butter) who advises her to join the predators - and donates his flick knife. Over a weekend in Brighton, she dispatches chaps with a hammer, a polythene bag, a car, a gun and the knife. Fans of the gross will savour the bondage freak and the forced blow-job with vomiting. Pretty rotten.