Scrubbers

Part-written by Roy (Scum) Minton, this follows the career of two Borstal girls: a lesbian orphan who busts herself back inside to rejoin her faithless lover, and a single mother who, separated from her child, puts an ever-increasing gap between them by her escalating violence. But blatant audience manipulation backfires: the more the mother bashes her way through the film, the less your sympathies are engaged. A script which bridles with a grim wit more akin to Porridge than Scum-in-a-skirt, and a filtered use of colour so dense it appears to be shot in black-and-white, are both points in favour. But no amount of effing and blinding, unconvincing slow-motion violence, scatological inventiveness, and buckets of flying excreta, can hide the fact that Scrubbers is a very noisy film that manages to say nothing novel. An entertaining washout.