A Disappointing Continuation

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I gave this film 2/10 stars. I couldn't make it to the end, so I thought I should be a bit generous. I suspect that if I had watched the entire film, outrage at being so stupid to waste more of my time would have moved me to give it a lower score.I felt I was watching the results of what somebody would create if they bought the cheapest little camcorder and asked some friends to help him or her make a cheesy pseudo-documentary. It was painfully dull and tedious to watch. I kept waiting for something of substance to happen, but eventually gave up. The only thing gritty about this film is the video quality of most shots.

To say Diary Of A Bad Lad is a "must see" movie is no mere hyperbole. There are already many discussions and observations regarding the film's low budget, independent nature (and indeed the style of the film and subsequent "acting" are the film's greatest strength) and it precisely because this film has not gone through a long, overdrawn and commercialised process by distributors keen to boil the plot, characters and story down to the lowest common (easiest to sell) denominator that we have a film so refreshingly different to anything on offer in our multiplexes or store shelves. Diary Of A Bad Lad is a film that may would not have dared try to make, or if they had, would have ran the risk of dropping the ball with too many Chefs spoiling the pot. The Production team were all reading from the same Hymn sheet on day one and it shows with such a tight, yet intricate, narrative.The plot revolves around disgraced former University lecturer Barry Lick, who enrols his former students and protégés, or rather seduces them, into making a Documentary about various gangster figures in the local area. What happens over the course of the film is that the film crew, who become thoroughly unlikeable pretty quickly (deliberately so) are actually being manipulated by their so called film subjects, Gangtsers Ray Topham and Tommy Morghen.The film's genius lies in making you, the viewer, implicit in Barry Lick's Production crew and quest to infiltrate the murky belly of the Underworld, camera always in tow. As he and his cohorts are drawn further into the dark-side of Ray and Tommy's actual goings on, eventually becoming directly implicated and involved in criminal activities, we become just as guilty as they do. They want more gory details in their film; we want to see more gory details in the/their film. Barry Lick's most memorable line "It's what the punters want to see!" isn't a statement, but a question to the viewer, one that we answer with a silent but assertive yes. Yes, show us more violence, pornography, drugs. Whatever you've got, we'll lap it up and watch.As such, we are drawn into and complicit in every single unflinching and brutal act the film wheels out to us. This is not a gangster flick of bravado, shouting and swearing. The observational style of the piece means that all the characters become chillingly real, which makes the ever so easy flick between Business-Gentleman and Cold-Killer all the more shocking. As such, Joe O'Byrne deserves immense amount of praise; his turn as Tommy Morghen is not just one of the greatest gangster performances I've seen, but one of the greatest all time movie villains. Not for Tommy is the bravado and machismo of Scarface or a Guy Ritchie archetype, but rather a calm and gentle smile with a handshake and a glint in his eye that tells you have just invited the Devil inside.As media commentary, performance piece and an incredibly well put together film, Diary Of A Bad Lad is epic in its scope; part movie, part satirical social critique. The latter makes it rise above being just another movie, but it is the former, that all of these threads, characters and criticisms can be woven into such a well crafted story, that makes Diary Of A Bad Lad an out-standing film and proof that film-stock, glossy actors and glamorous locations are not essential pre-requisites for a good film; they're not, it is about story-telling, and anyone can do that with the tools they have available. You won't see another film like Bad Lad anytime soon, and for that reason alone, the film is a "must see." The fact that the film is British, and gaining a release in Britain in cinemas, online and at retailers (any non-British reading this may not realise that this is monumentally difficult if not impossible to do in our own country) shows not just the determination of the film crew and Production to get this film scene, but that also it must have something to say and be doing something right as people are paying attention, and actively promoting the film. After seeing the film, Tommy Morghen's bone chilling smile doesn't give you any other option.

Every Danny Dyer fan should see this film. And so should he.For those who don't know, Danny Dyer is an actor has built an inexplicably successful career playing geezerish mockney gangsters and football hooligans. He also presents "Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men", a morally-questionable piece of reality TV in which he pals around with various low-level gangsters, celebrating their violent actions. Recently, Dyer made the sort of viciously misogynous "joke" one of the characters in his films, or one of his new gangster pals would make in a cheap lads' mag renowned for its Neanderthal attitude to women, and sparked a national outcry. Dyer very quickly backtracked, claiming to have been misquoted, expressing bewilderment as to how such a misunderstanding might have occurred. This is what happens to people who hang around with gangsters and criminals: they lose their distance, their objectivity; they become trapped in situations they did not initiate. Their laddish power fantasies turn nasty; spiral totally out of control. I found myself thinking of Danny Dyer and his fans a lot while I was watching DIARY OF A BAD LAD, Pleased Sheep Productions' ferociously intelligent study of the media's obsession with, and complicity in, modern criminality. The story is a simple one, a morality play for the modern age. Disgraced film lecturer and would-be documentary filmmaker Barry Lick has a project he believes will be the making of him: a no-holds barred documentary investigation into the alleged criminal activities of a dodgy local businessman who for legal reasons he can only identify as "Ray Topham". Recruiting a team of his own former students, Barry's quest leads him to "Topham's" "Security Consultant", Tommy Morghen, who offers all of the access the filmmakers could wish for. But Tommy is a smarter player than Barry and his callow crew could possibly imagine, and is exploiting them for his own ruthless ends…What gives Bad Lad its unique edge is its approach, the dextrous way in which it blurs the boundaries between the real and the reconstructed. An object lesson in low budget film-making; in making the best of use of available facilities; the film is shot entirely in grainy TV-documentary style, with scenes actually cut together from much longer in-character interviews and fly-on-the-wall sequences. Dialogue is a mixture of tight scripting and controlled improvisation. The cast is a carefully selected mixture of professional actors and "real" people. The filmmakers play fictional versions of themselves - young filmmakers just out of university, enlisted by their former tutor for a project that all of them see as a ticket to that much-coveted media job. Writer / Producer / Star Jonathan Williams really is a former film tutor, and director Michael Booth was one of his students. Various shady local "characters", such as Nicky Lockett (MC Tunes) appear as "themselves". This intricately-constructed quasi-reality really allows the actors to shine. All are on peak form. Joe O'Byrne delivers a mesmerising performance as the charming, terrifying sociopath Tommy Morghen, Donna Henry is a brittle mixture of defiance and vulnerability as exploited drug courier and porn starlet Joanne, and there are stand-out tragi-comic supporting turns from Clyve Bonnelle as an ill-fated junkie and James Foster as one of Tommy's more hapless victims.The result is one of the most plausible and convincing faux-documentaries ever made. So authentic is the film's recreation of the modern documentary style, and so credible its performances and depiction of Northern Gangland, that when lead actor Joe O'Byrne appeared in character as the gangster Tommy Morghen to introduce a screening at the BBC in London, somebody actually called security. But such attention to detail is only half the story. What gives the film its teeth is the extraordinary, multi-layered script, which is able to slide effortlessly from wince-inducing comedy of embarrassment into bone-chilling cruelty and violence and back again, and which boils with rage at our gangster-fixated, morally empty Reality-TV-dominated freak-show culture. The real monster in the film is not Tommy Morghen, it is the increasingly deranged and self-justifying filmmaker, Barry Lick, who tells one traumatized documentary subject, with an almost Satanic relish: "We can do anything we like - you signed a release!" With such an attitude, Barry's future in TV would seem guaranteed. The only problem is, he signed a contract of his own

I invited the film to be shown at our festival, the Manchester International Short Film Festival in 2005. Essentially a short film festival, but we were doing a showcase of local directors who had made or were in the process of making a feature, so it was appropriate to do an event around a locally made feature film.When I saw the film, I was quite honestly gob smacked by it. It was a tremendous piece of low budget film making, made with such vigour and expertise, it was difficult to see how this could have been made for less than a million! Everything about it was good. Wonderful and witty script, tight acting, some great characters, excellent camera work and really good editing. Oh and great sound too. OK, one or two minor flaws but essentially a fine piece of film-making and one of the best I'd seen from a Uk film maker in a long time. I think the film drew praise from everyone who saw it, and when I showed Bruno Coppola (distant cousin of Francis FC) the film at my house during the festival, he couldn't stop raving about it. I think saying they "stole the show" at the 2005 kinofest - is appropriate.All in all these guys deserve to go places and I'm really glad they got a 80 print release deal going into to UK digital cinemas this Autumn. Thanks guys for a wonderful experience and the DVD has a highly visible place in my DVD collection now. Kino john