Like many children educated in a state school in the 1970s, I endured corporal punishment by ruler and fist. Nevertheless, I did not encounter the level of sarcastic violence meted out to third-former John McGill (Conor McCarron) in writer-director Peter Mullan’s powerful yet entertaining Neds, set during the same decade.
Arriving for school late on the first day of term, he encounters a teacher (Gary Lewis) who expresses mock sympathy. “My, you must be tired. Climb on my back and I’ll carry you to your class.” John meekly obliges, whereupon the teacher groans under his weight. “Don’t – worry – lad, I’ll get you there”, he grimaces in feigned uneasiness, slamming John’s back against the wall in the process. “‘Hang on” – Thump! – “I didn’t think you’d be so heavy” – Scrape! – hurting him twice more. This is not so much Grange Hill as “Deranged Hill”, or for the videogame-obsessed youth of today, “Silent Hill.”
This is just one stand-out scene in a stand-out film. Neds confounds expectations from its first frame. From the advertising, you expect it to be just another film about senseless violence, featuring a kid who falls in and out of love with gang culture. On the contrary, young John (Greg Forrest) has no such illusions. His dad (Mullan himself) is an abusive bully. When he sharks into a room, John, his mother and sister bow their heads, avoiding eye contact. Mullan does not seduce the audience with fisticuffs; he makes us fear them. John’s older brother Benny (Joe Szula) has also gone the way of the lout. He’s a car thief who commands respect on the estates of ’70s Glasgow.
No, John doesn’t fall in with gang culture; it falls for him. After a relationship with a fellow swot goes sour, the rejected John encounters a gang who stand ready to give him a good kicking – or at least rob him of his football boots. When they find out that he’s Benny’s wee bra, they’re all over him. John finds a place – but not a gang who watches his back.
As we see him in various perilous states, we don’t root for him to triumph through violence. Rather, we want him to go back to the way of the book, or at least quiet time watching a dubbed version of Robinson Crusoe on television. All the period clips – including one from Monty Python – pay off through echoes in the on-screen action.
Mullan makes the point that bright kids like John are bullied as much through praise as by abuse. Early on, he is asked to stand on his desk as the only student who achieved 100 per cent for his Latin homework. In a class from which he desperately wants to escape, and where he ended up by an act of indifference by school administration, you feel his sense of peril for being singled out so overtly. John turns against the Latin teacher later on, but we also see him regret it.
Producer Stephen Woolley complained that his film Made in Dagenham was denied its proper audience by its 15 certificate. Neds demands to be seen by a child audience who might be inclined towards gang culture. It courts identification with intelligence and in its final scene puts John face to face with one of his victims.
In many ways, it is a deeply Catholic film. Guilt must be punished and at one point the brutish Mr McGill tells his son: “Finish me”. But it’s not Catholicism in the traditional sense, evidenced by a scene where John tussles with Jesus himself.
Neds has its reality-stretching moments, but also bravura set pieces, such as a dialogue-free party scene that ends in a chair thrown through a window and a fight scene on a bridge set to “Cheek to Cheek”. It feels emotionally true. You experience its outrage against youth violence while understanding the conditions in which it breeds.
There can be few more disreputable trends in modern American cinema than the gentrification of 1970s so-called video nasties. These are low-budget horror films such as Last House on the Left that are remade as mainstream multiplex fodder. Less pornographic in tone – they all feature violence against women that earned them, justifiably, their “nasty” tag when applying for a British home video certificate in the 1980s – but still manipulative in a base way and sordid. This autumn sees the release of the remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs but before that we have the remake of Meir Zarchi’s 1978 I Spit on Your Grave which, like Straw Dogs and Abel Ferrara’s Ms 45 – it must be only a matter of time before Hollywood gets to that one – is a rape revenge movie.
This is the sort of a film where a lone female, here writer Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler), seeking solitude to write her next novel, takes minimal steps to assure herself of personal protection. Sure, she stands up to the leering local youths at the gas station, with their stereotypical chat-up lines, and she has a can of mace in her handbag, but she is in a big old house all on her own without an emergency plan when said leery youths turn up on her porch, along with a “disabled” handyman (Chad Lindberg, setting back the portrayal of mental illness 30 years with his spinal contortions and rabbit arms up to his neck in a poor approximation of nervous anxiety).
After an extended ordeal, Jennifer escapes, but then encounters the sheriff who is even worse. Sheriff and kids intend to kill her – boy, they hate city girls – but she escapes. A month later, she recovers her pallor, finds some clothes and exacts a murderous revenge.
The dubious pleasure of the film is seeing the men get their come-uppance in increasingly protracted and gruesome ways. At one point, Jennifer puts fish-hooks through one fellow’s eyelids and you think to yourself that she was wasted as a novelist. None of the men are spared, as she throws back their lines at them when they plead for mercy.
This is so lowest common denominator stuff that you wonder why writer Stuart Morse and director Steven R Monroe bothered. Filmmakers such as Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper justified their aesthetic in the 1970s as bringing the realism of bloodshed seen on television news coverage of the Vietnam war into American movie theatres. Today’s reflection of news footage is all about spinning the argument, attempting to justify violence as a response to violence.
Oddly, this reflects Barack Obama’s recent rhetoric – itself taken from movies. ‘”If they bring a knife, you take a gun.” That might be “the Chicago way” to quote Sean Connery’s cop in The Untouchables, but it does not
show great maturity and wisdom in dealing with social problems such as idle, disenfranchised youth and out of control police.
