Crack Willow

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

I’m not sure exactly what I did in this life or the sum total of any previous lives to deserve the horror perpetrated upon my eyeballs by Crack Willow. There would seem to be no crimes grievous enough to warrant the sort of self flagellation that sitting in front of this, for want of a better term, film, constitutes.

Mark (Mark Bennett) finds himself caring for his elderly father in-between bouts of social inadequacy and casual insults hurled against anyone he seems to happen across. Soon afterwards his father dies leaving him parentless and us completely bereft of anything resembling a narrative.

What unfolds across various characters could, I suppose, were one a charitable sort, be considered something of a study in mental health. One would, however, have to be displaying about the same levels of charity as Mother Teresa did.

What you actually get, actually, in actual terms, is a fat guy who’s had his shoes stolen insulting a prostitute and a guy at a bus stop, a guy who grumbles a primary school level psychotic’s script down the telephone to his mother while atonal, Aphex Twin on a lobotomy level drivel pounds away in the background, and a woman who stares in silence at someone doing a clown’s act before a guy playing the trumpet badly eventually makes her crack a smile.

If any of the above condenses out into some form of message or point it can only be by accident rather than design, as this embarrassing mess of banal obscenity and entirely gratuitous full frontal nudity bounces around making no sense whatsoever for so long that it can seems to be making it a point of pride. I’m fairly certain that I have had bowel movements that are more worthy of a place on a cinema screen than this is.

Described breathlessly in the PR blurb as ‘sort of like Mike Leigh meets Chris Morris’, it’s really more along the lines of ‘a steaming great pile of shite meets a steaming great bowl of shite’. If there’s a single redeeming feature to this abomination I assume it must ship separately as there’s certainly none on screen. As close to a baseline of awfulness as I ever hope to see. British Film Industry, please cease all activity lest ye pollute the world further with anything like as bad as this. Promoted as part of the ‘Under the Radar’ section of the EIFF, however I would suggest that this be sought out on your radar only so that you know the best way to avoid it at all times.