LEFT FOR DEAD (2004)

Amongst the pensioners and fish and chip shops of the Southern British sea side town of Brighton, an underworld of violence and organised crime festers away amongst industrial estates, hidden back street gymnasiums and open waste ground. To some it’s just about the Bingo, but to co-writer/ director Ross Boyask and his indie filmmaking team, its all about the high kicks and low blows of spine snapping martial arts dealt out by some seriously shady scum bags. Welcome to Left for Dead a film about violence, betrayal and dodgy haircuts.
OK, so technically this low budget action fest isn’t actually set in Brighton despite this and various other locations around East Sussex being used for principal photography, instead the much more generic name of Hope City is used as the movies initial hive of villainy. The film opens with a low shot of three mean, brooding men striding purposefully towards a secure fenced area clearly designed to keep sane people from straying too close to its hidden menace. 10 minutes latter and the waste ground becomes the final resting place for many (many!) weapon wielding thugs who thought they could stand strong against the combined forces of our trio of expert killers. Skills established, the film moves on in pace where we are introduced to local crime lord Kincaid, a man whose love for shoulder padded suits can only be outdone by the hairstyle of lethal hitman Williams. Williams is tired of his murderous lifestyle and wants out, but Kincaid has other ideas and issues the order to reduce the happy trio of killers into a double act. As Williams some how finds the strength to survive the onslaught of men sent by Kincaid to execute him, he slowly recovers and teams up with local kickboxing ace Kelso, another victim of Kincaid’s maniacal rule, to seek a bloody and violent revenge.

The film opens with an interesting titles montage introducing the main movers and shakers as a small cell of movie footage freezes just as a primitive line drawing slides down and away to the extremities of the screen. It’s simple but imaginative and sets the urbanised tone for the opening of the film proper. Moving into the substance of the film, it soon becomes very clear that the priority here over anything else that the film makers hope to achieve, is to offer up an intense and some times gritty comic book style action film. Perhaps I should quantify this by saying that the action mainly revolves around the many (many!) fight scenes that dominate most of the films running time. Unlike the over-the-top Hollywood style fighting, this is very much down and dirty focusing on martial arts disciplines such as kickboxing, karate and tyquando. The filmmaker’s influences are clear for all to see and will defiantly appeal to lovers of combat disciplines but my concern here is whether the casual action viewer will appreciate the often over-elongated battle sequences which seem to bubble away for so long that I felt myself going completely numb from the whole experience. Don’t get me wrong; the work done by the fight coordinators is admirable, it’s just that I prefer the story to drive the fights, not the other way around.
Despite all the best intension's, the films meagre budget does lead to a few technical difficulties ranging from chopping editing, questionable continuity and the odd flaw in the fight choreography, but very few micro budget productions get it all perfect and bearing in mind that this is Ross Boyask and Phil Hobden (the films producer, co-writer and actor) first full length collaboration after the pair scored a string of similarly ‘revenge’ themed shorts, its no bad thing and at least shows an eagerness to push their comfort limits in an attempt to try something a little different. This eagerness also spills over into the cast with several admirable efforts from the rooky players including a fabulous Adrian Foiadelli as the violently insane Taylor whose passion for snapping fingers and cracking skulls with a baseball bat is surprisingly unsettling to watch. Adam Chapman’s role as crime kingpin Kincaid may be small in comparison to the lead players but his opening screen speech about bicycles and tanks is a joy to listen to in a sort of ‘crazy-grandfather’ way. Most of the other leads including Glenn Salvage and Andy Prior do a better job at kicking ass than they do at the thespian side of their roles, but seeing how the film is all about the fighting, that causes very little distraction. Amongst all the bone crunching there’s not a lot of time left for humour and perhaps this is the reason why the ‘Smoking Kills’ gag worked so well. Despite the warning on the side of the cigarette packet (complete with Boyask and Hobden brand name!), Cancer played no part in the death of one particular young criminal in the midst of lighting one up rather having more to do with a snapped neck bone thanks to hitman Williams.

This film helped me discover something about myself which I never truly realised until the final credits rolled. As much as I love action movies, I found to my surprise that I actually had a breaking point that, when reached would cause my little brain to shutdown. Now I love a good cinematic kick in the face as much as the next man (or woman if that’s you thing) but it’s hard to stomach the sheer volume on display here. The ratio of story/punch is too imbalanced to satisfy your casual action fan and anyone who gets a serious kick out of perfectly timed Americanised violence will probably switch this one off after 20 minutes. For me Left for Dead came across as a great first time effort from a couple of talented enthusiasts whose films will no doubt be watched passionately by fellow fight fans.