One for fans of cheerfully rude British cinema.... we're talking Sex Lives of the Potato Men level here...as washed up, coke snorting adult video director Damien Self (Simon Weir) and his even more obnoxious producer James Steel (Kieran Chalker) attempt to turn around the fortune of their failing porno operation by replacing flesh and blood porn stars with three sex robots. Only for the sexbots to start thinking for themselves and turn against their chauvinistic owners. Smutty, bloke humour is the order of the day here, but it also rubs shoulders with flashes of surprisingly satirical commentary on A. I., the metoo movement and female body image. The film hides it well, but there is a brain here. Making this, in it's smarter moments, a micro-budgeted Brit variation on The Substance, albeit had that film made the Dennis Quaid character the centre of attention. It's similarly visually hyperactive and in your face, with the downfall of it's train wreck of a protagonist being played out within a confined, claustrophobic setting. The film's concerns about A. I.'s potential dominance of the movie industry- the sexbots quickly master film editing and scriptwriting- and identity thief -Damien models one of the sexbots on his porn star ex-girlfriend- feel particularly topical. Damien's realisation that in terms of being stripped of his long ago artistic integrity and being answerable to unscrupulous masters, he's every bit a machine as the sexbots, leads to a surprisingly redemptive coda. My only gripe with the film is the CGI bloodshed, I just don't think the technology is quite there yet to accurately replicate flowing liquid, resulting in spurting blood having an awkward animated look. Low budget filmmaking's current favouring of this seems doubly baffling given that a bottle of old fashioned stage blood isn't exactly the price of caviar these days. Still as this is hardly a gorefest, the violence in the film being limited to only a few brief seconds, this is only a slight irritation, and these sexy but deadly dolls are well worth a look. The amount of female nudity in the film indicating that along with recent efforts like Graphic Designs, Dirty Work and Darker Shades of Summer, low-budget British filmmaking has got it's sexploitation groove back. Elsewhere Kieran Chalker brings some sweary, geezer gangster energy to Psycho Sex Dolls, as you might expect from someone who has been in a few Rise of the Footsoldier movies, and Simon Weir gives a debauched tour-de-force as a character who seems to be equal parts Ben Dover and Charlie Endell (esquire). As far as recent movies about sexbots go, Psycho Sex Dolls is more ambitious than Gerard Daly's V1200 (2019) and sexier than Louisa Warren's Cyberbride (2019). On a personal note, I was somewhat amused that Damien Self opted to give one of the sexbots a Manchester accent, as a Mancunian I'd never considered our accent to be particularly sexy, we should be flattered... I guess.
