Nancy Nancy

I hired this out on a whim last week. Can Timothy Spanos please make more movies.

You just have no idea where this film is about to take you. My first thoughts was that this was absolute rubbish, but before you know it you are transfixed and immersed into the characters and the situations. Filmed in an almost claustrophobic style, all in the confines of one house, Nancy Nancy, has witty and surprisingly quite intelligent dialogue and some very tongue in cheek performances, most notably from Tim Burns and Polly Stanton.

This is probably the most hysterical and clever Australian film in a long time, and one you can watch with your friends over and over.

Nancy Nancy is a cult classic. I was fortunate enough to see at a screening in New York recently when a friend forced me to come after seeing the trailer. The plot of the film revolves around a cracked gender bender called Nancy Nancy, who commits a home invasion in an Australian coastal town and keeps a nerdy couple hostage. This film is on the cutting edge of outrageous humor and satire, the delivery of sharp well written dialog is exemplary. A Tour De Force performance from Tim Burns in the title role, who not only repulses you, but possess' the power to have you in hysterical laughter one minute and in tears of sorrow the next. Burns seems almost possessed in the character, and you begin to forget that he is actually a male. Nancy Nancy has no scruples, is sexually promiscuous, foul mouthed, completely acts on impulse, but is also sad and vulnerable and world weary. You cannot help but begin to fall in love with her as the story progresses. The darkly comic and almost claustrophobic nature of the film both tastefully and tastelessly investigates the sense of belonging and acceptance, lonesomeness, motherhood and the family unit. Director Timothy Spanos has meshed together a hilarious romp that operates on many levels. There are so many classic lines in the film that not only resonate and stings, I wish I could remember them. Many I missed because the audience were laughing so loudly and hardly. The songs written by the director and co star Matt Thomas are catchy. The interaction between Nancy Nancy and her captives in the final scene alone are worth the purchase of a DVD.

That a film this monumentally bad could exist is some sort of miracle. I consider it the great nihilist catastrophe of our time. I have seen bad films, but none so aggressively anti-audience, anti-life, anti-joy and anti-human as this one.

Willfully torturous in its lazy aesthetic, amazingly badly written, mind- bogglingly poorly acted, staggeringly incompetent in the way it was shot, edited and directed, this film stands as a marker, a line in the sand, on one side resides life and the possibility of human grace, on the other, "Nancy Nancy".

The nadir of cinema. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.