The Winter Warrior

There's a tendency for some people to give 1/10 to almost anything they dislike, just as there is a tendency for every film's IMDb board to have an inevitable 'Worst Film Ever!' thread. Sadly, that kind of over-reaction rather tends to dilute the very, very few films that truly do not merit even a single star or, in this case, deserve negative stars. But be warned that this film is quite possibly worse than you can imagine. When I saw this at its marketplace screening at Cannes in 2002, it emptied the theatre in less than five minutes. They were the lucky ones...

There's a germ of a good idea somewhere in this no-budget, technically shoddy disaster (shot on film it looks like it was made on a home video camera), but the utterly hopeless director Robbie Moffatt certainly couldn't find it even if it was signposted. It's fair to say that the result is one of the most inept efforts ever to escape onto DVD: if you were to hire a camcorder for the afternoon from Dixons in Edinburgh, cast the first few people you meet on Prince's Street and then go down to the local park and film for two hours with the lens cap on you'd probably come up with something better. With the honourable exception of Victoria Pritchard, the cast are incompetent and some scenes are utterly incomprehensible - exactly how one character dies a horribly agonising offscreen death climbing a small hillock is a mystery for the ages thanks to a combination of irrelevant camera-work, insane editing (with no reaction shots to cut to it simply intercuts shots of characters who aren't even in the scene) and terrible acting. Unwatchably bad - and that's putting it mildly.