Suburban Mayhem

In some respects, this was quite an ambitious film – it's dark, smart, and edgy – a little bit in the vein of Brick (not as polished but a whole lot better). The music and energy are all there, but there seems to be a few flat spots. It may have benefited from some further editing to keep the momentum up, even though it's already just under 90 minutes in length. It seems like the writer and director had some good ideas, that weren't fully realised.

I think many cinema-goers will find this entertaining, and I certainly recommend it over the bulk of Hollywood releases (not that that's saying much), if that's your taste. For me it seemed laboured and contrived. The performances by the actors were generally (but not universally) OK. Emily Barclay's performance was good, but her character failed to engage – somewhat like Kath and Kim on speed. It's not that her character was nasty (David Wenham's monumental performance in The Boys was extremely nasty), but more that it seemed manufactured. Her brattishness becomes grating after a while.

The mid-film interviews reminded me of 2:37. They were better done in this film, but still detract somewhat from the continuity of the film.

The script seemed a bit clunky and self-conscious and just didn't quite work for me. I think the director depended too much on the sound-track and style over substance. A strength of the film is that it took some risks, but they weren't fully realised.

Suburban Mayhem is a sturdy-ish drama/black comedy-with-very-little-comedy about the exploits of brash young sociopath and single mum Katrina. She lives in the 'burbs and her beloved brother is in jail for decapitating someone(!), yet Kat blames her dad's fumbly efforts during the court proceedings for her brother's incarceration - and also for the swooping of social services upon her kid - and starts scheming to have dad murdered.

This is a very well performed film, especially by Emily Barclay as Kat, and it's craftily directed for the most part, but unfortunately in the end the parts don't add up to create much overall effect. There's little suspense and very few surprises along the way to embellish the fatalistic plot. The device of framing the story with news interviews from after the events sometimes has the effect of delaying our access to the inner lives of the characters, especially Kat. I had the feeling we were about twenty minutes into the film before we started to experience anything from her point of view.

Perhaps what struck me the most is the gulf between the way the film's being promoted - as a lively, maybe even wacky, black comedy - and what it actually is; a black and steady portrait of a sociopath. Certainly there are funny moments, but this is by no means a funny film. Kat is a hugely impressive creation, completely unyielding in her unreasonableness and constantly manipulating those around her through her dumb psychopathy in such a way that the line between apparent calculation and banal self-centredness is hard to distinguish. Any film which builds itself around such a relentlessly appalling character is a brave film, but this just isn't a very entertaining film overall.

Even if you're as open to being bathed in dysfunction as I am, it's hard to stay interested in the character when Suburban Mayhem's trajectory feels so static, seeming to move towards quietness and bleakness at the end rather than any kind of intensity. As for those who demand likable characters, well, they're all going to recoil from this film anyway. Folks expecting a lot more fun are going to be justifiably disappointed, and I blame the film's advertising for this. Take a look at the poster for starters! Instantly it was one of my favourite film posters of all time when I saw it, but it simply isn't representative of the material.

I'll be interested to see if this film manages to take off, or if word of mouth is going to subdue it. It's been compared (pretty vaguely) to Chopper, and Chopper became a cult hit in spite of its own great bleakness, but I don't think Chopper was ever promoted as being something it wasn't.

Few films will have you come away feeling as sick as I did from Suburban Mayhem, a putrid and quite vile film about despicable people doing despicable things to one another for the sake of daft entertainment. The film is bad, in that depressing and sickening manner that certain 'bad' films are. This is no guilty pleasure and this certainly isn't a study of anything remotely interesting despite the clear intentions it has. What else can you say about a film that brutally murders off the one, decent character whom tries to help others and then resorts to having its lead characters conform to horrific acts of animal cruelty for good measure?

The film centers on a female youth named Katrina (Barclay) and like the hurricane of her namesake, this little monster whirls bucket loads of chaos as she whirls around the general area causing havoc. Katrina has achieved what little ambition she has very early on in the film: her face on newspapers and her figure on television – it's a celebrity status through horrific acts that someone like Charles Manson might know all about but the thing that's more agitating is its obvious reek of Natural Born Killers and how Suburban Mayhem uses the distorted television perspective complete with 'the guilty' speaking into a camera in a mock interview set up – isn't that a clicé yet? If not, why not – I hate the convention and I hate how it makes people that do it feel clever because it 'breaks the fourth wall' and that's so 'out there' when it comes to mainstream cinema. You're not fooling anyone.

So the film revolves around Katrina and we see her story told to us in flashback format. Now, the term anti-hero is one that springs to mind here but I'm not going to apply it to Katrina because she (as does the film overall) doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the term. An anti-hero is someone who isn't quite on the level of 'good' but knows what they want and we feel a guilty urge to want them to win, even if it clashes with our own moral codes. Here, Katrina has a child, a child that she neglects and ignores in a couple of scenes that are just disturbing in her ruthlessness. Her father, John (Morgan), threatens to have the child taken away unless she sorts out her drug plagued; mischief plagued and crime plagued life. But she cannot have that and enters femme fatale mode to seduce a local nut-case named Kenny (Hayes) into killing her father for her. I don't think anyone in their right minds is going to want Katrina to get away with this.

The film's draw is a question that doubles up as its own hypothesis: "Can you really get away with murder?" thus tempting us to watch to see if someone actually might. Well, unless you're Jack the Ripper in 19th Century, or whenever it was, Britain – no, you can't. The question the writers and co. should've asked one another in a filmic sense is: "Should you really be able to get away with murder?" This is what they fail to spot by the time Katrina is just about home free and documenting to us her story from the confines of the future. If the film is so interested in the quirky delivery of the study of achieving celebrity fame through infamy then Natural Born Killers sets the bar and Van Sant's 'To Die For' is sub-Natural Born Killers; and Scott's 'Domino' is sub-To Die For which means this film is sub-Domino, which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel given how much I hated Domino.

So the 'anti-hero' on this occasion is not someone who will force us into questioning our own moral codes as much as she will force us to pray that she dies a slow death not too far into the film's beginning. The drug taking; threatening innocents at home; baby rejecting disaster that is Katrina struts about and moves into seducing Kenny for her own dirty work; we are not amused and we are not enthralled and we cannot believe what we're seeing. These days, the idea of becoming an overnight success for young people is, arguably, at its peak what with the extensive reality TV shows and so forth. I only pray this film be seen by as few as these young people as possible because in the end, the film is a glorification of a young girl who has attained celebrity status through things like pregnancy and getting caught up in a murder plot and what-not. What alarms me is that, here in Britain, the film was classed as a '15' certificate meaning most any teenager can access it.

I felt dirty when I watched Suburban Mayhem. The film is misjudged in its overall delivery and presentation of its ideas; a fun, fast and frenetic series of scenes that revolve around trench-coat wearing hermits being told to kill people on the promise of an easy lay from someone we're supposed to be gunning for. If you want a more mature look at working class life in Australia, as made by the Australians, I recommend 2005's 'Peaches' but Suburban Mayhem is a messy and childish exercise best viewed by as few people as possible.

Spoiled suburban girl Katrina turns into a femme fatale monster after her brother goes to prison in this Aussie portrait of a middle class crime wave. The box copy promises more in the way of sex and violence than this picture ultimately delivers, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The picture cuts back and forth from tell-all interviews to girl-gone-bad flashbacks and the effect, rather surprisingly, is not as jarring as it might be, as the cutaways were well-timed, and the overall pacing was quite slick. A low budget is in evidence, but the creators manage to combine a darkly comic tone with a believable situation and credible characters to create effective drama. Not great by any means but better than many similar films.

A darkly comic tale of desperation in the land of discount bourbon and Holden versus Ford. I'm somewhat at a loss to understand the negative reaction in some of the comments posted; understanding the foibles and peculiarities of Australian suburbia is important to seeing the film in its correct context. Emily Barclay sinks her teeth into Katrina with such enthusiasm that as she careens across the landscape with baby in tow over gullible men, naive women, impotent police and her well-meaning father we're tempted more than once to suspend the moral judgement we should be making and simply sit back to enjoy the ride. Questions are asked of the audience as much as of the film's characters, making us uneasy and showing Katrina's real power to manipulate. How much does the need for excitement in our lives stop us from making decisions about what is right or wrong? Is Bailee the get-out-of-jail free card that entitles Katrina to salvation as we find that crime sometimes does pay? A fresh, upfront production that along with recent films like "Kenny" and "Footy Legends" lends confidence to the recovery of the Australian movie industry from the ball and chain of film-school textbook orthodoxy.