REVIEW COMING SOON
Release Date: 18th April 2008 (DVD Premiere)
Director: Kit Ryan (Dementamania)
Cast: Stephen Dorff, Jaime Murray, Jamie Foreman, Geoff Bell, Hugh O’Conor, Bronogh Gallagher, Russell Smith, Edward Baker-Duly and Sean Pertwee
Writer: Eamon & Raymond Friel, Derek Boyle
Trailer: BOTCHED
WHAT HAVE I SEEN THAT ACTOR IN BEFORE?
- Stephen Dorff: Officer Down, Zaytoun, A Glimpse Inside The Mind Of Charles Swan III, The Iceman, Rites Of Passage, Brake, Immortals, Somewhere, Public Enemies, Felon, World Trade Center, Alone In The Dark, Cold Creek Manor, Featdotcom, Zoolander, Cecil B. Demented, Blade, City Of Industry, Space Truckers, Blood and Wine, I Shot Andy Warhol, Innocent Lies, SFW, Backbeat, Judgment Night, The Power Of One
- Jaime Murray: Hustle (TV), Dexter (TV)
- Jamie Foreman: The Hooligan Factory, Eastenders (TV), Dead End (2013), St George’s Day, The Grind, Screwed (2011), Ironclad, Baseline, Oliver Twist (2005), Layer Cake, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, The Football Factory, Goodbye Charlie Bright, Gangster No.1, Elizabeth I, This Year’s Love, Nil By Mouth
- Geoff Bell: Comedown, Comes a Bright Day, Storage 24, The Reeds, War Horse, Brighton Rock (2011), Big Fat Gypsy Gangster, Route Irish, Solomon Kane, Mercenaries, Just For The Record, Wild Target (2010), Freebird, Love Me Still, Tormented, Green Street, The Business, Mean Machine
- Hugh O’Conor: The Stag, Reuniting The Rubins, Killing Bono, Deathwatch, Chocolat, Hotel Splendide, The Boy From Mercury, The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, The Three Musketeers (1994), My Left Foot
- Bronagh Gallagher: The Food Guide To Love, Grabbers, Albert Nobbs, Malice In Wonderland, The Big I Am, Last Chance Harvey, This Year’s Love, Pulp Fiction, The Commitments
- Russell Smith: Mad About Mambo
- Edward Duly-Baker: Grange Hill (TV)
- Sean Pertwee: Alan Partridge – Alpha Papa, The Seasoning House, Jo (TV), The Magnificent Eleven, UFO (2013), St. George’s Day, Wild Bill (2012), Four, 4-3-2-1, Devil’s Playground, Dangerous Parking, Just For The Record, Doomsday, Mutant Chronicles, Goal II, Goal, Equilibrium, Dog Soldiers, The 51st State, Soldier, Love Honour & Obey, Cold Feet (TV), Event Horizon, Blue Juice, I.D, Shopping, Dirty Weekend, Leon The Pig Farmer
Review by Joe “Don’t call me Ewok” Pesci II below
RISE OF THE ZOMBIE HOOLIGAN FILMS 
BOTCHED – review by Matt Usher aka Joe Pesci II
Please see BOTCHED before reading this, then read this, then you’ll know whether to watch it or not. I see that there’s a flaw there but I know what I mean and it makes perfect sense.
BOTCHED is an odd film. BOTCHED is a film unlike any other I have yet reviewed. BOTCHED is bad, but also strangely brilliant, and well named.
To say it is wildly uneven is something of an understatement. We start off in the same sort of territory as the TV series HUSTLE, everything shiny and not quite as French as it’s pretending to be. Stephen Dorff is a professional thief (speciality: diamonds and other jewel-type stuff). The first job appears to be a success, but the film, and the characters, take a sudden poodle-related lurch round a corner (because all dogs in France are poodles) and before we know it there’s Sean Pertwee with (I hope) a comedy Russian accent and threatening Dorff with death. At this point we seem to be heading for typical bad British gangster movie land – surely Terry Stone is round the corner with his Russian accent? No, but here comes Jamie Foreman with his comedy Russian accent as some sort of thug to help our hero in his bid to steal a bejewelled ancient Russian cross from some sort of Kremlin style office block.
The film takes an even more peculiar turn when we don’t see the second heist take place. This seemed a little curious. What is this film playing at? Clearly it is some sort of heist based comedy thriller, but why the heist allergy? Things become a little clearer as Dorff and Foreman find themselves in a lift with Hugh O’Conor, Bronagh Gallagher, the mighty Geoff Bell and Jaime Murray, all sporting comedy Russian accents. Obviously it’s going to be a hostage thriller. Yes, the lift has got stuck and it’ll be some sort of character based escape from the lift movie. Oh, they’ve got out of the lift, but they’re trapped on a disused level of the huge office block. Ah! It’s a siege movie! Of course. But then a dispensable member of the cast is dispensed with in a quite peculiar way (he is unexpectedly beheaded – this isn’t a spoiler as a glance at the DVD’s front cover shows the aftermath of this event).
So there we are – it’s a comedy horror. At least we know that now. Fortunately nobody told Stephen Dorff that this was a comedy. This was a good decision as he plays it dead straight, frequently attempting the intensity of Kiefer Sutherland in 24 mode. Unfortunately somebody did tell Jamie Foreman that it was a comedy and he gurns and over-articulates his way through; the film improves vastly when he is away from the screen. Meanwhile the supporting players seem to be taking on lives of their own: Geoff Bell reveals himself to be an ex-army self-proclaimed alpha male who teams up with meek hospital radio journalist Hugh O’Conor (who needs subtlety of character when such broad strokes do the job?) (By the same token, character names include Dmitri, Anna, Boris and Yuri). And here’s Bronagh Gallagher leading an intriguing coven of religious nutters (who seem to have been inspired by Jeunet and Caro). Poor Jaime Murray gets saddled with a less-than-meets-the-eye role, but at least she contributes a comedy Russian accent to match the best of them. And here’s a descendant of Ivan the Terrible dressed as a medieval knight, scything his way merrily through the cast. Of course. Yes, why didn’t I spot that one coming?
After that the film ploughs a comic and gory course through to its inevitable conclusion. It is deeply silly, and I can’t quite work out whether it is the work of one crazed individual or a result of a committee of creators who just couldn’t agree on anything. Either way it works significantly better than it had any right to (after all it is very easy, and very tempting, to give up on the film for most of its first twenty minutes or so). The body count is high and there are a lot of body parts flying about with gay abandon; the dialogue is stupid (‘Dmitri, where are your trousers?’ ‘Where I left them’); there is little that is plausible, and nothing that is scary. The acting is variable: Dorff is committed in true Hollywood leading man style, O’Conor quivers in comedy librarian mode, Murray is statuesque (in two senses of that word). Gallagher is agreeably intense but Bell enjoys himself a bit too much. Meanwhile, the tone is all over the place, and the plot is more than a tad unlikely. How BOTCHED got made I will never know. It’s a similar sort of film to GRABBERS but is made with greater confidence, and a lot more ideas. (Not necessarily good ideas, but it keeps throwing them up hoping some will stick.) I have no idea who they thought would pay to sit through this, nor do I believe it is some sort of slumbering classic waiting to be rediscovered.
And yet, for all that, it is inventive, funny, sometimes clever, but above all a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of wealth, religious fanaticism and the power of family, cast in an interesting light given Russia’s vacillations between being a feudal, communist and capitalist society. (I worked that out all on my own. Proper newspaper reviews just think it’s a stupid and not very good horror, but they’re wrong, there’s a deep vein of serious thought underpinning the philosophy of the film-makers, just you mark my words.) And it has that rare quality: unpredictability (unless you read this review before seeing it obviously). But mostly it’s a cheerful, sly, dumb film which knows that people falling over is funny, that dropping heavy things on people is funny (particularly filing cabinets), and that getting chopped up into little bits is funny. And there’s a comedy rat; what more can one ask for?