Deadly Advice [1993]

In the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, famous for many second-hand bookshops and a notable murder trial, the meek and persecuted Jodie [Jane Horrocks] is tyrannised by her terrible mother [Brenda Fricker], tolerated by her livelier sister [Imelda Staunton] and barely touched by her tentative suitor Dr Jonathan Pryce. Troubled by memories of her long-gone father, Jodie is also visited by the spirits of famous murderers, ranging from local wife-killer Edward Woodward through axe woman Billie Whitelaw and Dr Crippen [Hywel Bennett] to an avuncularly vicious Jack the Ripper [Sir John Mills]. The waxwork refugees nag at Jodie, suggesting that she could solve all her problems with the occasional murder. Eventually, as Fricker raves at her, she gives in and embeds an axe in her mother's skull, but as Charlie Chan once remarked 'murder is like potato crisp ... cannot stop at "just one"'.

This attempt at a black comedy would like to be a British Arsenic and Old Lace, but sadly comes nearer to the tone of such duds as Consuming Passions or Killing Dad. While Pryce is reasonably cast as a Welsh weed, it seems extremely eccentric to ask Brenda Fricker to pretend not to be Irish as the monstrous mother [wasn't Nerys Hughes interested?]. Horrocks, contorting her face into various chin-abusing expressions, similarly fumbles the accent and compounds the problem by doing everything she can to fill out her thin character with silly tics. The film seems to want to play its killings for humour, but there's a gruesome mean-spiritedness that chokes off the laughter and, while the guest stars play impeccably, it's hard not to feel that depicting a notorious disemboweller of innocent women as a lovable old coot is stretching bad taste a bit too far.

However, amid the miscalculations and dull stretches, director Mandie Fletcher [best known for Blackadder] throws in a couple of spot-on scenes: the horrors of a 60s night at Hay-on-Wye Young Farmers are captured exactly down to the plastic glasses and pathetic dancing, and there's a similarly horrid hen party which descends from drunken groping of a male stripper in the excitingly sinful city of Bristol to tearful breakdowns in the minibus. At the end, there's a serious explanatory flashback that merely manages to be irritating, and the whole thing never catches that precise balance between callousness and compassion necessary to the comedy of murder.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Empire [issue unknown]

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