Fifteen minutes of notoriety

Kate Mikhail
Thursday 04 May 1995 23:02 BST
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There's little, in fact nothing, to laugh at in Boom Boom (9.45pm C4) so don't be misled by the title. This is 1990s realism at its grimmest, and whoever said every cloud had a silver lining didn't know what they were talking about.

Boom Boom - a 15-minute shortie - is the first film to be screened in this year's Lloyds Bank Film Challenge for young scriptwriters and directors and its author, 23-year-old Chris Main, clearly believes in throwing his viewers in at the deep end - we are the flies on the seedy wall, catching a slice of someone else's life - a winning formula given that voyeurism seems to be a national pastime.

And if you ever needed confirmation that today's youth are a pretty disillusioned lot you need look no further. This is a bleak but attention-grabbing tale of a sad, has-been comic face-to-face with lager-lout animalism, cruelty and rape. Five minutes in the life of this character and you've seen it all - life is ugly and there's no getting away from it. In fact, if you've ever seen a cat playing with a half-dead mouse - torturing its victim with incessant jabs and slaps - then you'll know what this anti-hero is going through. It's all push, push, push.

But everyone is said to have that invisible line where tolerance reaches saturation point, and which, when crossed, unleashes the fury within. So, watch out, this fly bites back.

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