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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
Film packs a nasty punch
By Robert Mendick, Evening Standard 16.07.08
Provocative: Jaime Winstone with her co-star Julian Morris in Donkey Punch, left, and her sister Lois
Murdered: British student Meredith Kercher
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A British thriller with terrifying parallels with the brutal murder of the London student Meredith Kercher is set to spark controversy when it goes on general release this week.
Donkey Punch had its London premiere last night amid concerns over the depiction of an apocryphal, dangerous sex act which lends the film its title. At least one movie reviewer has noticed a chilling resemblance to the death of Ms Kercher, 21, from Croydon, who was found semi-naked and with her throat cut in her bedroom in Perugia where she was studying Italian.
The opening of Donkey Punch on Friday - just a few days after Italian prosecutors requested that three suspects including the victim's American flatmate Amanda Knox be charged with her murder - is likely to cause upset.
Police suspect Ms Kercher died in an exceptionally violent attack after a sex game - in which she refused to take part - went wrong. Ms Kercher was murdered just two months after arriving in Italy as part of her year abroad studying for a degree from Leeds University.
In Donkey Punch, three northern English girls are invited on to a yacht, moored off Majorca, by four "posh boys" who then proceed to take copious amounts of drugs and engage in group sex, which they film. But during the orgy, one of the women is punched in the back of the neck - the so-called Donkey Punch of the title - and dies, prompting yet more carnage. The film, directed by Olly Blackburn-and starring Jaime Winstone, the 23-year-old daughter of Ray Winstone, cost just £1m to make but is likely to earn millions more at the box office. Filmed largely on location in South Africa, It also stars relative newcomers Robert Boulter, Sian Breckin, Tom Burke and Nichola Burley.
Ms Winstone has already been forced in publicity interviews to defend the orgy scene and the ensuing violence while in an interview in today's Standard, Blackburn declares: "It is meant to be a provocative film, to deal with things you wouldn't talk about at a dinner party."
He suggests he was first told of the term Donkey Punch by his co-writer David Bloom but when they investigated they discovered it was an "urban myth". But Blackburn adds: "Everything in the film is rooted in reality... We just took the stuff that's out there and made it into a movie."
The film has received mixed reviews to date, receiving applause at the Sundance Film Festival, for independent movies, when it was first screened but branded "comprehensively charmless... with its witless sex and gore playing flatter than a bent trombone" by one tabloid critic.
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