Tony (Peter Ferdinando) is a total inadequate. He wanders the seedier streets of London trying to make some sort of contact with the peculiars he finds, asks a prostitute what she can do for him for £5 and, when back in his drab council-estate flat, sits with a cup of tea watching old videos of violent action movies.

It’s only some way through Gerard Johnson’s short debut feature that you realise Tony is a serial killer. We see him disposing of the cut-up bodies of his prey down the sink which, apart from being messy, makes an awful smell.

The film is too funny to be compared with Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, and it never labours the violence. If it is shock we feel, it is because Tony is such a misfit, hopelessly unable to make any mark upon life except through killing.

This grim slice of life is very well shot by David Higgs, and directed by Johnson in an almost deadpan style that makes little comment on the action. Johnson pursues his oddball story as if annotating some sort of dreamscape. He films with a baleful shrug and a slight and perhaps twisted smile.

No one could possibly regard Tony as without flaws. It is often rough and ready — but it is
most certainly the product of a real and very promising film-maker, inhabiting a convincingly original world of its own.