Originally made for television, Bloody Kids (aka One Joke Too Many) emerged from an era of gritty, state-of-the-nation British film and TV dramas such as Scum, Meantime and its near-namesake, London Weekend Television's 'Kids', also from 1979.
Stephen Poliakoff's debut screenplay comes furnished with a more esteemed roster than most - director Stephen Frears, producer Barry Hanson (The Naked Civil Servant, The Long Good Friday), cinematographer Chris Menges (Kes, Babylon, The Killing Fields) - and, though thematically typical of the period, departs from the norm with its more experimental approach, imbued with hyper-real stylings which owe more to European art cinema and American noir than kitchen sink verite.
Filmed entirely on location in Essex, Bloody Kids opens on a downbeat tableau - the aftermath of some dreadful traffic accident in the middle of the night, a portent of the foreboding, near-hallucinatory atmosphere the film maintains to the unsettlingly ambiguous finish.
The slender premise springs from the actions of two listless 11-year-old young boys, the cold, manipulative Leo (Thomas) and his weaker, more impressionable friend Mike (Clark). Contemptuous of the fallible police force (Mike has already filched a police helmet from the accident scene), the boys arrange a staged knife fight outside a football stadium with the aid of a bag of stage blood and a real blade.
As Leo orders the less-than-convinced Mike, "You drop the penknife and run. The police will come and question me, and then they'll find out it's all a joke." Won't they be angry, asks Mike? "They haven't got the time," shrugs Leo. Then, chillingly, "We're too young, you see. We can do anything." When Leo is accidentally stabbed for real (the split blood-bags underfoot making a cackling mockery of the situation), Mike legs it, still assuming it's part of the joke, and Leo is taken to hospital.
Though Leo recovers quickly, he becomes seduced by the lies he tells detective Ritchie (O'Connor). "Mike's a bit weird you see, sometimes he talks about killing people... I've seen weird things he's drawn." While on the run Mike is 'adopted' by new-wave-styled reprobate Ken (Gary Holton of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' fame) who, impressed by his little charge's fresh notoriety ("you're going to be quite famous for a brief moment"), takes him on a joyride through town - and it's here where Bloody Kids comes unstuck.
The introduction of the magnetic, gobby Holton fatally unbalances the film, with the London actor dominating every scene he's in. Car-jacking, shop window-smashing Ken is also a conduit for Poliakoff to explore the seamier face of the late 1970s, where entropy is the disorder of the day, teens meander lifelessly in their death discos, and past their sell-by-date punks straggle blankly through the chaos.
Everywhere, everyone is bored beyond belief, ripped from their emotional moorings. Detective Ritchie, too, can barely summon up the effort to spend a few quality moments with his wife (familiar face Geraldine James). The only illumination comes from ghastly neon strobes spearing the night, as surveillance cameras keep a dispassionate, Orwellian watch over all, the sense of voyeurism heightened by the ubiquitous television sets beaming out images of cops and robbers, a banal parallel of the events being played out on the streets for real.
Ideally, Bloody Kids would be scored exclusively by Joy Division - the entirety of 1979's 'Unknown Pleasures' should more than suffice (It would certainly be preferable to the bizarrely inappropriate one by the film's composer George Fenton, which resembles something out of a Django western and was oddly nominated for a BAFTA.) Poliakoff is so concerned to ladle on the nihilism with a black-handled trowel that the boys' central dilemma - actually more troubling and worthy of exploration than this latter-day Bosch vision - soon falls by the wayside.
Nevertheless, the two young leads are excellent, Thomas in particular. Easily the more damaged of the pair (in both senses), Leo's a smart, golden-haired cherub with the chilly, unblinking gaze of a Great White, his casual defacing of his school corridor with a marker pen (indelible, he blithely assures a teacher) being symptomatic of his utter disdain for authority. "You seem to seep into every corner of the school," the teacher tells him, "like the smells from a cafeteria." More uncomfortably, in Leo and Mike we might also see future echoes of two other emotionally damaged boys who, like our juvenile screen pair, were also once picked up on a CCTV camera, leading a trusting toddler through a shopping centre.
Stephen Poliakoff's debut screenplay comes furnished with a more esteemed roster than most - director Stephen Frears, producer Barry Hanson (The Naked Civil Servant, The Long Good Friday), cinematographer Chris Menges (Kes, Babylon, The Killing Fields) - and, though thematically typical of the period, departs from the norm with its more experimental approach, imbued with hyper-real stylings which owe more to European art cinema and American noir than kitchen sink verite.
Filmed entirely on location in Essex, Bloody Kids opens on a downbeat tableau - the aftermath of some dreadful traffic accident in the middle of the night, a portent of the foreboding, near-hallucinatory atmosphere the film maintains to the unsettlingly ambiguous finish.
The slender premise springs from the actions of two listless 11-year-old young boys, the cold, manipulative Leo (Thomas) and his weaker, more impressionable friend Mike (Clark). Contemptuous of the fallible police force (Mike has already filched a police helmet from the accident scene), the boys arrange a staged knife fight outside a football stadium with the aid of a bag of stage blood and a real blade.
As Leo orders the less-than-convinced Mike, "You drop the penknife and run. The police will come and question me, and then they'll find out it's all a joke." Won't they be angry, asks Mike? "They haven't got the time," shrugs Leo. Then, chillingly, "We're too young, you see. We can do anything." When Leo is accidentally stabbed for real (the split blood-bags underfoot making a cackling mockery of the situation), Mike legs it, still assuming it's part of the joke, and Leo is taken to hospital.
Though Leo recovers quickly, he becomes seduced by the lies he tells detective Ritchie (O'Connor). "Mike's a bit weird you see, sometimes he talks about killing people... I've seen weird things he's drawn." While on the run Mike is 'adopted' by new-wave-styled reprobate Ken (Gary Holton of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' fame) who, impressed by his little charge's fresh notoriety ("you're going to be quite famous for a brief moment"), takes him on a joyride through town - and it's here where Bloody Kids comes unstuck.
The introduction of the magnetic, gobby Holton fatally unbalances the film, with the London actor dominating every scene he's in. Car-jacking, shop window-smashing Ken is also a conduit for Poliakoff to explore the seamier face of the late 1970s, where entropy is the disorder of the day, teens meander lifelessly in their death discos, and past their sell-by-date punks straggle blankly through the chaos.
Everywhere, everyone is bored beyond belief, ripped from their emotional moorings. Detective Ritchie, too, can barely summon up the effort to spend a few quality moments with his wife (familiar face Geraldine James). The only illumination comes from ghastly neon strobes spearing the night, as surveillance cameras keep a dispassionate, Orwellian watch over all, the sense of voyeurism heightened by the ubiquitous television sets beaming out images of cops and robbers, a banal parallel of the events being played out on the streets for real.
Ideally, Bloody Kids would be scored exclusively by Joy Division - the entirety of 1979's 'Unknown Pleasures' should more than suffice (It would certainly be preferable to the bizarrely inappropriate one by the film's composer George Fenton, which resembles something out of a Django western and was oddly nominated for a BAFTA.) Poliakoff is so concerned to ladle on the nihilism with a black-handled trowel that the boys' central dilemma - actually more troubling and worthy of exploration than this latter-day Bosch vision - soon falls by the wayside.
Nevertheless, the two young leads are excellent, Thomas in particular. Easily the more damaged of the pair (in both senses), Leo's a smart, golden-haired cherub with the chilly, unblinking gaze of a Great White, his casual defacing of his school corridor with a marker pen (indelible, he blithely assures a teacher) being symptomatic of his utter disdain for authority. "You seem to seep into every corner of the school," the teacher tells him, "like the smells from a cafeteria." More uncomfortably, in Leo and Mike we might also see future echoes of two other emotionally damaged boys who, like our juvenile screen pair, were also once picked up on a CCTV camera, leading a trusting toddler through a shopping centre.