Dir. Brett Leonard, 2005, Australia, 109 mins
Cast: Patrick Thompson, Alex O’Loughlin, Gabby Millgate
Review by Mike Bartlett
Perhaps you’d best let your dinner go down before you read this review any further because, if nothing else, Brett Leonard’s new film is the most unpalatable of the week. It concerns an Australian detective who combs the internet for signs of underground criminal activity and comes up trumps when he hacks into the site of a “feeder”. These guys team up with willing female victims, or “gainers”, and stuff them with food until they’re monstrously oversized, either for their own sexual satisfaction or for that of thousands of paying voyeurs. And this isn’t a conceit dreamed up by a nasty scriptwriter either – apparently, there are some 4,000 sites devoted to this jolly little pastime.
No, the filmmakers can’t be accused of thinking up this scenario, but they are certainly guilty of wallowing in it. Every opportunity is taken to leer over excruciating force-feeding sessions or the fat suit worn by poor actress Gabby Millgate. More attention is paid to the levels of sweat and goo on her chest than to the paper-thin characterisation and the increasingly cliched plot, as it is revealed that the hunted man is – you guessed it – a serial killer. Leonard has said this is his “comment on America”, by which I presume he means its contemporary culture of over-consumption. Oh, dream on. The truth is, his film is the very epitome of that culture – aggressively courting the teenage demographic with attractive items like yet more violence, yet more sex, yet more opportunities to exclaim, “Oh, gross!” Like the world it purports to criticise, it’s interested in feeding you a surfeit of trash that looks inviting but just leaves you feeling ill. It’s the McDonalds of the movies – and it’s not coincidental that Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me is a much better riff on its themes.
If only it was “sick” – I wouldn’t mind that. “Sick” is a term often given to movies that are consciously using the strategies of exploitation to create subversive critiques of our society - see John Waters, David Cronenberg, even Russ Meyer. But Leonard wouldn’t recognise “sick” if it was served up to him on a plate. And let’s not even go near the film’s sexual politics – where women are crazy lust victims of whatever their violent partners want to try next – or the painfully obvious Sydney locations standing in for American suburbia. The fact is, the only dish on offer here is a four-letter word.
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