Watching Steve Martin's film is like having your teeth pulled one by one. Almost as bad, much of it consists of watching other people having theirs pulled.
Mr Martin, a swish California dentist who gets sexually high with Helena Bonham Carter's bird'snest-haired floozie who vamps him for his prescription drugs, actually pulls his own teeth at the end. Imagine a close-up of Mr Martin baring his bloody gums: I'd sooner take my chance with Dracula. Then he pulls the teeth of a corpse in the dentist's chair and inserts his own set of snappers in one of those fagged-out identity-switch scams. Please don't press me to explain further: I'll just spit and rinse.
This is the most incompetent mess submitted for review this year. Why a person of Martin's distinction, sensibility and artistic taste got himself involved in such
a crass disaster is beyond me. These days, it's rare to see even a beginner's film looking bad. But everything about this one is spectacularly awful.
To read its debutant director David Atkins's CV is a more numbing experience than even novocaine could induce: he cites Kubrick, Tati, Hitchcock and David Lynch as influences. Under anaesthetic, maybe. His dreadful film skids from gross-out comedy (slipping a fibre-optic camera into a guy's trouser crotch) to blood-drenched melodrama (scissors through the palm of someone's hand) before piling up into total narrative chaos.
Unlike another home-grown catastrophe, Killing Me Softly, it's not just bad enough to be perversely enjoyable: it's simply bad, bad, bad. Unbelievably bad.
Novocaine
Cert: cert15
