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5 hours ago
4
In a beautiful yet sinister village, a mysterious woman with spooky powers shows up to investigate her sister’s death. This perturbs the local business community, who are responsible for the killing, having hired an assassin called Shark to do the deed. He is not called Shark because he can smell blood, but because he can smell fear. He reveals this, then walks off, cackling. It’s that kind of film.
Daggers Inn is muddled, but landmark cinema in certain respects. Finally, the UK has a film to rival the 2003 US indie The Room, which still plays to packed houses, with audiences eternally thrilled by its hilarious creative choices and uneven performances. Daggers Inn is similarly ripe, not in the calculatedly trashy manner of a Sharknado film, but in the sense of amateurs’ original, sincere but almost entirely unsuccessful efforts.
There is a weird fascination to watching it play out, because of various production peculiarities, including several strangely blocked scenes in which actors essay entire dialogue exchanges standing next to one another while looking vaguely in the same direction rather than at each other.
The dialogue veers between an imagining of how, for instance, businesspeople talk, and lines intended as savage zingers. One highlight: “You should take that dried up old vagina of yours and go to work on Stanley over there ’cos I know you’re fucking him.” There is a funny fight to the death during which a character is lightly waltzed into the side of a tree, killing them instantly. This isn’t action-packed, it’s not intriguing as a mystery, and there’s no momentum. One hour in, a character says: “This keeps happening. It needs to end now.” Quite.
