THE YOUNG POISONER’S HANDBOOK

Rip It Up, Issue 224, 1 April 1996, Page 40

THE YOUNG POISONER’S HANDBOOK

Director: Benjamin Ross

Loosely based on a grisly case of the early 60s involving a teenage lad with a Crippen bent, Benjamin Ross’s first film opens breathlessly and stylishly. It’s 1961 and we’re in a North London suburb, with a well-scrubbed family sitting around the telly watching a deathless variety show. All except young Graham, that is, who’s elsewhere, poring over his chemistry set. Trauma follows trauma. In one sitting-room confrontation, it’s revealed that Sister Winnie (the marvellous Charlotte Coleman) uses... depilatory cream; in another, Graham gets unjustly accused of hoarding girlie magazines... these scenes show Handbooks its best — catching the batty, repressed hysteria of those times. Graham ends up in a mental hospital and (later) finds employment in a photographic laboratory, and Ross’s film becomes rather more laboured. Pretentious even, as Graham pursues his alchemical ambitions to make diamonds from antimony. When his late stepmum makes a surprise appearance in the toilet bowl, Ross achieves a minor frisson, but the director throws it all away with a particularly feeble chunder joke, which wouldn’t even make the semi-finals in a Les Pattinson Award. The best? Without a doubt that tasty moment in Robert Altman’s Brewster McLeod, when Shelley Duvall gives Bud Cort a passionate open-mouth kiss immediately after losing her lunch.

WILLIAM DART