Smells Like a Gun Crazy Carry On

Director: Jim Groom
Main Cast: Paul Herzberg, Portia Booroff, Frank Scantori, Norman Mitchell, Brian Murphy

After 11 years in the making and countless production problems, Jim Groom’s love letter to classic film noir finally gets delivered.  Of course, there are problems with it; the dubbing can grate, some of the external scenes expose technical issues and the acting is patchy, but these are merely limitations of an extremely low-budget.  Despite these constraints, Room 36 is still a delicious slice of hard boiled thriller, and one that refuses to simply ape American movies, adding in wry British farce and rough London grit to deliver a cine-literate pastiche of genre conventions.

DVD Release Date: 25th January 2010

The plot of Room 36 sounds like something out of Blame it on the Bellboy – in a seedy Paddington hotel, a randy salesman waits for a prostitute and, in the next room, a hitman waits for a contact.  An accident changes room 38 to read 36 so does hilarity ensue?  Not quite, murder and mayhem follow instead.  Welcome to director Jim Groom’s off-kilter homage to old crime movies, a sort of retro-fitted world where errors and mistaken identity lead, much like a Coen Brothers movie (think Fargo), down a dark, bloody road.

The hitman is simply known as Conner (Herzberg), supposedly at the hotel to exchange money for a piece of microfilm supplied by a government insider – Miss Woods (Booroff).  It’s never clear exactly what the microfilm contains, although it has something to do with the election of the next Prime Minister, so in true Hitchcockian style it is merely an object various parties desire.  But Conner is also there to dispose of Miss Woods herself, something she realises when she discovers the dead prostitute stuffed under his bed.

Though the film is shot in stark black & white the characters themselves are varying shades of grey.  Like all good noirs there’re no heroes or villains, just those out for themselves.  While Herzberg looks the chiselled Bogart type he plays Conner as a mumbling, brutish thug, a stone-cold killer who you certainly don’t want to meet down a London back alley.  By contrast, Miss Woods is quick-witted but still hampered by greed, right up until the bloody finale where no-one gets away clean.

Groom has fun with the supporting cast – an array of letches and tarts that are the twisted cousins of the Carry On world and Scantori especially excels as the morose salesman with a lingerie fetish.  Most of them get some sort of comeuppance as Groom’s cat and mouse between Conner and Miss Woods within the confines of the hotel gets more and more violent.

The film is most confident when inside the rooms themselves.  The crew built two rooms and a corridor so Groom made the most of the sets by shooting from all sorts of angles to create a sense of desperate claustrophobia.  Outside things are a bit more shaky.  A pub brawl isn’t a visceral as it should be given the other more ‘intimate’ acts of violence and other scenes seem expositional and rushed.

It’s clear that Room 36 has been a labour of love for Groom and his crew.  Over a decade in the making and with very little money it was always going to be a challenge to get a genre movie like this made in the UK, but here it is, a testament to independent filmmaking and proof that anything is possible.  There are moments where cracks appear – the Sin City influenced use of red to highlight blood and one whole scene is bizarrely in full colour – but Room 36 is still an exciting piece of work.  Rarely is a film so stripped-down but still has tension you can chew on.

Country of Origin: UK
Running Time: 89 mins
Certificate: 15