A decidedly tedious, profoundly unfunny comedy-crime-fantasy set in some nightmarish version of a British metropolis (essentially a sound stage with murky lighting) where nearly everyone is high on something, be it super-skunk or a highly addictive, crack-like substance called Red Devil.
Writer-director Savvas D Michael (Smoking Guns) prods the plot forward at gunpoint as we follow three converging storylines. In one, Hugo (Ian Reddington), an ageing cannabis farmer-dealer in a flappy-eared hat, entertains an assortment of customers, none of whom seem especially interested in hanging out with him and listening to his appalling taste in music and sharing the obligatory spliff after purchase. His only hanger-on is Gabriel (Matt Lapinskas), a sneering millennial who, judging by the black-feathered bolero he wears, apparently raided the costume box of a low-rent production of Swan Lake before he bought a handgun.
Meanwhile, married couple Oscar (Jack Turner) and Ella (Fernanda Diniz) are on a murderous rampage through the city, killing Red Devil dealers. They are so turned on by their vigilante antics they sometimes have sex in the middle of an assassination. Finally, Red addict Riley (Jamie Crew) snivels a lot while desperately searching for a fix, the shortage created by Oscar and Ella’s antics.
The banal and ludicrous, sub-early-Tarantino dialogue at least sounds vaguely like the kind of stoned nonsense people drone at each other when they are high, but that doesn’t make this any more entertaining to watch. The sprinkling of casually amoral violence and mild misogyny are just the CBD gummies on the rancid cake of stupid that is this waste of hard-drive memory.
• Red Devil is released in the UK on 15 November.
