“You’re way ‘ard, dad!”

Brit revenger Bull is the proper cheap, strong stuff

What if I told you there was a long-running exploitation movie scene alive and well in the U.K.? A direct to video nirvana of cheap thrills, low budgets, slumming stars and violent action that in terms of sheer output is the nearest these isles have had to the Italian crime movie boom of the 1970s? What if I then told you that nearly all of the films that came out of this scene starred Craig Fairbrass? Well, you-who-calls-yourself-an-exploitation-fan, that’s likely where you reverse the car, because I think you know the kind of thing I’m talking about…

Essex Boys, The Guvnors, We Still Kill The Old Way, Rise Of The Footsoldier, Rise Of The Footsoldier 2,  Rise Of The Footsoldier 3: The Pat Tate Story, Going Off Big Time, The Intent, The Intent 2: The Come Up, Smoking Guns aka A Punters Prayer, Piggy, Charlie, Bonded By Blood, Bonded By Blood 2: Essex boys The New Generation…

I’m not talking about the British crime flicks that came out in the immediate aftermath of Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. The sort directed by Nick Love and starring Danny Dyer; comparatively highbrow efforts such as 2005’s Costa Del Sol-set The Business. Or even stuff like Green Street, in which Frodo Baggins smashes a bloke’s head through the window of a telephone booth (although I will talk about Green Street at some point, because, wow, that is a film worth talking about). No, I’m talking the bottom of the BritCrime barrel. The DVD’s with three-and-a-half-star ratings from Nuts magazine that you used to see in those little baskets in garages. A weird cinematic netherworld with its own directors, a dedicated audience, and a regular cast of rotating players, including former Eastenders cast members, slumming Shakespearians and occasional walk on parts for Dave Courtney. And there is so fucking much of it. A never ending cavalcade of baseball bat beatings, TK Maxx-sourced casuals, pub fights, deals gone down the swanny, tarts in fake furs, geezers in balaclavas and EVERYBODY FACKING YELLING IN COCKNEY FACKING ACCENTS.

This is not an area where serious cineastes tend to venture. Even the most dedicated of exploitation mavens rarely set foot in the area some call ‘Ladsploitation’ (but which we’re going to call ‘Blokesploitation’, because ‘Blokesploitation’ is funnier). But why not? To go back to my Italian comparison, is it not perfectly reasonable to think that amongst the sheer amount of films released that fit the criteria there might be a Colt 38 Special Squad? A Violent City, The Big Boss or Caliber 9? Might there be an auteur of the strength of Fernando Di Leo amongst the jobbing directors throwing jabs in the mouldy boxing ring of Blokesploitation? And what kind of low-rent film fan are you if you’re not investigating this cinematic netherworld on your own dime?* It’s all very well enjoying the scurrilous cinematic chaff of yesteryear, but if you’re not following that line through to the present day, are you doing anything more radical than pointing at flares and sideburns? What if there’s a Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning in amongst all that digitally shot crime dross? A film that gives an opportunity for an ambitious director to take the cliches of the genre and turn them on their head with a borderline psychedelic masterpiece that completely rearranges what you thought you knew about Cockney bastards and the birds that love them?

Although not quite of a piece with the titles mentioned above, Paul Andrew William’s 2021 movie Bull is close to what I imagine that mythical film would be. A hyper-lurid revenge drama with a mean streak as wide as the M25 and an eye for the minutiae of low-rent criminal lives, Bull excels due to its poetic eye for its Kent locale and a commitment to a particularly sordid brand of nastiness that recalls the sting of ‘70s British thrillers like Douglas Hickox’s underseen Sitting Target. And it’s also really weird.

Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before: a hard man mysteriously returns back to his old stomping ground and begins taking bloody revenge on the former criminal colleagues that screwed him over a decade ago. It’s Get Carter, it’s Dead Man’s Shoes, it’s any number of crime films made in the last century of crime films and there would be no reason to pay it any attention at all, if it weren’t for the myriad eccentric touches that are dotted throughout it like knots in a strangler’s rope.

Firstly, the titular hard man is played by Neil Maskell, a stalwart of the Blokesploitation underground, although probably best known to the heads as the lead of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. Maskell brings a similar sense of perpetually churning aggression to his portrayal of Bull, but it’s heightened to a borderline absurd degree. There’s a shot of him glowering while riding a dodgem that would be hilarious if it wasn’t for the crackling aura of violence that Maskell brings to the game. He's backed by a murderer’s row of Brit talent, all of whom know exactly how seriously to take the material, including David Hayman, who you’ve seen in everything from Sid And Nancy to Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, and Tamzin Outhwaite, who U.K. readers will remember as Mel from Eastenders (told you!), but who also appears to have been in a film with Wesley Snipes, which is just mind blowing.

It's handsomely put together. Williams has a definite eye for the depressed edges of little England. The run down playgrounds, former scout huts and semi-detached bungalows of suburban Kent, amongst which Bull moves like a pissed off ghost. There’s just enough style and flash – cribbed in part from higher brow go-getters like Tarantino and Nicholas Refn – to lend weight to the drab stuccoed purgatory the characters call home. The details of low-rent criminal lives are nicely sketched out. That the men Bull is picking off wear high-vis jackets for their day jobs hints at a whole realm of under-the-table dealings that a less subtle touch would miss; the knock-off casuals they sport giving clues as to just how low down the pecking order of organised crime these luckless bastards are.

And make no mistake, they are bastards. David Hayman’s Norm, their leader, is the kind of scumbag who hides his psychopathy behind an extremely thin veneer of family-first pragmatism. His needless murder of Bull’s mum repulses even his useless henchmen, who sheepishly go along with his miserable schemes before Bull rips through them like wet paper bags. What should feel like cathartic justice is given all the romance of a cow getting bolt gunned in the skull. These men are animals, driven by a desire for little more than spare change, and Bull, powered by vengeance, is the toughest animal of them all. The angriest bastard in the barn.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, because Bull has a whole bunch of weird tricks up its sleeve. When Bull knifes a man on a fairground waltzer, having convinced the bloke running it to “spin it like you’re trying to kill us” it’s a hilarious deconstruction of something that every bored teenager in every depressed town across the U.K. has done. But it’s Maskell’s whooping delight as he’s spun into a murderous psychedelic nirvana that sticks with you. His passion oddly infectious and childlike in a way that makes the giggling viewer unhealthily complicit. A drug dealer who Bull ends up lopping a limb off is one of the strangest examples of that stock-type I’ve ever come across. A protein shake glugging loser who boasts of playing five aside football against children because it means he can score more goals and get a better cardio workout. The film is full of such bizarre little touches - Bull glowering from the bushes outside his mum’s house, Bull killing a man with his bum – which lend much needed recklessness to what could have been a draggy crime saga, as well  as indicating a director with just enough tongue in his cheek.

And then there’s the final twist, which without giving too much away shoves the film into a different genre bracket altogether. Mileage may vary – judging by the comments online it was enough to sour some viewers on the whole experience – but personally speaking, I love it. It’s ridiculous, but it’s also bold, luridly realised and ties the proceeding events together in a way that keeps the film thematically on the rails while moving it away from Get Carter and closer to John Constantine. It over explains itself a bit – perhaps indicative of a director worried he’d gone too far – but Bull wouldn’t be the reprehensible hoot it is without it.

Look, Bull isn’t perfect. It’s confusingly plotted, with a muddy sound mix that’s probably intended to heighten the mystery, but instead frustrates, and its treatment of female characters is sadly of a piece with the scummy 1970s efforts that presage it. The script could probably have done with another polish, and there are moments where its mix of cheap thrills and brooding self-importance feel uncomfortable next to each other, but it’s that rarest of things: a contemporary British exploitation film that matches its predecessors lump for bloody lump. Bull is real deal Britpulp. And that ain’t no shit.  

*I’m not saying for a moment that I’m the man for the job, but It’s something to think about. That being said, if anyone has any recommendations then I’ll check them out.