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★★
Directed by: Marc Coleman
Starring: Jonathan Cobb, Paul Aitchison, Reis Daniel and John Campling
Short Film Review by: Annie Vincent
What happens when filmmakers review the issue of fly-tipping and sit about concocting ideas about what would stop fly-tippers in their tracks? The Flytipper happens! And what starts well with the promise of some decent gags, quickly becomes the queerest slasher plot you’ve ever imagined.
The plot starts organically enough with Greg’s first day in a new job not going particularly well. He’s had a row with his girlfriend and his new colleagues are unsettling to say the least: Nelson seems obsessed with genitalia, including his own which has a new adornment, and whilst Dale outwardly seems fairly straight-forward, he is recovering from a divorce, cited because of an interesting stag-do liaison. Greg doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with his new colleagues, or the fly-tipping they’re engaging in, but when Old Bill arrives with a warning about ‘it’ coming after them if they fly-tip, his nerves kick up a notch. Bill encourages them to leave immediately and especially before dark, but true to form, the van won’t start and their phones are dead. What fills the remaining ten minutes of film is each character’s encounter with a monster, constructed from fly-tipped white goods, on a mission to destroy each one of them.
At this point, many a viewer may question the creative process and what exactly brought about the light-bulb moment of a fly-tipping-inspired-villain; because The Flytipper started so well. The gags and one-liners were genuinely amusing and the characterisation was good. Nelson, played by Reis Daniel, absolutely captured the caricature numpty-work colleague and even Old Bill, the mad Grandad in his yellow overcoat and shorts, was likeable in that familiar stock-character way. So it seems sad that it developed into the not-so-funny robot horror of the end.
Though the film stuck to type in many ways and, as such, a few viewers might find the oddity of the film’s premise amusing, it seems that wit was sacrificed for farce which is a great shame.
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