Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (DVD)

Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (DVD) ... September, 2003 at Ilc Prime / Features of the DVD: PAL / Christie Malry's Own Double Entry is the revenge fantasy of a resentful, humiliated, somewhat simple office wage-slave who undergoes an epiphany in the unlikely surroundings of a lecture on accountancy. Malry, superbly depicted by Nick Moran as a sort of English Timothy McVeigh, decides to allocate a monetary value to every single act of, as he puts it, "casualness, indifference and mass carelessness" that besets him, and to exact appropriate recompense. As the debt grows, so do Malry's retributions, from disfiguring the paintwork of a Rolls-Royce to poisoning a substantial percentage of London. Based on the novel by B.S. Johnson, the film is funny and clever, making inventive use of flashbacks, and the echoes of broadly similar fables, like Taxi Driver and Falling Down, are never loud enough to be distracting. An overall atmosphere of tensing malevolence is abetted by a terrific soundtrack of original songs by Auteurs and Black Box Recorder songwriter Luke Haines. The only duff notes the film strikes are the initially engaging but eventually utterly baffling excursions to the Renaissance court of an Italian prince. Aside from this one over-ambitious conceit, this is a fine and mystifyingly under-rated film. On the DVD: Christie Malry's Own Double Entry includes only the original theatrical trailer as a special feature. It is all too easy to imagine that an advertisement for a product you've already paid for is exactly the kind of thing that Christie Malry would have entered in the "Debit" side of his ledger. --Andrew Muller