REVIEW: No Blade of Grass

After struggling for a week to find the words for Dungeons and Dragons, this took twenty minutes. Balls.

HEY KIDS, DO YOU WANT TO FEEL REAL SAD? As environmental climate change creates a virus that kills off grass around the world, the England Cities descends into anarchy but when a upper class family find out ahead of time that Martial Law is going to be declared, they promptly scarper for the North while slowly sacrificing every moral principle they claim to have in the process.

The film tries to have it both ways by being a tale of sacrificing morals and a shocking exploitation film, but in doing so, sometimes feels like we’re watching an episode of ‘The Comic Strip Presents…’ which is trying to parody this type of film. Leading every attempt at emotional pathos seems to go on just a few moments too long as if the filmmakers planned to edit themselves in saying ‘Huh? Get It? Get It?’ and just ends up feeling like a mess. There are some good scenes, but they’re lost inbetween everything else.

Would I be saying this if the film didn’t contain an incredibly shocking and lurid scene of sexual assault? Well, I guess we’ll never know, honestly.

That they use it on one of the publicity stills is crass.

Compare to the original Mad Max which is a far better made film with far less experience on all sides of the camera but manages to keep a working emotional throughline as well as fantastic stunt-work or the first season of Terry Nation’s Survivors from 1975 which at least gets the freedom to breath and debate on the morality and fundamental struggles of surviving in a societal collapse which, while it doesn’t always work, never feels like we’re watching a grotesque parody.

Also there’s a side-character in Mad Max who looks like me. 10/10 movie.

-Miles