Honest, the hugely hyped gangster flick with which the girl band All Saints hoped to launch their film careers, has bombed at the box office.
The £4.2m film, directed by pop singer Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame, flopped spectacularly when it opened over the weekend, averaging barely £500 at each of the 220 cinemas where it was screened.
Despite a glitzy premiere at the Cannes festival and a publicity blitz which made great play of its drug and orgy scenes, only five people turned up at one Saturday evening screening in Leicester Square.
Honest's abysmal showing is all the worse considering it opened over a bank holiday, when audiences are usually at their peak. Even Rancid Aluminium, widely regarded as the worst of a whole flock of recent British movie turkeys, took £50,000 more on its first weekend from 80 fewer screens. The equally risible Guest House Paradiso, starring Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, made six times as much.
Last night as Honest was being pulled from cinemas across the country, its distributors, Pathe, refused to blame its failure on the 18 certificate imposed by censors. "Obviously we are very disappointed," a spokesman said.
However, industry analysts said Stewart's refusal to cut the "infrequent strong sex and drug use, and occasional strong violence" detailed by the British Board of Film Classification meant it was inevitable the bulk of its target teenage audience would be barred from going.
Mary Scott, of the industry magazine Screen International, said the film's performance was "pretty shocking. The 18 certificate obviously hasn't helped when you think of all their schoolgirl fans, but even so it should have done much better. They have shot themselves in the foot. The first weekend is crucial for every film: if you don't perform well then, that's usually that."
Stewart, who in his film-making manifestation likes to be known as Dave A Stewart, blamed the press for bumping the censor into imposing the 18 certificate. "The censors were so paranoid because of the sex and drugs. They write anything they want. [The press say] I'm a mental patient, who has a nudist colony in the south of France, and that I teach hairless dogs to speak."
He also complained at Cannes that he had never been taken seriously in Britain. "There is an assumption that you shouldn't make a film if you are a pop musician. It's nice to be in this country [France] where they are interested in writing about the film rather than my hairless dog farm or [his star] Natalie Appleton's breasts."
Although the caper - which features three members of the band playing East End girl robbers against a backdrop of London's swinging sixties - was dismissed by the Observer as "witless, soulless and inert", though most critics agreed it was not as awful as the Spice Girls vehicle Spiceworld.
Spiceworld took in £11.5m. Honest will be lucky to recoup £1m.
Ironically, Melanie Blatt, one of the three band members in Honest, complained at the premiere that modern youngsters were too apathetic.
"I would love to be part of a rebellion about something. Kids today are too spoiled. They have everything they want and nothing to rebel about. They are happy to play video games," she said.
While the £111,309 Honest took in its first weekend was enough to give it 12th spot in the box office charts this week, takings are likely to drop like a stone next week when it will be shown on many fewer screens. Its takings were a drop in the ocean compared to the £3m which the chart-topping Gladiator made over the same period.
