Chopper, a gruesomely funny entrant for the Edinburgh film festival, was last night condemned for glamorising a self-confessed "murdering bastard" who claims to have "wiped out" 19 other criminals "for the good of society".
The low-budget black comedy, based on the nine books the hitman Mark Brandon "the Chopper" Read wrote while in prison in Australia, has taken the film world by surprise, knocking the Mel Gibson blockbuster The Patriot off the top of the box office down under this week despite being dropped by its distributors at the last minute. It is the first adults-only film to have performed so well there.
Chopper Read earned his grisly nickname through the "free pedicures" he administered as a gangland enforcer, slicing off his rivals' toes with a bolt cutter. His notoriety grew while he was in Pentridge prison near Melbourne for attempting to kidnap a judge, where he cut off both his ears with a razor blade as a fashion statement, a trend copied by other hardcore convicts.
But it was his infamous drunken appearance on the McFeast Live TV show when he groped host Lisbeth Gorr and joked about stuffing a victim in a cement mixer ("It took us hours to get him into it, the bastard. He kept climbing out"), that caused widespread revulsion. The series was later pulled and ABC had to issue a public apology.
The film, which Rupert Murdoch's Fox corporation dropped last week, has caused most anger in Tasmania where Read, 45, served his last sentence for shooting a friend, and to where he has now "retired".
The state's cabinet secretary and minister for women, Fran Bladel, yesterday repeated her claim that there was no value in making a film to further glorify a "very sad and dysfunctional person", who had profited from gross violent acts and achieved celebrity by joking about victims on TV. "This film will certainly convey the message that to be cruel and vindictive and to beat women pushes you to hero status with a certain class of people," she said.
Read himself, though happy with his portrayal by stand-up comedian Eric Bana, said he was angry that "while every other bastard is making money out of me I've got nothing". He insists he will donate the £9,000 he got for the film rights to a police benevolent fund.
The film has been a big hit with critics both in Australia and at Edinburgh, where it had a sneak preview yesterday.
Chopper Read comes over in the film as a deluded but personable psychopath who thinks of himself as "a normal bloke who likes a bit of torture," another Australian convict anti-hero in the Ned Kelly mode. But what makes the film both frightening and funny, and which had the audience in Edinburgh yesterday shouting its praises, was how it inhabits the mind of a clearly psychotic criminal like no other movie made before.
The festival's director, Lizzie Francke, said she had no compunction about showing it and said getting its European premiere had been a coup. "We had long and complicated negotiations to get it."
Critic Dougal MacDonald, of the Canberra Times, praised the writer/director Andrew Dominik, who he said had walked a thin line making it clear that Read was "a man devoid of moral worth".
Its British distributors, Metrodome, make no bones about selling it on its mixture of violence and black comedy, a kind of real life antipodean Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
