Room 36

What the fuck’s going on in this place?’ wonders a murderous bagman, leaving his blood-spattered tip in an absurdly cheap ’n’ nasty Paddington  hotel to find the carnage next door’s even worse. Well may he ask; this likewise cheap ’n’ nasty black comedy-thriller bears scant relation to life as we know it. Inspired purely by movies, it ransacks Hitchcock, ‘Blood Simple’ and so on with the visual panache and performance skills of an Ed Wood chef d’oeuvre and the comic sophistication of a Robin Askwith romp. The script – disregarding the clunky dialogue – has a certain tortuous narrative ingenuity, as politicians, call-girls, hotel staff and the aforementioned heavy get their metaphorical (and literal) knickers in an asphyxiating twist, but that’s slim pickings for a film hoping we’ll find funny a girl being sexually assaulted by an obese middle-aged slob naked save for a corset. (A wholly gratuitous peep-show scene also raises sex-pol questions.) More fruitful, laugh-wise, is the thunderously inappropriate use of orchestral archive music – only the silliest element in an intrusively over-emphatic soundtrack.