Beating Schrader’s Hardcore to the punch by a matter of months, Robin Spry’s grim and gritty gutter-level drama is driven by a not-dissimilar premise, that of a man searching the seedy urban underbelly for his drug-addicted prostitute daughter. Rather astonishing that it was made for TV – the remarkably bleak opening indicates that no punches are going to be pulled, as we first see Peter Brennan (Don Francks), before the credits have even finished rolling, nodding out in a grimy cafe toilet, the needle still sticking out of his arm. This is followed by howling hospital cold turkey, as a borderline sadistic cop plays Peter a slide show of a drug-addicted girl forced into sex work, before revealing that said girl is Peter’s own daughter. We then get to see said slide show again in harrowing close-up, while Peter wails ever louder. So, once recovered, and with regular...
- 4/2/2015
- by Tom Newth
- SoundOnSight
TORONTO -- Veteran Canadian filmmaker and producer Robin Spry died Monday in a car crash in Montreal. Spry, 65, was best known for running Montreal-based Telescene Film Group as CEO and president during the 1980s and 1990s. Before that, he worked at the National Film Board for 14 years, where he shot the acclaimed 1974 film Action: The October Crisis of 1970, a documentary account of Quebec FLQ terrorists kidnapping a British diplomat and murdering a Quebec cabinet minister. Eventually, Spry moved into more commercially driven fare at Telescene. His TV credits included such syndicated series as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Student Bodies and The Hunger, and the 1995 miniseries Hiroshima.
- 3/30/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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