Clark's alarm call rings true

I shall have to eat my words. Well, my words about Kids, Larry Clark's first feature and a patently exploitative piece of prurience posing as an "alarm call" to parents. His new film rings the genuine bell. Bully is a return to his obsessional theme of lust among the young. But this time it is done with demonstrable seriousness.

It is based on a true crime. Seven middle-class Florida teenagers, aimless, promiscuous and speaking near-intelligible slang to keep their parents at a distance, gang together to murder one of their schoolmates. Bobby is no ordinary victim, though. He is a domineering stud, played by Nick Stahl, whose relationship with girls and his easily led pal Marty (Brad Renfro) is sado-masochistic. All they had to do to deflate this kid's ego was ignore him, walk away. Instead, in keeping with the macho ethic of every video game they play or film they view, they resolve to murder.

The slaying is horrific, but as much for the thoughtless, casual ruthlessness of the assailants as its actual mechanics. "Is he dead yet?" someone cowering in the car asks, as the rest stab, bludgeon, eviscerate and chuck Bobby in the alligator canal. "Gettin' there," is the reply.

Despite this terrible sequence, it is a film with more flesh than blood in it. Clark's camera flits like a restless, lascivious fly over the intertwined but often exhausted nude bodies of kids zonked out of their minds by pot and promiscuity. I doubt if anyone seeing it would ever recommend so-called "recreational" drugs be legalised. It is a rebuke to all the irresponsible "reformers", in or out of uniform, in our own community.

In Clark's film, such drugs are clearly inflammatory functions of behaviour that the generation gap has already separated from parental control. "What are you kids doing?" parents ask from time to time, and take the reply "nothing" with uninterest.

When one frightened girl, a participant in Bobby's slaughter, asks indirectly about the penalties for murder, her mother says: "Do you mean 'murder' murder?" As if there were any other kind. "I didn't murder him," cries another defensively, "I just killed him. He was fighting back." On these calloused tongues, semantics have lost their ancient meanings.

It is almost unbelievable that the group, splintering into recriminatory factions denouncing one another after the murder, should boast openly of their deed to their peers: but the real-life kids did. All drew lengthy prison terms, or life, and one still awaits the electric chair.

Clark's film is at its starkest in its sidelights on hedonism and the heedless behaviour it generates; on Marty replacing his kid brother's lost ear-stud with his own, as if ritually passing on his set of "values"; and on the disgusted reaction of one of the young killers to the discovery that crabs have already found Bobby's corpse - "Nature sucks!"

Bully
Cert: cert18