Boy Meets Girl

Director: Ray Brady
Starring: Tim Poole, Danielle Sanderson, Margo Steinberg
Production Budget: under US$100,000
Running Time: 93 min

Boy meets girl, girl drugs boy, girl tortures boy - repeatedly, for 80 minutes. That's about it.

"Sadism: a sexual perversion in which gratification is obtained by the infliction of physical or mental pain on others" - Merrian Webster Online.

This was banned for 8 years in Britain, yet has no sex, no nudity, and very little blood. Ray Brady has admitted that he set out to make a censor baiting film. He researched the main reasons movies had been banned in the previous few years, then added those elements together to create this movie. It seems the censors weren't especially worried by the obvious things above, it was sustained sadism that got them hot under the collar, and Boy Meets Girl has this in spades (or, in rhyming slang, Marquis de Sades*). Sadism, depravity, torture, microwaved hands... it's all there. When the main character is tied to a dentists chair in his underwear for 9/10ths of the movie, you can be sure this is not going to be a romantic comedy.

Boy Meets Girl is remarkably similar to 2006's Hard Candy. In fact, in many ways they are almost identical. A man is drugged, then tied up, and a battle of wills ensues with his captor. The main difference is the motivation of the female character. In Hard Candy, the girl is motivated by revenge against paedophiles, while in Boy Meets Girl, the motivation is pretty much non-existent. She's just a cruel, cruel person.

Oddly, about 20 minutes in, the female character (Steinberg) is rather inexplicably replaced with a completely different woman (Sanderson). It turns out that part way through filming, Brady decided that Steinberg wasn't working out, and replaced her, and rather than re-film the start, he worked this into the script. It's a bit awkward, but understandable given that he was just starting film school and had a very limited budget to work with.

This is an ultra low budget, psychological thriller, with convincing performances. It's uncomfortable to watch, but you will enjoy this if you take pleasure in watching other people take pleasure in the pain of others (which I guess would make you a metasadist). That doesn't make you a bad person, mind.

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*Marquis de Sade, sadism, spades, get it?