Dalston weirdo Tony Benson is the host with the most. Come and relax in his bachelor pad after a hard day mooching, trying to score smack. Been to the local gay trance night at the “Joiner’s Arms”? Carry on the party back at geeky Tony’s. He’ll pay for your drugs, cook you up some beans on toast, offer you a beer or better yet a squash (made weak), and dazzle you with his second hand array of action movies, all on hi-tech VHS.
Just be prepared to be suffocated, hammered, or throttled with a kettle cable if you take advantage of his well-intentioned hospitality.
Tony is a serial killer who craves a little T.L.C., which is pretty hard to come by if you look like a cross between Oswald Mosley and Gary Oldman’s Zorg from the “Fifth Element.” His Stonehenge teeth and grubby white school shirt don’t help matters, and his straight-armed walk and glasses single him out as a “nonce” in the minds of the people on his estate. Still, Peter Ferdinando’s disconnected killer (Tony has been unemployed for 20 years) is easily the most sympathetic character on view in Gerald Johnson’s low-key but assured debut, “Tony.”
What does it say about modern British society when we feel sorry for a serial killer? Tony’s victims are all sleazebags in their own way: an aggressive junkie, a predatory Essex boy and a cocksure television licence inspector. Do these people they really deserve to die, though?
Watching their squalid demise, should we ask ourselves why we hate them so much? What have they really done to irritate us so badly that we want this pathetic beast to butcher them and dump them in blue carrier bags, the kind mad people fling into trees from tower blocks?
Johnson deftly uses cult East End comedian Ricky Grover as a macho lunch searching for his missing son, little Davey, Tennant’s Super in hand. Grover’s terrifying bulk and unhinged verbal assaults mark him as the alpha psycho on the estate, a physical threat that is too brutal for even Tony to handle. His bullyboy tactics get Tony thrown out of his local boozer, and the expression on his face as his carrier bags are slung out after him will make you want to cry. This is no mean feat considering what might be in those bags.
The comparisons with “Taxi Driver” and “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” are inevitable but “Tony” is quintessentially British. There is a reason your parents told you to avoid London arcades and certain Soho back alleys and Tony, bless him, is it. David Higgs’ creepy cinematography and a sinister soundtrack totally immerses the audience in Tony’s scummy world, one of endless traipsing from one sh*t hole to another and back again, quoting lines from “First Blood.”
“If you lose it here, you’re in a world of sh*t,” Tony says, aping Jesse Ventura in “Predator.” The killer rainforest of that movie has nothing on the abject poverty of Dalston, and a killer far more invisible than any alien.