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They don't win Baftas, they're bought at Asda, and they usually star Nick Moran. Yet low-budget action flicks have saved our film industry
British producer Jonathan Sothcott makes no bones about the kind of films he releases. “I collect one-star reviews from The Guardian like a badge of honour,” he says. “It’s the polar opposite of my audience. If I get a one-star review in The Guardian, it’s like a five-star review from anyone else.”
Forty-year-old Sothcott is a prolific purveyor of low-budget, straight-to-DVD crime and gangster flicks – a genre which Sothcott himself dubs “geezer films”. Among them are the Danny Dyer-starring Vendetta, Fall of the Essex Boys, and We Still Kill the Old Way (“A taxi driver’s favourite movie,” he says).
The low-budget British crime film is perhaps the last bastion of lad culture – an unashamed indulgence of swearing, violence, and girls. Though sneered at by critics, and walloped with one and two-star reviews, there is, for some films fans, an enduring appeal to the British gangster B-movie. The geezers do have an audience.
It’s often overlooked that a chunk of action from the British film industry plays out on the supermarket DVD shelves. These films – packed with hooligans, foul-mouthed wide-boys, and veteran C-listers – are made for the small screen.
“When you go to the cinema you want bang for your buck,” says Sothcott. “When you spend that kind of money, you want to see Robert Downey Jr and Iron Man. You don’t want to see something that you know is going to be five quid in Asda next week. We make McDonalds, other people make fillet steak.”
It’s not to be sniffed at. The home entertainment market grew by 26 per cent under the pandemic in 2020 – to a whopping £3.3 billion.
Under his Shogun Films banner, Sothcott’s latest is Nemesis, a gangland-home invasion story, starring crime genre stalwart Billy Murray, Nick Moran and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott. “The people who like these movies will respond to it very well,” says Sothcott about Nemesis. “It’s very easy to underestimate the audience. It’s a very loyal audience but an audience that absolutely knows what it likes. They can sniff out the s––– ones from the good ones.”
That goes for...