FrightFest review – The Arbiter
Writer-director Marc Price is known for the low-budget zombie film Colin and science fiction movie Dune Drifter, but this gangland-after-dark thriller is more in the style of his underrated London action film Nightshooters – the one in which the makers of a low-budget zombie action film run into a gang of serious crims on a night shoot.
This epic-length film has a knowing reference to Streets of Fire, presumably because The Warriors would be too on-the-nose, and is set in an unnamed city (pretty obviously London) where turf wars between gangs are all but tolerated by the police so long as guns aren’t involved and property damage is minimal. One masked gang of loons – the Nightcrawlers – has become so dominant that other factions need to make a truce to prevent them taking over, which involves Verril the Arbiter (Craig Russell), who can be trusted to broker a deal between gang leaders who normally want to kill each other. Verril gathers faction representatives – arsonist Guy (Alastair Kirton), ice cream tycoon Terry (Georgina Leonidas), rollerblader Rusty (Jasmine Sumner), parkour/kung fu expert Stuart (Jon Xue Zhang) and paranoid techie Henry (Michael Geary) – in a near-abandoned, much-boobytrapped building, with a representative of the police (Ekow Quartey) along for good measure so they can talk it out.
Price stretches the budget by getting colourful types into a large empty space for a marathin bickering-and-bitching session – some of which is smart and funny, some of which goes on and on – but eventually betrayals, explosions, excessive plot developments and the need for regular fight scenes takes over. The large cast features a lot of folk putting their all into it – Quartey, Leonidas and Sumner are especially good, while James Groom is a hoot as mad ‘Police Chief Sargent’.
Like all Price’s films, this riffs on American genre tropes with a very specific British sense of humour – a sudden outbreak of discussion about hole-in-the-heart kids during a climactic face-off, the reveal that hard-bastard nicknames have run out and most of the Nightcrawlers go by unthreatening real names like ‘Christopher’, and the fearsome gang boss who just wants to quit the violence and get back to selling ice cream.
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