The Young Poisoner's Handbook

1995

Action / Comedy / Crime / Drama

3
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 87% · 15 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 84% · 1K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.0/10 10 3868 3.9K

Plot summary

Graham Young is a teenage misfit living in suburban London in the 1960s. He hates his stepmother but loves chemistry, and the two impulses unite in a wicked plot to slowly poison her. After she dies, he's found guilty and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where an idealistic doctor thinks he can be cured.


Uploaded by: FREEMAN
October 24, 2023 at 08:00 AM

Director

Top cast

Jack Deam as Mick
Simon Kunz as John
Ruth Sheen as Molly
720p.WEB
914.87 MB
898*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
30 fps
1 hr 39 min
Seeds 7

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by heywood100 6 / 10

Runs like Clockwork...

...A Clockwork Orange to be precise. Which is something of a bafflement, as besides the occasional coincidental similarity the basic story ears no relation or resemblance to the Stanley Kubrick film or the Anthony Burgess novel. And they don't try to shy away from the fact that they've ripped off the film - they even use the same piece of music at certain times.

So, inspired by the nadsat talk of the original and far superior film, the story is; Your Humble Narrator is only interesovatted in one lesson at the skolliwoll - Chemistry. He uses his knowledge to slowly poison his poor old pee and em but gets found out by the millecents and sent to Staja. There, he sucks up to the psychologist and gets an early release for being so horrorshow with the old chemicals. But once out, he begins poisoning the grahzny vonny malchicks and ptitsas at his firm, until they also figure out what he's up to and send him away again, O my brothers.

And if you understood that you're a better man (or woman) than most. The film has identical shots and similar scenes to Kubrick's film, but has none of the originality or daring subject matter of it. As A Clockwork Orange was still banned when this film was released, I can only assume they thought no-one would remember what it was like and would let this pass. It makes absolutely no sense, but it has created a talking point that the film otherwise wouldn't have, since essentially this is nothing more than another average British movie.

Reviewed by / 10

Reviewed by Nyssa 8 / 10

A funny, witty, and creepy glimpse inside genius gone horribly wrong.

Director Benjamin Ross has done a terrific job creating a humorously warped view of life through the eyes of Graham Young, alienated boy genius and serial poisoner. Hugh O'Conor perfectly portrays Graham's carefully studied innocent appearance, which Graham constantly feigns lest anyone find out what he is really thinking in his twisted, calculating mind. O'Conor manages the tricky job of looking innocent enough to fool the other characters, but maniacal enough that the audience always knows what is going on.

Through Graham's eccentric (to say the least) point-of-view, we witness the painfully mundane Young family, the pitifully easy to fool psychiatric and medical community, and the pathetically simple-minded middle-class. Ross captures the comic disdain with which Graham sees his surroundings without disposing of the distance necessary to be horrified at Graham's "experiments" and the fate of his unwitting subjects.

Because of Ross' careful tightrope walking between distance from and intimacy with Graham, the audience can't fully fall under Graham's spell and sympathize completely with him. There are some gruesome scenes of people reacting to poison, but these are necessary to heighten the audience's horror at Graham's incapability to assess his own actions and to recognize his own evil. Ross gives us an entertaining, yet twisted, glimpse into genius gone wrong, without sensationalizing Graham as a hero.

It is also very hard to go out for drinks or coffee after seeing this movie.

Read more IMDb reviews

3 Comments

Be the first to leave a comment