Dead Man's Shoes Torrent
Tae Damndjperiod
The men encounter Richard while driving in their Citroën 2CV. He tells Sonny he is not scared of any of them, and invites them to come to the farm where he is staying. That evening, while the gang are playing cards, Sonny decides that they should shoot Richard. When Gypsy John goes to the toilet, Richard (having sneaked into the house) kills him with an axe, using the dead man's blood to smear the words "One Down" on the wall.
The next day, Richard arrives in a nearby town where the final gang member, Mark, lives with his wife and two sons. He talks with the children's mother and asks her to let her husband know that he is Richard, Anthony's brother. When Mark returns home, she explains the conversation to her husband. He tells her how the gang abused Anthony. The abuse culminated with them pretending to hang him at a local ruined castle whilst he was high on acid. The gang then ran off, and Anthony hanged himself. It then becomes clear that Richard has been alone the whole time and talking to a vision of his dead brother.
Nathan Edward Bledsoe, of the Bowery Bledsoes, a man once, a specter now. One of those myriad modern-day ghosts that haunt the reeking nights of the city in search of a flop, a handout, a glass of forgetfulness. Nate doesn't know it but his search is about to end, because those shiny new shoes are going to carry him right into the capital of the Twilight Zone.
A homeless man, Nate Bledsoe, snatches a pair of shoes from Dane, the target of a mob hit dumped in an alley. Two of his homeless associates try to con him out of the plainly expensive shoes, to no avail. Wearing the shoes infuses him with the personality and memories of the victim, and he continues his life as Dane.
But what he loved was to fish and hunt and camp and work in his small shop attached to their modest house, both heated by wood-burning stoves. And then colon cancer struck, struck like lightening from the blue serene. And then, a month after the diagnosis, he was dead, an unfulfilled but now permanent outdoorsman, a townsman of a stiller town, as one poet put it.
But now, not much more than a month later, the widow who opines that her dead ex-husband should have been a conservation officer or a park ranger is selling all the artifacts and markers that might make a man infer that he actually was.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.
Shane Meadows' raw revenge flick should be called Sympathy For The Bogeyman, because the director dusts off the invincible-killer-picks-off-teens routine and tells it from the bogeyman's point of view. The result is a thoughtful, possibly controversial, horror that offers none of the easy comforts typical of the genre these victims are far from innocent, but do they deserve to die?
A bum, Nate Bledsoe, snatches a pair of nifty shoes from the target of a mob hit dumped in an alley, and receives a dose of personality. The shoes infuse him with the personality of the victim, and so he decides to pick up where he left off. He stops by the home of the victim's girlfriend, who does not know the face, but recognizes the manner and kiss. He then goes to a bar to deliver a message to Dagget, the boss who had him killed. Dagget is at first unsettled, but gets the drop on Nate and Nate is gunned down. Before he dies, the spirit vows to return until he finishes Dagget off. The body (with shoes) is dumped in the same place the original victim was dumped, and another bum finds the corpse and steals the shoes. As the episode ends, a look of determination slowly appears on his face.
In Dead Man's Shoes, Shane Meadows delivers an uncompromising blunt instrument of a revenge thriller. A film in which Richard (Paddy Considine) returns to the scene of a terrible event and without undue emotion applies his deadly trade on those responsible.
There was Paps on the corner
Well, He wearing his shoes
He died in the lot
Too much rhythm and booze
They came to meet their maker
That showed up last night
Now they're in the window
what a frightening sight