Weekender

Weekender follows a couple of young guys in Manchester in 1990. The pair of them are petty thieves but soon realise that they can make some money if they begin organising their own raves. Everything starts out well but serious problems soon complicate things.

Weekender is a likable snapshot of the early 90's when dance music as we now know it was just emerging from the underground. Many people started going along to raves and got loaded on ecstasy. While the movie follows the usual trajectory of ascent and descent, similar to films such as Human Traffic it doesn't have a 'drugs are bad' message. Instead the villains of the piece are local gangsters who turn up on the scene and start controlling things with force. Weekender does look back on those early 90's times with a certain amount of fondness and there is an effective soundtrack of house music to emphasise the sense of time. The music isn't the usual familiar array of well known dance anthems from the time; it goes for a more specific selection of tunes that ravers would have encountered back in the day.

In fairness there isn't anything overly new in Weekender. Its story doesn't really offer up any surprises at all. However, it's a good little movie about an important time in British music history.

(no pills were popped in the watching of this film)