Newly released on DVD, this 1995 feature is a droll and surreal story of a marked man with a spectacular port-wine birthmark—"stain" isn't the word; it's more as if someone had doused him with an entire bottle of Sandeman's. Rejected at the gay discos, lonely Harry (John Hannah) flees to a remote coast to be seen no more by man. Beachcombing after a storm, Harry finds some human flotsam: Flint (the affable but devilish Bernard Hill, best known as the poisoned King Theoden in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers). He is a sort of tattooed merman, found buried up to his neck in the sand. Chris Newby's tale of the courtship could have used a little more narrative tension, but it's a very peculiar love story, one that has enough weight to keep from evaporating. Newby, whose handsome, strange Anchoress played at the 1994 Cinequest, here demonstrates a sensibility you'd love to see more of.(Richard von Busack)

Send a letter to the editor about this story.