Who Killed Nancy?

Now Showing

In Cinemas 06/02/09

Director: Alan G Parker

Stars: Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen

Year: 2009 Running Time: 90 mins Rating:

Certificate TBC

Released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Sid Vicious' death, punk historian Alan G. Parker's film disinters events surrounding the New York death of Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of The Sex Pistols bassist. Aged just 20, the hooker and heroin addict was found slumped in a hotel bathroom with stab wounds in 1978. The tabloids declared Vicious - who would later die of a heroin overdose - the killer, but Parker and a clot of punk survivors tell a different story. They also provide a tragi-comic oral history of punk's highs and lows in the fag-end of the 1970s.

Review

As sure as night follows day, give the world a violent celebrity death and the world will give you conspiracy theories.

The most interesting aspect of Alan G. Parker's documentary account of Sid Vicious' final few months is not who killed Nancy.

That he doesn't solve the murder is not surprising - we might have heard something by now. And the man accused here, via a pencil sketch and the name "Michael", is actually a different person to someone fingered in one of Parker's previous books - proving how lucrative the punk messiah's early demise remains.

Who Killed Nancy? is most engrossing when it settles into a comfortable VH1 Behind the Music groove, complete with artsy animation and low-budget recreations.

Amassing a colourful collection of punk veterans, from musicians to journalists to groupies, it paints a vivid portrait of Sid's short life, mostly in shades of snot and puke.

Neither Sid or Nancy emerge smelling any fresher than when they were alive and wallowing in smack addiction, and certainly aren't the doomed Romeo and Juliet of Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy.

But while Vicious is still regarded as a diety by some groupies interviewed, Nancy, a drug dealing hooker by all accounts, is presented as punk's Lady Macbeth. That ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock's flatmate recalls him garrotting a cat, or others remark on him "playfully" jabbing a knife into Nancy does tend to suggest Sid lived up to his stage surname though.

The infamous Chelsea Hotel, where Nancy met her end, comes to life as Dante's Hell on Earth, where bottom feeders of all stripes congregated, plus Sid's mum, a free-spirit who kindly scored heroin for her lad.

But, even if he hadn't died in 1979, what Vicious lacked in talent he made up for in excess, meaning it's still unlikely he would have be present at 1996's Sex Pistols reunion.

As one acquaintance recalls in a grisly, amusing anecdote about an earlier near fatal overdose:

"Sid was still in a semi-coma, but at least his circulation had returned."