STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Manchester, 1990. Dylan (Jack O' Connoll) and Matt (Henry Lloyd Hughes) are two scallywags who get by nicking fruit machines from pubs, until they spot a marketing opportunity in the shape of the emerging acid house/rave culture that is springing up in towns and cities across the UK, with hordes of disenfranchised, disaffected young folk breaking into abandoned warehouses to get off their faces and dance the night away, only for the authorities to clamp down on them. Dylan and Matt propose the biggest rave yet, and enlist the help of a top DJ to help see them over. However, it's not long before drugs arrive on the scene and the criminal element involved plunge the lads into a new and dangerous world that threatens to destroy everything they've worked to build.

Ever since it arrived over from Ibiza in the late 80s, rave culture has played it's inimitable part in the music, fashion and style of a certain generation of young people, and what it went to lead on to was arguably it's greatest achievement. Weekender attempts to be a story based around this phenomenon and is squarely aimed at the audience the film is depicting. At the beginning it starts out as sort of style over substance, opening with the start of what promises to be a funky, lively soundtrack featuring just the sort of tunes that made that period in musical history so memorable.

The soundtrack remains the best asset of the film, but it's worth sticking with the story, because although it retains it's sense of being frenetic and sort of jumbled and incoherent, it does develop into a more engaging portrayal of two lads living in a very recent time, caught up in an emerging world with unexpected dangers cropping up in it. The manner of the film is in line with it's style, with it's sped up shots and blurry camera moments giving it it's added authenticity.

Performances wise, O' Connoll is convincing in another notch to his resume, while Hughes, best known as the bully in The Inbetweeners, is pretty decent support. Emily Barclay and Zawe Ashton are the chicks on display, and they make their mark on the film.

The problem with Karl Golden's film is it sometimes (most disasterously at the beginning) gets lost in it's own style and doesn't have an engaging story to follow. But it still comes off as a fairly decent thriller, inspiringly set against the back drop a lot of people young back then can remember. ***

It's 1990. The rave scene has arrived, and warehouse parties are exploding across the UK bringing wealth to the organisers.

Matt and Dylan long to be more than just punters. As the government moves to outlaw the scene, it's now or never and they quickly rise through the ranks to join the promoting elite.

They are taken on a journey from the VIP rooms of London to parties in Ibiza, and the hedonism of Amsterdam.

But as their success continues to grow, they attract a dark and sinister world. Matt and Dylan start to drift apart as they are forced to question the dreams they set out to achieve and their once solid friendship......

Again, nostalgia is the order of the day here to enable the viewer to enjoy the film that little bit more, because, as with all these films, the story, and narrative has been done a dozen times before.

Lads start to make it big in the rave scene, get noticed by some bad lads, and then get too involved, and then it's too late. As always, one goes over the top, and then the other decides to go straight, because he has a girlfriend.

We've seen it before, and before you can say 'injected with a poison' one owes lots of money to the character who is constantly angry for no reason.

But it all ends as you'd expect, the cast are great, especially O'Connell, and it's well paced.

It's just a shame that the makers didn't do more research into 1990, as some of the music wasn't released until much later (Ken Doh: I Need A Lover, wasn't release until 1995),and makes you roll your eyes a little.

But worth seeing.

Charming little bit of early 90's nostalgia that deserves far more than the 3 out of 10 currently being offered up by IMDb users.

I can only assume that the people giving this film low ratings were not the people who were partying in the early 90's - if they were they'd be rating it far higher just from the nostalgia perspective.

Great soundtrack that pretty much corresponded chronologically (except for Kendo Nagasaki which was a much later track, but hey its a great track so who's complaining!!).

No where near as dark as Trainspotting and less schmaltzy than Human Traffic this is well worth a watch if you are looking for a trip down memory lane or if you fancy an glimpse of how it was.