"MEDIUM RARE"/VERY WELL DONE

For many people, the funniest thing in the cinema for the last year or two has been the Orange Wednesday ads. How many times have they stirred an audience to laughter, only to have the main feature, supposedly a comedy, fall flat?

Much of the credit for the humour in these witty scenes goes to comedian Steve Furst, the more expressive of the main pair, and now he has taken his talents into the short film realm with a very different but tasty role in Medium Rare.

Based on a short story by German cult author Hans Herbst, this is a dark film combining danger, lust, desire and fear in an erotic game.

It opens with the your “average Joe” type - that would be Steve, here called Carl - on the run from a gang in somewhere like 1930s Paris, diving into an expensive restaurant where a beautiful woman, Sara Stewart (aka Camille), is dining alone and surprises Carl by demanding his attention. Cornered he has to believe his luck has changed and enlists the lovely Sara as his ally, knowing that one false move from either of them will cost him his life.

But salvation has a price. This is the movies after all

And if you think you recognise the waiter, that’s because he is played by Derren Brown in HIS first film role. NO, not he of the Da Vinci Code. That is DAN Brown. Derren is he of the mind games. He who convince people they have been shot or stabbed or had lunch or whatever, when in fact they have not.

Directed by Stefan Stuckert, who previously worked on Peep Show and Derren Brown's TV shows, Medium Rare was made on a modest amount of private finance but on Super 35mm. It is the first production from Stuckert's new company Finger Store Film, set up with Debbie Young, and will have its UK premiere at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival before heading off around the world’s festival circuit.