CHOPPER

“I'm a good bloke. I've just had a run of bad luck.” Two declarative statements that would seem to be mutually exclusive for their utterer, Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, Australia's most notorious living criminal. Hannibal Lecter is fiction, Read is not. A robber, murderer, drug user, gun aficionado, police informer, perjurer, jailbird, assassin's target, gentleman farmer, writer, recording-artist and media celebrity, whose nine volumes of memoirs/alibis have made him one of his country's best-selling native authors (and he purports to be only semi-literate) the Chopper earned his nickname by having his ears cut off so he could transfer out of a prison populated with deadly enemies. Now Read's stranger-than-testimony life reaches the screen in a darkly comic character portrait of the ultimate outlaw survivor, a complex and perversely charming sociopath, who can brutally stab a cellblock kingpin to death with a shiv, withstand an equally viciious betrayal by his best mate, track down and viloently extort cash from an old cohort one the outside and then step back, bemused, and share teh viewer's disbelief at the absurdity and madness of it all. Nominated for ten awards by the Australian Film Institute, CHOPPER sets in celluloid a modern legend of the DownUnder underworld.