THE sight of human remains being minced and turned into kebabs may not be the most horrifying thing in K-Shop.

Bournemouth’s first feature-length movie is not just a horror film but a comment on Britain’s drinking culture. And it features some shocking real-life footage of drunken behaviour in the town centre.

“Some of the stuff we’ve seen on the street is probably worse than we ended up with in the film,” says writer-director Dan Pringle.

“We saw things that were absolutely hideous. If you were to recreate them properly, it would scare people.”

The film is a 21st century take on the Sweeney Todd story. Ziad Abaza plays Salah, a studious young man who works in a kebab shop and who turns some of his most abusive customers into kebabs.

Dan, 29, conceived it as a critique of Britain’s relationship with alcohol. He and producer Adam J Merrifield, who run White Lantern Film, had witnessed plenty of yobbish behaviour for themselves.

“Our office used to be on St Peter’s Road. I used to look down on that road when it was full of clubs and bars,” says Dan.

“Every other fascia was a bar or club and it was carnage, to be perfectly honest.

“We worked late at night. I started getting thoroughly sick of police cars and ambulances turning up virtually every other night.”

Adam says they became tired of arriving at work in the morning to survey vandalism and vomit. “This was when the Echo reported Fir Vale Road was the sixth most violent street in the UK,” he says.

We chatted at the patisserie Delice Des Champs in Gervis Place, a couple of doors away from where most of K-Shop was filmed. The crew took an empty shop unit – now home to the frozen yoghurt bar Yobu – and fitted out as a lifelike kebab shop.

“We explored shooting it in a real kebab shop but they make too much money for us to take over for five or six weeks,” says Dan.

“We made it so convincing that we had problems with people trying to get into the shop. We realised quite early on we were going to have to have security guys on the doors on drunk patrol, otherwise we weren’t going to be able to get a film made.”

Locals will spot the pier, the Old Fire Station, Royal Bournemouth Hospital and the National Express station. They will also see a lot of St Peter’s Church, which, in the film’s story, is being turned into a nightclub.

St Peter’s, famous as the burial place of Mary Shelley, raised no objections to the film, says Dan. “They laughed at it. They were incredibly supportive. They were like ‘It’s your church, it’s part of your community’,” he says.

The British Board of Film Classification warns of K-Shop's “detailed images of bodies being cut up and eviscerated, with the body parts put through a mincer”.

Yet Dan points out most of the violence is in the first 20 minutes. “It was about showing it once, showing everything and then being done with it,” he says.

Adam admits he was keener not to skimp on the gore. “Commercially, you want to put as much gore in as possible without it being too much of a slasher movie,” he says.

“We tried to strike a balance between a B-movie, slasher movie and a sophisticated horror movie. It’s nice to have some hard core gory scenes in it.”

Dan adds: “We had battles quite a lot. I was constantly up against that commercial side of things.

“I’m not really a horror film nut and I don’t really do violence very well. People from the horror magazines and blogs ask me what’s my favourite horror film and what’s my favourite moment in horror films. The most striking violence is always about context, it’s not about violence for the sake of violence.”

Dan went into partnership with Adam, 42, in 2008, after graduating from Bournemouth University, where he studied film and television production. His parents have since moved from London to Canford Cliffs.

Like most students, he sometimes drank "a lot" but started to question whether it was worth it.

“I didn’t like going out, getting hammered, spending £50 in a night and spending the next seven days trying to recover," he says.

“It felt very needless and repetitive and just a bit pointless.”

The film also includes some shots of Bournemouth council's street-cleaning crews clearing up in the mornings.

“It’s this drinking culture that Bournemouth has become accustomed to, that lets people come down, destroy the place on a weekly basis and we’ll just come and clear up the damage,” says Dan.

* K-Shop is on digital platforms, including iTunes, now and on DVD on August 1. A theatrical run will see Dan Pringle answering questions at Poole’s Empire cinema on August 5 and Southampton’s Picturehouse on August 15. Tickets at ourscreen.com/film/K-Shop