WHAT King Canute could never manage, movie magic has finally achieved. It has turned back the Essex tides.

Southend high tide was transformed into Southend low tide for the new feature film Hard Boiled Sweets, which has its London West End premiere at the Empire, Leicester Square on Friday March 9.

The film's writer-director David Hughes explains. “We were filming on Southend Pier, and we needed low sea conditions for the scene. Instead, as luck would have it, it turned out to be the highest tide in living memory that day. We had to lose the sea. So we used the magic of CGI (computer generated imagery) to wipe out the water and turn it into mud.”

Sea-changes aren't the only way that the film is set to transform Southend's image. This is David's own debut film, and it could also be the film that marks Southend's debut as a location star.

David says that from the start he saw Southend itself as the key player in the film, and he cast it before he cast any of the human actors. “Southend is character in its own right, and it is the character which connects all the other characters in the story,” he says.

David is a Londoner, but he has nurtured an imaginative vision of Southend since he enjoyed a rumbustious night out on the seafront with his mates at the age of 19.

He says that, in his mind, he created a sort of alternative Southend landscape, which he stresses is purely fictitious. He describes this place as “a sort of low-rent English Las Vegas, a Las Vegas of the third world. Instead of high-end hotels and swanky casinos, it has grotty bed and breakfasts and low-end slot machines and arcades ... Into this setting I've placed a series of really hard boiled characters.”

Hardest of the hard in Hard Boiled Sweets' storyline is Shrewd Eddie, played by the veteran character actor Paul Freeman, of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame. “Eddie is kingpin of Southend,” says David. Eddie runs his criminal empire with murderous ruthlessness, and his weapon of choice is Southend Pier.

“It's over the end of the pier for you, f***head,” he tells anyone who crosses him, and he is as good as his word. Victims get chained to car spare parts and tossed into the sea. By the end of the film, the estuary is awash with bodies.

Eddie keeps £250,000 stashed around the house, and a whole castful of characters is in pursuit of it. The include a bent copper who needs money to pay for his wife's in vitro fertilisation, a young jailbird hoping to go straight once he's got the dosh, two gun-toting south London gangsta-types, a seafront pimp with pretensions, and Eddie's beautiful but treacherous young live-in-lover. Their paths begin to cross, unleashing a torrent of double-crossing, sex and violence.

Hard Boiled Sweets began life as a short film, A Girl and a Gun. “The staring points were the character of Eddie, and the Southend setting,” says David. He then developed the material into a full-length script, which he sent to the veteran actors Paul Freeman and Ian Hart. Once they had expressed interest, he was able to raise funding and the promise of a distribution deal.

David says that inspiration for the story came from writers like Elmore Leonard and James Elroy, whose work is commonly referred to as hard-boiled fiction.

“You start with a multiple bunch of characters and get a glimpse into their lives. It's an ensemble piece, with lots of little stories. At first you feel that you're not going anywhere, and then, poomph, something big happens, all the characters' storylines collide, and all hell breaks loose.”

None of the characters is very pleasant. “These are bad people doing bad things,” says David. “But they're having a blast while they're doing them, and somehow we warm to them.”

For its writer-director, Hard Boiled Sweets is the fulfilment of a lifetime's dream to make a feature film. Before that he served an unusual apprenticeship in film-making skills.

“I've spent the past fifteen years making trailers,” he says. “It's been an incredibly privileged way of learning about film from the inside. I've sat in a room with people like Roman Polanski, Richard Attenborough and Giullermo del Toro, and learnt from them on a one-to-one basis.”

Now, established as a director and “looking at a number of other projects”, David says: “I like to think hat other people will soon be making trailers for my movies.”

For Southend, too, Hard Boiled Sweets could represent the start of a productive cinema career, especially since the setting up of White Bus's location service to encourage film-makers to work in the town.

Its role in this film may not be wholly flattering, but it does give Southend a firm stake in the lexicon of the film-maker's imagination, representing a sort of shorthand for stylish sleaze. By contrast, as Michael Winner once put it: “Who ever made an action film in Tunbridge Wells?”