Virtual Sexuality
1/2
Rated on a 4-star
scale
UK
Directed by Adrian Edmonson
Written by Adrian Edmonson and Rik Mayall
CAST.....
Rik Mayall..... Richard Twat
Adrian Edmonson..... Eddie Elizabeth Ndingombaba
Helene Mathieu..... Gina Carbonara
Vincent Cassel..... Gino Bolognese
Simon Pegg..... Mr Nice
Like most young men in Britain, I love the squalid
sitcom "Bottom", in which unemployed layabouts Richie (Rik Mayall) and Eddie
(Adrian Edmonson) violently argue through assorted gross situations. The
outrageous audacity of the show, its stagy style and perverted performances
are so darn weird that one simply has to laugh.
Mayall and Edmonson reprise their roles in
"Guest House Paradiso", but the characters have moved away
from the London council flat to run a dilapidated south-coast motel next
door to a nuclear power station. Its walls are rotting away, the light switches
itself off, the children's play area is on the edge of a cliff and the kitchen
staff are alcoholic illegal immigrants. Before this movie is over, Richie
and Eddie will have fed their guests radioactive fish, beaten each other
up with kitchen utensils, tricked old women out of money and broken pretty
much every count of the Building Code.
This has the potential to be funny. The show was.
But director Edmonson imposes the deliberate pacing and slick photography
of a normal, realistic feature film on material which needs to be produced
cheaply, and it dies a sorry death. There is no energy or unpredictability,
only an embarrassing mess of zany movement and occasional loud clonks. An
idiotic beauty-in-peril subplot is included to provide a structure and to
allow the picture to end with a kiss, but the final shot we're given portrays
a blow-job. In material as crass as this, I guess that's an acceptable equivalent
to kissing.
"Guest House Paradiso" is constantly bad. At times,
it's creepy, too. Richie finds time to lock himself in an oven, deliver room
service nude, masturbate in the middle of serving breakfast and run around
wearing stolen kinky underwear; Eddie enjoys getting a little boy drunk and
then almost kills the lad's sister. Together, the gruesome pair strap down
an elderly lady and try to chisel her teeth out. There are graphic scenes
of mass projectile vomiting, vandalism and attempted rape. Ho ho
ho.
Why can't cinema adaptations of TV shows try and
replicate the styles that made their source material so successful in the
first place? By the two-minute mark, "Guest House Paradiso" had already reminded
me of "Rising Damp" (1980), another catastrophic attempt to translate great
sitcom to the big screen. Later on, of course, I was just amazed at the repulsive
depths it managed to scrabble into. If you enjoy this film, consider it one
last treat on the way to the asylum.
COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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