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Sex Lives of the Potato Men
*
Cinema
Review - March 10, 2004
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. UK.
84 minutes. Written and directed by Andy Humphries. Produced by Christine
Gayford, Graham Gayford, Cass Marks, Anita Overland. Starring Johnny Vegas,
Mackenzie Crook, Mark Gatiss, Dominic Coleman, Kate Robbins, Lucy Davis,
Julia Davis, Angela Simpson, Nicola Reynolds, Helen Latham, Nick Holder,
Barry Aird.
Reviewers love to take lines from bad movies and
hold them up as gifts of ironic prophecy. Think about "It's turkey time!"
from "Gigli", and you get the idea. I can do without this method; it's a
pretty obvious trick. But sometimes these movies just make it too damn easy.
Like this one, where Johnny Vegas looks at a crummy patch of cement and cobbles,
and says, "I think you've focused too much on the 'crazy' and not enough
on the 'paving'. This isn't crazy paving. It's just crap."
And so it goes. There's something deeply sad about
"Sex Lives of the Potato Men", which thinks it's clever and
colourful and zany -- as base and camp as a collection of fart jokes, but
as finessed and hip as a slice of Tarantino. The characters reel off
observational speeches that have all the observation of a smutty 9-year old;
we get the idea that the script has its author's best jokes, and we look
away in embarrassment.
One of the characters tells us he's addicted to
jam and fish paste sandwiches. It's because his girlfriend used to put jam
on her area, and let the young romantic lick it off. Now he wants to find
the taste again. This inspires another character to philosophise: "I used
to go out with this girl who licked my arse. Then she used to try and kiss
me. Like swings and roundabouts, that is -- you just can't win. Wonder what
she has on her sandwiches. Shit, probably."
Indeed.
The story, such as it is, involves pretty much
what the title says. It's about four men who deliver potatoes to chip shops,
and their attempts to find romance and blow jobs. Vegas is married, but
unhappily; he calls up one of his old girlfriends to see if she still fancies
a threesome. Mackenzie Crook, best known for "The Office", is a young hipster
who has to conserve his energy for the girl who works the fryer at the take-away,
as well as his former mother-in-law, as well as… well, we'll get to
that. Mark Gatiss is a mopey, creepy loser who steals his ex-girlfriend's
dog to teach her some kind of lesson, after a bunch of scenes where he drinks
wine on his own and does exaggerated crying over his collection of never-sent
self-pitying love letters. Dominic Coleman's character is supposed to be
half-retarded, I think -- his is the obsession with jam and fish paste, which
is bad enough as a throwaway line, worse when we realise it's his big running
joke, and it goes on, and on, and on. (The movie could be used as some sort
of treatment for people who eat too much fish; it trains us to cringe whenever
they come onscreen.)
I suppose it's good that the movie is only 84
minutes, but then, the writer and director, Andy Humphries, shows a tremendous
gift for packing a lot into the running time. After fending off the attentions
of one older woman, Crook's grandmother-in-law develops an obsession with
wanting to suck him off. He also has to suffer being tied up on the floor
while the chip shop girl screws him and her massive skinhead husband is suspended
above them in leather chains, jerking off from a ceiling view. Coleman's
scenes with fish are too many to count; the most memorable one has him wanking
on the couch, before the shot cuts to a wide angle and lets us know that
Vegas is sitting beside him trying to eat a bowl of cereal.
This is also, I hope, the only movie that has
shown, or will ever show, Johnny Vegas, topless, in not one, but two gangbang
scenes. His character is supposed to be the intelligent one, although he's
not smart enough to realise that clapping in the face of a coma patient is
not enough to wake her up.
In other news, an old woman says the word "cock"
and a vengeful housewife fills a water gun with dogshit and fires it all
over her ex-husband's house. "Sex Lives of the Potato Men" will maybe find
an audience -- there are a few people out there who get in hysterics at the
sight of runny brown stuff and the mention of the word "cock". They also
get tickled by the words "willy", "poo" and "bottoms", are likely to own
every video Roy Chubby Brown ever did, and avoid reading Viz because the
Fat Slags might be funny but the rest of the satire is far too sophisticated.
If you have succeeded in reading the 786 words of this article, you're probably
not one of those people, and I'm guessing you can avoid this
film.
COPYRIGHT©
2004 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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