Ahhh, the British film industry. If it's not tickling you under your monocle with a whimsical feather, it's glassing you in the face and driving off in a black cab into the darkest and most pungent anus of realism.The forced juxtaposition of these polar opposites is bound to be an uneasy alliance at best. As Lenny Henry would testify, Comic Relief is no piece of cake, and this film could easily serve as an antithesis to Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder's claim that ebony and ivory live together in perfect hamony.
This film could not be more British if it featured Kathy Burke eating a plate of beans on a council estate and then calling someone a 'cunt'. In fact, in one of the opening scenes we see our hero's willy, and as we all know, Hollywood stars do not have genitals. There follows an admittedly impressive scene where he stumbles around a totally desolate London, fresh from a long stint honked up to the eyeballs on goofumfall at hospital, without the foggiest where the bleedin' 'ell everyone is. Clue: everyone's either dead or infected with 'rage' passed on to them by laborotory monkeys who've been subjected to Darius' album on a loop for a month.
It's not long before he encounters a bunch of them, and when it dawns upon him that he hasn't interrupted a Rolling Stones rehearsal he makes a dash for it. Two more survivors whisk him to safety in a shop. It's at this point that you get the sneaking suspicion that Pepsi may have a stake in the film. Truly, it stops just short of the main characters singing a jingle about the unrefreshing beverage backed by two dancing Pepsi cans (we'll have to wait for the DVD extras). Then we get to see more survivors in a hilarious odd-couple mismatch and we get to see some sexually deviant soldiers. The end.
'The scariest film I've ever seen in me life' blurted one girl in an ad for the film. One must speculate that the only other film she's seen is Santa Clause: The Movie. In its constant succession of promising rumblings followed by anticlimax it was chilling, if only because it gave me an unsettling glimpse of what toilet trips are going to be like for me when I'm an octogenarian. |
