Imagine turning on the TV to find Fawlty Towers is on, widely regarded as one of the greatest sitcoms ever made, and in any country. But you’re in Hell, so the part of Basil Fawlty will no longer be played by John Cleese, but instead by Rik Mayall. And there’s no Sybil, Manuel or Polly—just Adrian Edmondson as stupid as about three Manuels and serving in as many capacities.
Never mind the racial concerns with Manuel in the original series, as Edmondson is somehow continually more offensive than even the least sensitive of the TV show’s material, and his character is completely standard-issue British guy, albeit a complete moron. No, in 1999 UK “comedy” Guest House Paradiso, he and Mayall somehow manage to completely scorch the Earth with a wide range of strangely offensive material, but I found myself surprised later when I realized none of those offenses are race related. I guess that will be a tick in the positive attributes of the picture, and there won’t be many of them.
Admittedly, I might have had my expectations a bit high when the opening credits revealed the cast included Mayall, Bill Nighy, Kate Ashfield, Fenella Fielding, Vincent Cassell and Simon Pegg. Admittedly, I only know Mayall from The Young Ones, and that was an ensemble show, but I looked forward to seeing what he could do outside of that. Edmondson was in that show as well, and completely unrecognizable as the punk Vyvyan. Given how terrible he is in this film made me even more astonished he had been the funniest character in that group. Everybody knows who Pegg is nowadays, and Ashfield co-starred with him in Shaun of the Dead. As for Nighy, if you don’t know him, then I can’t help you. Fielding is a bit of a UK comedy legend, having been in the Carry On series. I’ll admit I was confused as to why Cassell was in this, as I don’t believe I have seen him in any comedies. After having seen this, I believe that statement still applies.
This is roughly the plot: Mayall owns an old, gothic mansion of an inn, with Edmondson as his sole employee. Mayall largely hates the guests, except for an Italian film star (Hélène Mahieu) who believes this will be a great place to hide from paparazzi and Cassell, whom she left at the altar. I will confess I chucked three times in the course of the film, and one time was when she says of Mayall’s establishment: “Even the people in the village deny its existence.”
Whereas Basil Fawlty was a prude who is equally judgmental and repressed, Mayall plays what is obviously a character modelled on the same, except even more crassly judgmental but completely sex obsessed. We are scant minutes into the runtime when we see him about to masturbate in his office, only to be interrupted. He will later flee the hotel, taking with him only a suitcase full of pornographic magazines. He will go through the luggage of Pegg and wife Lisa Palfrey and swap his clothes with rubber fetish wear he finds there, something which may be the most bizarre such item of sex play I have ever seen. And yet, he loudly and continually berates Nighy and Ashfield as “that common law couple”.
It would be a stretch to make most of this work, and this is a production that isn’t going to put in the work. Even the last name of Mayall’s character is crude without being funny, and that is “Twat”, though it is allegedly pronounced “Thwaite”. He corrects a character at one point when they do get it right, saying it is pronounced “cunt”. Huh.
I shouldn’t even be thinking about the quality of the effects work in such a farce, except the greenscreen here is so poorly executed as to make me wonder if it was deliberately so. Exterior shots of the inn show it perched right on the edge of a sea cliff, and the second time I chuckled was when Pegg’s son and daughter are told to go down to the playground, and their horrified reaction shot is spot-on. The horrible compositing effects also put a nuclear power plant immediately adjacent to the hotel, with fish from a radiation leak cooked and served for dinner, leading to projectile vomiting by all but three characters. Still not sure why Mahieu isn’t seen doing that, when she also had the fish for dinner. Perhaps she simply had the ability to keep anything down, as evidence by it later being implied she is about to orally gratify Mayall.
Although gross out humor is not my cup of bodily fluids, I have seen such humor as the projectile vomiting succeed in movies like Monty Python and the Meaning of Life and even Peter Jackson’s aptly named Bad Taste. It doesn’t here. Nor does a great deal of violence Mayall and Edmondson inflict on each other. Nor does an extended gag where Pegg’s nipple becomes remarkably distended when a fishing hook gets caught in his nipple ring. I won’t bother going into the how that came to happen but, really, is there setup that could make that funny? I don’t know of one. Thank all the gods we don’t see them succeed in their plan to knock Fielding’s gold teeth out of her mouth with a hammer.
To say I hated this picture is insufficient. I felt betrayed—betrayed by the comedy genre, betrayed by UK comedies, specifically, and betrayed by the motion pictures, in general. That a swinging kitchen door makes a twang recalling M. Hulot’s Holiday, makes me think the Tati estate has just cause for legal action. As somebody who loves a great deal of lowbrow British humor, I couldn’t believe this film exists nor that the show from which this was spun-off, Bottom, was hugely popular. It is nowhere near as pointlessly, gratuitously vulgar as Freddie Got Fingered, but it is somehow worse, as it neither seems to aspire to be an anti-comedy nor has the stones to be so offensive as to be transgressive. Basically, it stands out in no ways except it is deeply terrible and, worse, woefully unfunny.
Oh, yes, that third time I chuckled: it was the sign on the honeymoon suite, which reads “HONEYMOON SUET”. There, now you really don’t see to Guest House Paradiso.
My advice for Mayall and Edmonson’s characters: burn the building to the ground, move on to somewhere else and never mention it again. My advice to the filmmakers: burn it down, move on to something else and never mention it again. Perhaps it might be for the best to also salt the Earth so that nothing grows there ever again, and I mean that for both parties.
Dir: Adrian Edmondson
Starring Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson and people I can’t believe are here. I wonder if any of them also wish they had not been there.
Watched on Powerhouse/Indicator UK (region B) blu-ray