"Since they became TV stars in the The Young Ones almost twenty years ago, Rik
Mayall and Adrian Edmondson have been developing and refining their aggressively crude
brand of humour - which has some affinity with certain recent American 'gross-out'
comedies. Still, it's hard to think of an American comedian who's willing to seem
repulsive in the way that's Mayall's peculiar stock-in-trade: pushing forty and balding,
he's still playing the same sniggering schoolboy, with his cheap nerdy suit and hideous
leer. What's sometimes missed about Mayall and Edmondson is how old-fashioned and innocent
their work is, and the extent to which they're self-aware comedy classicists. Their TV
show Bottom is designed around a (very blokey) notion of comedy at its simplest and most
basic: toilet jokes, sexual humiliation, guys kicking each other in the balls. Basically a
bigscreen version of Bottom, Guest House Paradiso wallows in Three Stooges-style violence
and crappy jokes that are decades if not centuries old: characters like the Italian sex
symbol Gina Carbonara (yes, really) are straight out of a Carry On film from the early
'70s. So why does the film fall flat? Probably because Mayall and Edmondson are working in
an unfamiliar format without an experienced director. The pacing is frequently misjudged,
and (compared to the accustomed grotty look of their TV shows) the production seems
pointlessly expensive and overscaled. The dark, cavernous hotel set suggests Edmondson is
aiming to create a Gothic alternate universe similar in feel to the slapstick netherworlds
of Delicatessen or Mouse Hunt, but he just doesn't have the cinematic knowhow to pull this
off. The film's failure shows up the dangers in their whole approach: there's a fine line
between the deliberately stupid and the merely stupid, but once you cross that line it can
be hard to go back."
Jake Wilson
"There is an audience for this film. There is for every film. It's just a little
difficult to imagine who it might be but they would have to satisfy the following
criteria: They would think watching endless projectile vomiting is hysterically funny.
That silly voices are funny. That grown men hitting each other over the head and torturing
every body part is funny. That bashing old women is funny. That the threat of rape is
funny. That the names of Italian characters like Gina Carbonara and Gino Bolognese are
funny. That jokes you can see coming an hour before they're delivered are funny. That the
type of material that made The Young Ones funny a very, very long time ago can still be
funny. That a gem such as Fawlty Towers can be made funnier. That a comedy doesn't need a
plot. That a man running around in women's spiky rubber underwear is funny. That Jennifer
Saunders isn't the funny one in her marriage to Adrian Edmondson. (Oops, sorry, lost the
plot a little there - see what this tedious, sickly, abominable waste of an hour and a
half has done?) Yes there's an audience for this film. The problem is it will be those
dreadful little 14 year old boys who think spitting on passers-by is funny and they're not
old enough to see the film because of its M (mature?) rating."
Lee Gough
"As a reviewer, I see a lot of movies. Some tell a great story with grace and
insight. This isn’t one of them. Some are hilariously funny. This isn’t one of
them. Some illuminate an aspect of the human experience. This isn’t one of them. Some
however are so repulsive, so unoriginal and so unfunny that you find yourself slack-jawed
wondering how anything could be so bad. This is one of those. Rik Mayall and Adrian
Edmondson reunite in this feature film which is actually more like a drawn out episode of
their Young Ones TV series, mixed with liberal doses of Fawlty Towers and the Farrelly
brothers. In fact, the plot is basically a rehash of the "rat" episode from
Fawlty Towers - except everyone eats the veal. The characters also have an odour of
staleness about them. Could it be that the disgusting, campy Mr Twat is actually an older,
flabbier Rick; and Eddie a latter day Vyvyan? The plot is so thin it’s embarrassing
and the main device used to drive it is physical abuse. Don’t get me wrong - I like a
good nutcracker to the testicles joke as much as the next person - but the physical jokes
are so repetitive here that the film long outstays even its modest 89 minutes running
time. The material lacks any kind of spark. Stuff that may have worked on The Young Ones
falls flat here. As for the performances, there’s not much to say. Mayall is
appropriately awful as Twat, and the rest of the cast follow his lead. While researching
this film I came across a review which dubbed it 'worst British movie of the year'.
That’s pretty accurate - even if you delete 'British'."
David Edwards
