We’ve had just about every other version of this tale and here’s the one we could easily have done without – a flatlining Pete and Dud caper wherein the only pleasure to be had is watching humourless Warhol acolyte Paul Morrissey (he of the tedious longeurs and gay cowboys) pompously decide that a career mostly spent filming Joe Dallesandro wander around for hours with his knob out is the perfect grounding for an exercise in Carry On-style “bawdy” comedy, and come a massive cropper in the process. Less fun is seeing greats such as Kenneth Williams, Spike, Terry-Thomas, Max Wall, Roy Kinnear, Prunella Scales and Penelope Keith, not to mention Denholm ‘Peter Niss’ Elliott, Joan ‘Girls On Top’ Greenwood, Rita ‘Pompeii’ Webb, Josephine ‘Ronnies’ Tewson, Dana ‘Time Forgot’ Gillespie, Anna ‘Lou Beale’ Wing, Irene ‘Fruitbat’ Handl and Henry ‘WAP’ Woolf, get dragged down with him.
Tom Ronson
October 4, 2020 at 10:15 pm
Seeing as nobody else is going to stagger to this film’s defence, I’d like to point out that whilst this film isn’t hilarious by any stretch of the imagination, the photography is excellent, it’s got a cast to die for, there are enough funny lines to make you chuckle or groan in fairly equal measures, the characters are all engaging and it was made right in the middle of Cook and Moore’s Derek and Clive ‘blue period’, which might account for the incontinent chihuahua and the revival of the ‘One Leg Too Few’ sketch, with Moore using the same voice as the croaking pervert from the ‘Winkie Wanky Woo’ and ‘Members Only’ sketches. In summary, then, not as good as Bedazzled but not half as bad as its reputation might suggest.