I did eventually come to like Bottom, but this film had nothing in it for me. The best I can say for it is that Helene Mahieu, as `Gina Carbonara', was beautiful and always elegant in knee-length sheath dresses of the kind fashionable around 1960, and they had the decency not to spray her with the green slime that was used as hilarious radioactive vomit. Other than that the film was a ghastly mess of painfully crude humour and jokes often telegraphed minutes in advance. In the sitcom, the ridiculously over-the-top violence is something which Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson inflict on each other, and there it doesn't matter. They are like cartoon characters: the audience comes to feel that they don't really feel pain, any more than Daffy Duck or Elmer Fudd does, and so it's possible to relax into the manic way the story is run. In the film, their horrible behaviour is visited on all sorts of other people at the guesthouse they own, who deserve sympathy: I don't think I could find a scene of Simon Pegg's nipple being torn out by a hook funny if I tried (though I'm aware other people on this server did). It's a good thing for him he got involved in Spaced afterwards: that was worthy of his talents. In any case, Messrs Edmonson and Mayall had chosen a bad subject: the comedy theme of `unpleasant character runs second-rate hotel and mistreats the guests' was done and gift-wrapped for the public by John Cleese and Connie Booth more than twenty years ago, and even a good attempt at that situation is going to suffer by comparison with Fawlty Towers. I suppose, in a way, Guesthouse Paradiso benefited from that, because it was so bad that after a while the comparisons didn't even come to mind: it was entirely in a class of its own, and a good thing too.
I watched this film sober. I can understand that being drunk might help to make it look better. I suspect, though, that it's best appreciated if you've drunk so much you're actually unconscious by the time it starts.
I watched this film sober. I can understand that being drunk might help to make it look better. I suspect, though, that it's best appreciated if you've drunk so much you're actually unconscious by the time it starts.