Before British born comedian Rik Mayall landed himself
countercultural status with the 1991 fantastical black comedy Drop Dead Fred
for which the late comedian is the most well known for, Mayall forged a
creative and comedic partnership with co-star Ade Edmondson on their hit 1991
BBC2 sitcom Bottom. The ongoing
series of misadventures lived by Richie (Rik Mayall) and Eddie (Ade Edmondson),
these crass jobless creeps living in a squalid flat in Hammersmith, London who
both long for a better more fruitful life.
A style of comedy the funny duo had been working on since the 1970s, it
mixed in a brand of anarchic black humor and violent slapstick the likes of which
only really showed its face in Saturday morning cartoons like The Ren &
Stimpy Show. Gross, vulgar, stupid
and yet in its way hilarious, the show filmed in front of a live crowd became a
hit with audiences and spawned several live stage iterations of the show and cemented the careers of Mayall and Edmondson.
Following the show’s cancellation in 1995 after a third
season and the subsequent stage tours, circa 1999 Mayall and Edmondson decided
to give their Bottom show the silver screen treatment and with
effectively Edmondson’s directorial debut the comedy duo with Universal
Pictures’ United Kingdom division mounted and released one of the grossest and
yet least known British comedy epics of all time with the slapstick shocker Guest
House Paradiso.
Picking up on the
titular Richie and Eddie from Bottom to ostensibly the “worst guest
house in the United Kingdom”, Guest House Paradiso is depending on your point
of view a “successful” version of Dan Aykroyd’s ill fated directorial debut Nothing
but Trouble for how it turns audiences loose into a kind of funny, scary
and gross horror-comedy funhouse while confidently throwing caution to the
wind. The premise is exceedingly simple:
two sociopathic morons try to run a hotel with explosive results both literal
and figurative with Mayall and Edmondson’s surreal discomforting brand of ultraviolent
slapstick kicked up to its logical extremity.
Rik Ayall and Ade Edmondson’s style of comedy might not be for all. It is off-putting, aggravating, at times infuriating, but all the while kind of oddly whimsical for its mixture of horror and hilarity. That everyone was game for this and that Edmondson himself years later would appear in The Last Jedi given Rian Johnson’s appreciation for their brand of comedy speaks volumes to the amount of fun one can have with this kind of anarchic brutal laughter if you just give it a chance.
Fans of the gross out comedy are in for a literal Tsunami of
regurgitation, hooks being stuck where they shouldn’t be, a man being cooked in
an oven, and a lot of gallows humor peppered in for additional spiciness. Not everyone will take to this but for the
adventurous cinephile Vinegar Syndrome Labs have given this a new 4K restoration
for its surviving 35mm interpositive and also included plentiful
behind-the-scenes extras, deleted materials and outtakes, making it for the
uninitiated a wonderfully disgusting comedy package.
--Andrew Kotwicki
