Paul "Mighty Boosh" King storms onto the silver screen with a cavalcade of imaginative imagery, from a snow globe mountain retreat to a clockwork bullfight, but then attempts to meld it all with an atrocious script, which is at times inane, elsewhere sentimental, and riddled with boring f-bombs. The dialogue is full of jokes but empty of wit or insight.
Broadly (and it often is) the film is about a traumatised and possibly agoraphobic young man named Stephen who musters a lo-fi Euro road trip in his head, the landscape and characters forged only by the contents of his apartment. If it sounds like Amelie then that's because it is like Amelie, right down to the rippling piano score. Difference is, Amelie, under its sugary shell, contained pathos and humanity, and its surreal digressions were complementary to a solid and coherent plot.
King's film is a cauldron of slapstick, surrealism and homosexual tension, all stuttering along on the power of a pair of lifeless performances. As a viewer all we have to root for is the soppy, infantile Stephen (Edward Hogg) and the crass, infantile Bunny (Simon Farnaby).
There's an almost amusing turn from Richard Ayoade as a bored shore museum curator. Noel Fielding's matador cameo shows promise then descends into a loud nothing.
Woven well into the wayward narrative, the animated asides are arresting in a Lloyd's TSB ad kind of way, providing welcome respite from the highly variable sketches in between. But ultimately they only serve to remind us of the talent that's going down with the ship. It all comes across as quite "random"; except we know it's anything but. It really was meant to be this way.
The whole venture reaches its nadir with a homeless zoophile who drinks milk from a dog, at which point you may wish to follow Bunny and leap through the frozen ice to save yourself.
Broadly (and it often is) the film is about a traumatised and possibly agoraphobic young man named Stephen who musters a lo-fi Euro road trip in his head, the landscape and characters forged only by the contents of his apartment. If it sounds like Amelie then that's because it is like Amelie, right down to the rippling piano score. Difference is, Amelie, under its sugary shell, contained pathos and humanity, and its surreal digressions were complementary to a solid and coherent plot.
King's film is a cauldron of slapstick, surrealism and homosexual tension, all stuttering along on the power of a pair of lifeless performances. As a viewer all we have to root for is the soppy, infantile Stephen (Edward Hogg) and the crass, infantile Bunny (Simon Farnaby).
There's an almost amusing turn from Richard Ayoade as a bored shore museum curator. Noel Fielding's matador cameo shows promise then descends into a loud nothing.
Woven well into the wayward narrative, the animated asides are arresting in a Lloyd's TSB ad kind of way, providing welcome respite from the highly variable sketches in between. But ultimately they only serve to remind us of the talent that's going down with the ship. It all comes across as quite "random"; except we know it's anything but. It really was meant to be this way.
The whole venture reaches its nadir with a homeless zoophile who drinks milk from a dog, at which point you may wish to follow Bunny and leap through the frozen ice to save yourself.