BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!STUDIO: BBC Warner
MSRP: $129.98
RATED: Not Rated
RUNNING TIME: 1475 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Episode Commentaries
• Featurette
• Mockumentary
• Image Galleries
• Production Notes
• Text Article
The Pitch
Bad British Horror and a foreign Alan Partridge clone.
The Humans
Steve Coogan and others.
The Nutshell
The Portuguese, Amicus Horror and idolization come together with these two lesser Coogan offerings. More miss than hit, we watch as Coogan tries on these one-off series that try to find the humor in traveled material. Whether we’re looking at the weird conceits of British pop cult cinema or the oblivious Tony Ferrino, it’s all the same. We’ve seen Coogan do it before and better. I blame Coogan’s rising stardom in international cinema for the decline of this 1999-2001 material.
The Lowdown
I had heard about Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible before I first saw this set. What blew my mind was the level of detail that Coogan and company went through to create these callbacks to old Hammer horror and Dr. Who episodes. Hell, I even picked up a throwback or two to the Shaw Brothers and some Mario Bava action. Yet, the forced attempts at awkward Brit humor didn’t really blend into the genre staples. Much like the bald guffawing Dr. Terrible, it just sat there looking out of place.
The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon became tired and trite about ten minutes into the show. Whether it was the song about raping an Au Pair or the musical tribute to The Silence of the Lambs, nothing really gelled. What we did have was Coogan bouncing around the stage and mugging like a speed freak. Naturally, critics ripped it a new asshole upon its initial airing. Steve Coogan later seemingly retired the character and has never spoken of Ferrino again.
This period of Coogan’s career has offered up a weird look at a comedian trying to redevelop his schtick. By branching into this bizarre mix of Variety Show humor and International Horror send-ups, nothing really stuck out. Sure, if you notice the timeline…Coogan was blossoming with his performance in 24 Hour Party People and other films. You gain that international audience, but you make the home team suffer through a lot of poorly planned garbage. Also, you’ve got to take into account that Coogan was starting to lose his supporting creators.
Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber were starting to move away from Coogan and into their own success. Hell, this again was around the time that Marber’s plays Closer and Howard Katz were starting to set the theater world on fire. A lot of comedians have interesting down periods in their careers, but I don’t quite see the appeal of what Coogan was trying to do here. There’s a lot of chuckles, but nothing that hangs the piece together.
The Package
The
DVD
package comes with some commentaries and a featurette. There’s also a brief mockumentary about Tony Ferrino. What kills me again is that the commentaries on Dr. Terrible serve no fucking point. It’s like listening to buddies talking about something that happened fifteen years before you met them. It’s more annoying than entertaining and it doesn’t serve to support this awkward material.