BURKE AND HARE

dMYD

Starring Simon Pegg

Trailer

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The moral of the story? Stick with your friends and chop up your idols. Not the film, the makers: here a smackering of Spaced-alumni scarper from the comfort and genius of Edgar Wright’s woollen hat sanctuary and straight into the arms of huggable Uncle John Landis, beloved purveyor of their childhood dreams and werewolf fantasies. The result’s a complete fucking disaster.

Real life makes Landis seem a big, frightening, lovable man, adjectives that have no business being bandied about in terms of this latest waste of celluloid, amazingly his first effort for thirty-eight thousand years. A roustabout murder-comedy with the laughs chopped off, it acts as a handy fail-mirror to the giddy heights of Wright’s latest work: Scott Pilgrim casts a motley clutch of youngsters who you’ve never seen or heard before, proceeds to let them say and do astoundingly entertaining things, and basks in the warm afterglow of cult quality. Burke and Hare rips Ronnie Corbett from his cut-price coffin and has him stand there. For two hours. Saying nothing funny. Wearing a hat.

This isn’t the way to make humorous films. Landis has been running around London with an oversized bag stuffing in funny people before having them… exist. On film. Hey, there’s Steven Merchant, the goggle-eyed Office thing-man! He’s smiling! His scene’s done! Papa Lazarou’s walking about, with a gun! And he’s… he’s shouting and… no, he’s gone. He’s gone. What’s happening? Oh thank God, Simon Pegg’s back and... he’s wiggled his ears a bit, and he’s run off and disappeared, and another scene’s ended, and nothing’s happened, and nothing’s funny. Landis has farmed some success in the past (specifically with Carrie Fisher pushing a high-calibre rifle into the pudgy face of a shit-coated John Belushi); it’s why everyone is working with him here. But he’s failed, and so have they: it’s a beyond-rubbish amateur project from a 60 year old man with form and goodwill on his side. So does that make it sadder that only six people turned up to watch it, or that none of them laughed once? Two morals then, three, another one for the road. Never let the men who wrote St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Frittons Gold near pen, paper or oxygen ever again, and have Edgar Wright direct, write and possibly even star in every film made for the next fifty years. GO HOLLYWOOD, GO.