Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door
Rating - 15
Director - Stephen Friers
Written By - Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Rowland Rivron
Starring - Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Peter Cook, Nicolas Parsons
Run time - 52 minutes
Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door is a 1988 comedy from the Channel 4 short comedy film series The Comic Strip Presents… which originally began as a comedy club ran by actor, writer, and director Peter Richardson in Soho which showcased future alternative comedy stars like Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, and Alexei Sayle who (among others) all frequently starred in the episodes as well.
The film is based around the two unnamed alcoholic owners of escort agency Dreamytime Escorts (Mayall and Edmondson) who rather than offer female companions to men, the two lure rich foreign businessmen, and use their money to go on all day drinking binge against their will. They live in an office next door to a contract killer called Mr. Jolly (Peter Cook), who claims to be a fluffy toy salesman and hides his murders from his neighbors by loudly playing Tom Jones records to drown out the noise of his victims’ screams. While taking out a Japanese businessman, they visit an “illegal drinking establishment” called The Neon Teepee where they are given a letter for Mr. Jolly which consists of £3000 and a note from gangster Lovebucket (Peter Richardson) to “take out” TV presenter Nicholas Parsons, as he wants to stop him opening the off-license the escorts live over. The two take this note as an opportunity to go out with him and scrounge some money and booze from him. Parsons thinks they are winners of a competition to have dinner with him as he was expecting to meet them the same night (the Dreamytime Escorts ran the real winners off the road in an earlier scene). After a night of drinking and messing about, they wake up in their van and bump into Lovebucket who forces them to kill Nicholas Parsons which leads to many attempts and hilarious antics along the way.
Though I do love this film as it is one of my favourite comic strip episodes, the main characters are highly similar to Richie and Eddie from Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson’s future sitcom Bottom. They are stupid, wild, both equally sneaky and violent and they shout a lot but still enjoyable to watch mess about and have a laugh. Even a lot of the violence in this was later used in Bottom but I do still highly enjoy this film for its great performances from Mayall, Edmondson, and Peter Cook, a good script and the hilarity of the film itself.
Score - 8/10
This film and many other Comic Strip episodes are currently available on All 4
Comments
Post a Comment