Average User Rating: 1 Vote(s)
 
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Coverscan of Rentadick
Video Cover Thumbnail(s)

Distributor Rank
Catalogue Number V1063
Release Series
Release Date August 1984
Duration: 89m 21s
Printed Classification
Notes
User Reviews:
by Lee James Turnock
'From the [i]Monty Python[/i] team!' screams the misleading packaging for this misfiring seventies farce. In fact, [b]Rentadick [/b]started out as a screenplay written by Python alumni John Cleese and Graham Chapman, under the title [i]Piglust and Company[/i](!), and it was intended as an all-star showcase for the astonishing array of talents who burst onto the small screen in the sixties under the aegis of the divisive David Frost - the Pythons, The Goodies, the Two Ronnies, and Marty Feldman among them. Not surprisingly, Frost jumped at the idea and bought the screenplay - only to have a change of heart at the eleventh hour (no doubt prompted by his decision to reinvent himself as a serious journalist) and sold the rights to Ned Sherrin, another prime mover in the sixties satire boom with a track record for producing highly variable British films ([b]The Virgin Soldiers[/b], [b]Girl Stroke Boy[/b],[b] The Alf Garnett Saga[/b], [b]Up Pompeii[/b]) - and a man Cleese has since described as 'slimy and incompetent.' Understandably so, since Sherrin quickly gutted the script, had it extensively rewritten by unknown hands (John Wells and John Fortune receive a screen credit for additional material), and dismissed the Oxbridge lot in favour of a pick-and-mix cast of sitcom stalwarts, familiar favourites, and character actors parachuted in from various television series. He also changed the title to [b]Rentadick[/b], in case you hadn't already guessed - 'there was a coarseness to his taste,' to quote the rather miffed Mr. Cleese.  So, with the film's chequered history firmly in mind, is it any good? Of course not. It's an absolute bloody shambles, reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Children's Film Foundation filtered through a series of knockabout slapstick set-pieces that would struggle to pass muster in a below-average instalment of [b]Rentaghost[/b] or [b]Crackerjack[/b]. The decade-specific casual racism and chauvinism might have some appeal to contrarian nostalgia masochists - the kind of people who bought [i]Curry & Chips[/i] on DVD, not because it was funny or interesting (it most definitely isn't) but because they want to make some pathetic point about 'the good old-fashioned comedy we used to enjoy before political correctness killed everything' - but I wouldn't count on it, and anyone hoping to find even the merest of traces of the pioneering spirit of the best of [i]Monty Python[/i] in this woeful, cheap-looking ragbag is on a hiding to nothing.