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Sideshow
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| Year: |
2020
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Director: |
Adam Oldroyd
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| Stars: |
Les Dennis, Anthony Head, April Pearson, Nathan Clarke, Pameli Benham, Owen Oldroyd, Adrian Harris, Iorestina Florea
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| Genre: |
Comedy, Thriller |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Pray silence, for the Great Stupendo (Les Dennis) is speaking! He is a stage psychic, or mentalist as they are sometimes known, though he claims to have genuine psychic powers which the managers of the theatres he is hired for do not always appreciate. His manager, Gerald (Anthony Head), is pretty fed up with him and his habit of getting bored so easily while performing that he goes off on obscene tangents to keep himself engaged in what he regards as a very past it audience. But what this mentalist does not know is that someone wants to put him in an even more awkward position than he places his audience, someone who plans to break into his house tonight and see what he has in his horde of mementos...
While he has been very successful on stage and television, one medium comedian Les Dennis had trouble with conquering was the movies, and the ones that hired him were not exactly top tier. However, writer and director Adam Oldroyd had other ideas and got him to star in this crime comedy, one with ambitions to revive the humour of the Ealing comedies, though it seems the one he had in mind was The Ladykillers judging by the timbre of the jokes here (rather grim). And also, you cannot envisage The Titfield Thunderbolt including a quip about felching, so you could observe humour had certainly moved on since the nineteen-forties and fifties - The Carry Ons would not have gone that far either, for that matter.
Actually, neither would Confessions of a Window Cleaner, if we were being honest. So, while the gags were coarser, they were still ridiculous enough to raise a well-earned chuckle, these were a professional cast experienced in comedy and they did well with the material they were given. Had it not been for the grand finale on a clifftop, this would have made for a decent stage play itself, as the action was largely confined to the psychic's house for the greater part of the middle section, said psychic's real name being Stewart Pendrick. Two would-be criminals break in, Eve (April Pearson), the brains of the outfit, and Dom (Nathan Clarke), a goodhearted but slightly dim stooge who we can tell has gotten in over his head thanks to Eve's coaxing. She says she's there to liberate Pendrick's riches, as he doesn't trust banks and keeps them at home, but what is she really after?
There were a bunch of twists here and a mark of Oldroyd's surprisingly neatly plotted screenplay was that there was nothing extraneous, everything was there for a reason and that could be very pleasing, especially when the jigsaw pieces begin to slot together. As Pendrick is a slippery customer, we can never be sure whether he is playing his captors against each other or floundering in a situation he cannot, for once, control, and that tension helped the story over some stretches where frankly the film seemed to have forgotten it was a comedy and was aiming more squarely for the low budget thriller market. Really there were only four characters in this of any importance to that story, and one of those was off the screen for most of it, but if it was not a solid ribtickler from start to finish, every so often a real zinger, however bad taste it may be, would prompt laughter. That said, the team here were mostly television trained, and that might be why it rarely convinced you it needed to be on the silver screen: imagine a less edgily wacky version of Shearsmith and Pemberton's Psychoville and you're somewhere close to this. Music by Michael Csanyi-Wills.
[Sideshow will be in UK Cinemas from 11th March & available on Digital Download 21st March 2022!]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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