The Comic

I came across this movie when arrow announced a bluray treatment would be making its way into the world but upon the announcement the sheer barrage of negative comments was like nothing I had seen before. Fast forward to the release of the movie on bluray ,Arrow also added the film to its online channel on amazon prime. So I had a 7 day free trial for arrow so why not check out to see what all the fuss is about..... This film is cheap but not cheap in a good or arty way just cheap in a nasty poorly filmed way. I lasted a mere 25 minutes of this atrocity and that was 24 minutes to much. So instead I will review a female stripper in the movie and her breasts as that was at least something interesting I saw i this movie. The main character goes home with a stripper who strips to her sexy underwear and removes top half to show perky little boobies and then it cuts to next scene. Not great boobs but least was something lol.

So avoid this movie at all costs as its rotten and the people who made it should be ashamed of themselves. A Uwe Boll movie is citizen kane compared to this rubbish.

I did actually read a story in regard to this movie that when it was premiered in the Scala cinema in London that the director had to be escorted out secretly as it was getting booed,heckled and they feared for his safety

In a dystopian city, aspiring comedian Sam Coex (Steve Munroe) murders Joey Myers (Jeff Pirie), the leading comic on the club circuit, and takes his place in the limelight. Soon after, Sam hooks up with drug-addict stripper Ann (the beautiful but untalented Berderia Timini), who is the cause of his downfall.

I first saw The Comic at the legendary Scala cinema in King's Cross, at an event called Splatterfest '90. Since IMDb says that the film was made in 1985, I can only assume that it languished unreleased for quite a few years on account of it being so completely and utterly awful. It should have stayed on the shelf, in my opinion; what were the organisers thinking when they added this to the programme? I recall that the film was so poorly received at Splatterfest that its director Richard Driscoll, who was present at the screening, sloped off without saying a word.

Having just watched the film again after 30 years, I can confirm that the film is every bit as awful as I remembered it to be. Worse, in fact: it can now add 'looking horribly dated' to its long list of cinematic offences. I hate this film with every fibre of my being. I hate the dreadful dialogue and corny performances. I hate Coex's terrible orange hair (Coex is supposed to be a top comedian, but his hair is the only funny thing about him). I hate the over-use of a smoke machine (99% of the film is swathed in smoke, Driscoll clearly a man who likes to get his money's worth). I hate the gaudy coloured lighting. I hate Coex's badly wall-papered apartment. I hate the totalitarian guards with their stupid little ponytails (what I like to call 'punytails'). To be honest, I hate everything about this film and everyone involved for making such a joyless train-wreck.

1/10. Definitely in my Top Ten Worst Films Ever list, and I've seen a lot of rubbish.

Sam Coex (Steve Munroe) is a stand-up comedian who just can't get a break. After a rival comedian is murdered in what must be the only nightclub in town, Sam takes his place and goes on a prostitute and stripper killing binge.

The Comic has lofty ambitions, but it is hampered by a small budget and bad acting. Steve Munroe lacks charisma in the lead role and his Christmas cracker jokes are poorly delivered. In an odd design choice he also sports dyed, day-glo orange hair like a clown wig.

Any commentary about a dystopian society are hampered by an insipid script. This is not A Clockwork Orange or 1984 level of atmosphere. It's bizarre. The brutal guards look like weedy and people get about in horse and carriage for unknown reasons.

For exploitation and horror fans there are some surprisingly nasty murder scenes with a fair amount of blood. Also a few long sex scenes.

This film has gone onto gain a bit of a cult status due to VHS tapes doing the rounds in the 90s and screenings at horror film festivals. It's a mediocre at best film and one wonders what the intended vision was had the budget been into the millions. The Blu-ray from Arrow has a sharp print, good sound and English subtitles.

When I picked up a copy of The Comic at a truck stop for $1, I expected a bad movie. But I never expected something this horrible. I thought it would be a trashy horror film with a comedian who murders people while telling lame jokes. The box said "He's a real cut-up!", suggesting such a movie. But instead of a campy horror film, we get a confusing, boring and pretentious foreign film that doesn't make the least bit of sense. It was a half-hour into the movie that I realized that it was in a post-apocolyptic future, and after that, it kept on jumping back and forth between flash-back and dream sequence, that I didn't know what in the blue hell was happening. I think the movie makers tried to put a bunch of symbolizm and meaning into many of scenes, but in a crappy film like this, it doesn't really matter at all. I almost fell asleep during this movie, and I love bad movies. Unless you like sitting through three hours of hellish tedium, don't watch The Comic.

There is very little doubt in my ruinous, B-Movie barbecued mind that maverick independent film-maker Richard Driscoll's hyperbolically weird 'The Comic' remains one of the more garishly eccentric genre films Britain produced in the 80s. While I actively celebrate the unbridled lunacy of the director's singularly skewed vision, as his idiosyncratically downbeat, pan-dimensional narrative about a perplexingly humourless comic's murderous rise to fame is not readily categorized! If Andy Milligan had directed a transfixingly ponderous, visibly penurious, bathos-laden long form Fields of The Nephilim video, one crudely adorned in faux Dickensian squalor, its luridly blue-gelled dystopian palate, dismal dialogue and cheapjack Orwellian rhetoric transform 'The Comic' into a monolithically mental micro-genre unto itself, and bravura bad actor Steve Monroe's hysterically unfiltered, unconventionally unsubtle, disturbingly childlike 'performance' as the hateful, orange-haired harlequin Sam Coex is mesmerizing to behold! 'The Comic' is, perhaps, not an altogether amenable watch for B-Movie newbies, since its manifest absurdity, turgid prose and the inventively contrarian acting choices of Steve Monroe actively guarantees that none of your more delicate sensibilities remain unmolested!

Vividly expressing all the innate humour of a cold war Thatcherite Britain, the curiously caustic cinematic charms of Richard Driscoll's outlandish, fabulously off-beat, pathologically strange phantasmagoria are grimly revivified on this brand-new HD restoration of 'The Comic' for the rarefied edification of hardcore bad movie masochists and scurrilous schlock collectors alike! At many points this majestically melon-twisting misshape feels like the most vexing, dayglow delirious, THC-spawned fever-dream made celluloid flesh, and for that especially edifying, reality corrupting reason alone, I have a grudging admiration for its confounding uniqueness!

'The Comic's uniquely melon-twisting dystopia is a monolithically mental micro-genre unto itself!' - Weirdlingwolf / Dirty Kunst Video.