Rentadick

How one film can so woefully underuse such a great line up of actors and actresses beggars belief. A lame script laces poor and very unfunny jokes.

An all round pathetic film.

This woeful 70s comedy was, believe it or not, scripted by some of the Monty Python team. Appalled at the result they removed their names from the credits leaving John Fortune to carry the blame for 'additional dialogue'. 'Rentadick' probably did seem like a good idea but somewhere along the way it went badly wrong.

Funny? No. The cast - ok, stand up Richard Briers, Donald Sinden, Ronald Fraser, James Booth, Kenneth Cope, Spike Milligan, and Richard Beckinsale. All showed a major misjudgement appearing in this rubbish. Don't waste your time - there's little to raise a smile in this pathetic movie.

This abomination, which was written by John Cleese and friends, represents the very low point of English film making. Leaving aside the excesses of the 1970's, this is a racist, sexist, and very unfunny movie with so little plot it is amazing.

Re-arrange your sock drawer instead. The time would be better spent.

Armitage runs a chemical company that is on the verge of producing a gas that causes temporary disability. Clearly the military want it but it is also sought by a group of Japanese. Both Armitage and Madam Greenfly hire different people in the same detective agency to guard the gas and steal it respectively……confusion, double crosses and hilarity ensue….

I had high hopes for this…get this…it was written by Python's Chapman and Cleese, with contributions from satirists Wells and Fortune (who still works with Rory Bremner). It has a lot of famous TV faces (Sinden, Griffiths, Keith, Briers) and has involvement from Goons Milligan and Michael Bentine. With this type of quality involved I assumed that the product would be good.

But this never rises above the standard set by all 1970's British comedy which rely on bawdy farce rather than humour to get by. It has plenty of little surreal touches that make it rise slightly above the pack, but really this isn't carried across into the dialogue or plot. It even builds to a keystone cop style chase – typical of the period. None of the cast really get into it – the cameos are OK, but you can't help feel the waste.

Overall this is pretty poor. It's better than the raft of smutty 1970's comedies that this is related to, but with the talent on board you can't help feel that greater things were possible.

I watched "Rentadick", as I assume most people might, solely because I learned that John Cleese and Graham Chapman co-wrote the script; however, in my version at least, they are both uncredited, so they either took their names off out of embarrassment, or their initial work was completely discarded. In either case, the final script is godawful. The direction is so clumsy that it is impossible to know who is in any given scene or what they are trying to do; in its own way, this film is as hard to understand as any of Tarkovsky's work. The cast is a who-is-not-who of British film comedy; the only face (among other parts....) I recognized was Julie Ege. They say few people have actually seen "Rentadick" and lived to tell the tale. Don't risk it. 0 out of 4 stars.