Movies

Kevin & Perry Go Large was proud British cinema – now it’s all but gone

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Twenty-five years ago, Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke played libidinous teenage monsters in one of the most successful Britflicks in UK box office history. Since then, the British film industry has become crisis-stricken and largely Americanised, writes Adam White. Where did all the local stories go?

By Adan White

The laws of physics are challenged early in Kevin & Perry Go Large, when Harry Enfield’s sullen, spotty teenager foils a bank robbery with his erection. Later on in the film – one of the most successful British movies in UK box office history – the camera is splattered by the gloop from an infected belly-button piercing, Kathy Burke cops off in a sand dune while dressed in full Gallagher-brother drag, and a third-act cameo is provided by EastEnders’ Phil Mitchell. Kevin & Perry Go Large, about a pair of sex-starved mates attempting to lose their virginity in Ibiza, is absolute tosh. But it’s our tosh: the product of a nation that invented Viz, Lucozade, and Denise van Outen. And 25 years ago this month, it was the sort of slapdash, locally made and proudly creaky tosh that British audiences regularly flocked to see. Today, though, things are different. And it begs a simple question: did the movies change, or did we?

The year 2000 is often considered a nadir in the story of the British film industry, with too many nascent production companies – each flush with National Lottery funding – trying to make their own Guy Ritchie movies, or their own spins on Richard Curtis, or films designed to capitalise on the (questionable) allure of the Primrose Hill set. Numerous releases became punchlines in their own right: the office romcom Janice Beard 45 WPM with Patsy Kensit and Rhys Ifans; the grotty gangland turkey Rancid Aluminium with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans; the… err… equally grotty gangland turkey Love, Honour and Obey with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans. Others have been largely forgotten: Kelly Macdonald’s bingo hall comedy House!; the clubland murder mystery Sorted; the unholy union of disco music, psychic powers and a naked Stephen Fry titled Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?

I will not lie and declare these films any good, likewise many of the Britflicks that came and went through cinemas soon after the millennium. Even if you wear the thickest of nostalgia goggles, you won’t find a secret cult classic in Honest, Dave Stewart’s infamous Swinging Sixties crime thriller in which three members of the pop group All Saints dropped acid and took their tops off. But to watch any of these films again is to be immersed in work that could only ever be made in Britain. And – with that in mind – it’s staggering just how expansive the term “British film” used to be. At the other end of the quality spectrum, homegrown cinema meant that year’s Purely Belter, an endearingly chintzy Geordie comedy about teenage Newcastle United supporters. It also meant Wonderland, Michael Winterbottom’s tender ensemble drama about lonely, alienated Londoners. We had range.

Upon its release, Kevin & Perry Go Large was often contrasted with the previous year’s American Pie, another sex comedy about prurient teens, albeit one with a far less grubby bent. It was “more sophisticated fare”, as Empire magazine put it at the time – some claim for a film built around a scene in which Jason Biggs has sex with a dessert. But I suppose it’s accurate: whereas American Pie cast nebbishly handsome men and some of the most beautiful women of 1999 to play its horny yet earnest adolescents, Kevin & Perry is almost overwhelmingly ghoulish-looking.

Enfield and Burke, who originated the characters on the Nineties sketch show Harry Enfield & Chums, transform themselves into greasy-haired monsters; tantrum-throwing grotesques with craven libidos and a wardrobe of sagging shell suits. American Pie boasted Barenaked Ladies, Third Eye Blind and Norah Jones on its soundtrack. Kevin & Perry Go Large is built around a novelty dance track in which the pair repeatedly chant: “All I wanna do is do it – big girl, big girl”. It went to No 16 in the UK Top 40.

A Variety article in 2000 reported that Paramount Pictures did pick up Kevin & Perry for US distribution – with plans to position it as a British spin on Beavis and Butt-Head, apparently – but an actual release didn’t seem to materialise. It’s largely unthinkable for America to ever have “got” the film, though, with its “top shelf of a newsagent magazine rack” set pieces and laddish frivolity. Its entire creative approach is as British as bangers and mash, its aspirations admirably local.

Over time, British films like Kevin & Perry – meaning ones devoid of obvious global appeal – have become increasingly unusual, and rarely trouble the box office like they once did. Think Mike Leigh’s mesmeric Hard Truths, Molly Manning Walker’s holiday-from-hell drama How to Have Sex, or the little-seen 2024 comedy Seize Them! with Aimee Lou Wood. Think queer dramas Layla and Unicorns, or the Christmas movie Boxing Day, or recent film versions of TV series including Bad Education, The Inbetweeners and People Just Do Nothing. All worthy slices of thoroughgoing Britainalia, and satisfying to varying taste levels, yet few of them found a deserving audience.

The possible reasons for this are tenfold. The internet age is one defined by homogenisation and an Americanisation of creativity, while the genres that for years British film seemed to champion (comedy, romances, gritty character studies, even costume dramas) have largely migrated to television. Cinema tickets are expensive, and audiences are conditioned only to want to pay for blockbuster spectacle – something that is rarely financially viable for the UK film industry, and that, arguably, we’ve never been particularly good at making anyway.

Endearingly British tosh: Kathy Burke and Harry Enfield in ‘Kevin & Perry Go Large’
Endearingly British tosh: Kathy Burke and Harry Enfield in ‘Kevin & Perry Go Large’ (Tiger Aspect Pics/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Still, it is concerning for the future of British cultural identity as a whole. Numerous industry power players have spoken in recent years of the crisis in UK film funding, and the increasing threat to specifically British storytelling. Statistics last year from the BFI were a sobering read: the overwhelming majority of film production spend in 2024 (87 per cent of it, in fact) was on “inward” productions such as Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon, and the next Knives Out sequel – films with largely American casts, American backers and global reach. “Domestic” productions – meaning films with a more overtly British bent and British backers – made up just nine per cent of spend.

Is it any wonder, then, that Britain is in such a cultural drought when so many of the films we make might just as well have been made anywhere? And that while movies including Barbie and Wicked – which were shot at Warner Bros Studios in Hertfordshire – helped inject millions into the UK economy, they barely spoke to British culture or British society, or reflected anything about our everyday existence. For all the criticism levelled 25 years ago at British cinema’s Class of 2000, it’s impossible to deny that films like Kevin & Perry, Purely Belter and Rancid Aluminium were ours. It was easy to see our humour in them. Our lives and foibles. Our teeth. Someone get Rhys Ifans’s agent on the phone and tell them we need him pronto.

Source: Kevin & Perry Go Large was proud British cinema – now it’s all but gone | The Independent

This 41-Year-Old British Film Is Among the Greatest Gothic Horror Movies Ever

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The Company of Wolves

Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves turns a classic bedtime story into a haunting and unforgettable cinematic experience.

By Ria Pathak

From Snow White to Cinderella, the cinematic world has seen many retellings of these fairy tales over the years. Many of these tales, like Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel, crossed themselves to the horror genre with a mix of fantasy. One such film from the 80s doesn’t just retell the tale of Little Red Riding Hood but turns the classic bedtime story into a dark, haunting and unforgettable cinematic experience. Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, rather than showing a colorful, happy fairytale, confronts the darker aspects of desire and fear. The film plunges the audience into its subconscious, revealing the unsettling truths hidden beneath the surface. Even 41 years later, this British fantasy film stands as one of the greatest gothic tales ever told in cinema.

The Company of Wolves is a screen adaptation of British author Angela Carter’s 1979 short story of the same name. Carter, who also co-wrote the screenplay along with Irish director Neil Jordan, experienced a troubled childhood. She spent most of her childhood with her maternal grandmother and suffered from anorexia, an eating disorder that causes people, especially young women, to obsess over their body image and weight. Hence, Carter used the theme of adolescence and the fears related to it to craft dreamlike to transform the forest into a breeding ground for primal fears. With one of the most iconic and genre-bending werewolf transformations ever portrayed in cinema, The Company of Wolves is a testament to the power of gothic horror.

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British filmmaker Mike Leigh celebrated in Paris

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As Mike Leigh’s five-decade career takes centre stage at the Paris Cinémathèque for a retrospective, the British filmmaker speaks to Eve Jackson about 50 years of making movies, from the raw intensity of “Naked” and the jubilant optimism of “Happy-Go-Lucky”, to historical storytelling in “Peterloo” and “Mr Turner”. With accolades like the Palme d’Or for “Secrets & Lies” at the Cannes Film festival and the Golden Lion for “Vera Drake” at Venice, at 82 Leigh continues to illuminate humanity’s complexities with his latest film “Hard Truths”.

Mackendrick and Odets’ “Sweet Smell of Success”

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The Sweet Smell of Success
The Sweet Smell of Success

By Paul Cronin | The Criterion Collection

In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be taught, only learned, and each man or woman has to learn it through his or her own system of self-education”), he became one of the art form’s most legendary instructors. Aspirant filmmakers from around the world chose to study at CalArts because of Mackendrick’s presence, and even today, copies of his carefully composed classroom notes—which he called “my life’s work”—remain prized possessions among CalArts graduates, who speak of their mentor with veneration.

Though he was reluctant to use his own films in the classroom, one notable exception was Sweet Smell of Success, which served as the basis for one of his most penetrating handouts. In the extract that follows, Mackendrick describes how the original screenwriter on the project, Ernest Lehman, author of the short novel on which the film is based, fell ill and was replaced by Clifford Odets.Odets had been a leading Broadway playwright who, in the thirties, delivered to the progressive Group Theatre collective such works as Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Golden Boy (see Barton Fink, whose title character even looks a little like Odets). As a Hollywood screenwriter, he had worked on the script for Hitchcock’s Notorious and on early drafts of what became It’s a Wonderful Life. Handed Lehman’s script, Odets chose to rework it completely into one that, while structurally based on the original, is a much more densely packed affair, bursting at the seams with expressionistic dialogue.

 

 

Yet for all the genuine sparkle of Odets’s memorable dialogue and the structural reinforcements he made to the story, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Sweet Smell of Success can also be a thoroughly visual experience. Years after the film’s release, Mackendrick would tell students that “cinema is not so much nonverbal as preverbal. Though it is able to reproduce realms of dialogue, film can also tell stories purely in movement, in action and reaction.” When we turn off the sound and let the pictures of Sweet Smell of Success do the talking, we see just how much information is gleaned through the camera, the lighting, and the blocking of the actors. As former Mackendrick student and writer-­director James Mangold explains, “While Sweet Smell is a film brimming with rapid-fire dialogue, it is almost completely decipherable as a silent film.” Assisted in no small part by cinematographer James Wong Howe’s crisp, glistening, high-contrast location photography, his low-angled, smoke-filled framing and technique of washing the walls “with oil to get the glitter,” Mackendrick understood how much of the storytelling’s heavy lifting could be done with blocking, costumes, lighting, props, and the camera.

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