Directed by: Andy Humphries
Starring: Johnny Vegas, McKenzie Crook, Mark Gatiss, Dominic Coleman, Lucy Davis, Adrian Chiles, Julia Davis, Carol Harvey
Buy Here: Amazon UK
When it comes to bad taste British comedy you can’t get any worse than Sex Lives of the Potato Men, a film that you may need to watch twice to ensure it wasn’t just a drunken dream you had when passing out after downing ten pints of Special Brew and eating a cold vindaloo.
The Potato Men of the title are Dave, Ferris, Tolly and Jeremy, who all work for a potato distribution warehouse in Birmingham. What unites them is they all keep their brains in their trousers.
Sleazy fat Dave (played by lager lout comic Johnny Vegas) is married with a kid, but he’s totally obsessed with porn. After his wife chucks him out, he dedicates himself to a life of “fanny, blow jobs, big tits, and beer”.
With this in mind, Dave looks up an old flame, a right old slapper who has seen better days but is well up for threesomes and group sex. Things don’t go quite according to plan though. The promised threesome turns out to be with another bloke instead of another woman, and when Dave turns up for the group session there are so many men waiting to have a go that he can’t get parked anywhere near her house. He has to take a ticket to guarantee his place in the queue.
To be fair, the threesome scene does yield some comical moments. Waiting in the bedroom for their female sex partner to arrive, Dave and the other guy bond over a discussion on how creaky the bed is. Rather than getting excited when the woman turns up in her kinky clobber, they put in a request for some WD40!
The lads then try to get busy ‘spit roasting’ the rather manky female but find the going hard, or not, so to speak. Ever the gentleman, Dave asks her if she has any porn to get them in the mood!
Dave’s workmate Ferris (McKenzie Crook) has an even sleazier sex life. Being totally skint, he is forced to live with his mother-in-law who for some inexplicable reason treats the skinny, shadowy-eyed lothario like a sex object. “My mother-in-law gave me a blowjob last night”, he tells Dave, who replies, “Mine gave me a fishing rod once.”
At one point Ferris manages to cop off with a girl from a chip shop (named ‘Fishy Fingers’). But while he’s giving her one in her own bedroom her obese peeping-tom hubby jumps out of the wardrobe. Far from being upset, he insists that they carry on for his viewing pleasure. In a later replay of the same scenario, the fat hubby tapes himself to the ceiling above the bed!
Tolly (Dominic Coleman) has never really recovered from his wife walking out on him. His favourite occupation is enjoying one off the wrist listening to sex lines while eating jam and fish paste sandwiches. At one point we see him doing this while Dave sits beside him on the sofa!
Jeremy (Mark Gatis) is the manager of the Potato Men and seems at first to be the most sophisticated of them – not that the bar is set high. He claims to enjoy wine, books and chess but in reality spends the majority of his spare time picking his nose and stalking his ex-girlfriend, sending her hate mail and kidnapping her dog.
The movie is filled with unattractive and desperate characters with no shame and no standards, who will do just about anything for sex, women included. There’s even an amorous granny who wants to give one of the lads a blowjob but asks him to stand on a chair because “I can’t get down there, what with my back.” Oh, and Adrian Chiles turns up as a sex party host.
It’s awful, yes, and Empire may even have been right as labelling it one of the worst films ever made. But if expressions like ‘fanny juice’, ‘pork sword’ and ‘beef curtains’ cause you to chuckle then you’ll probably enjoy it anyway, even though you know you should be deeply ashamed of yourself!