The Comic (1985) User Reviews

Woah...

[BandSAboutMovies · 3/10 · 2 July 2021]

This movie feels like it belongs to no set time and space. I can freely admit that it's not good, but also that I'm fascinated by it. If asked to describe it in ten words or less, I'd say, "Imagine if Cafe Flesh was about comedy and not good."

It's set in a fascist police set of the future, but shot on the sets of Freddie Francis' The Doctor and the Devils. Nobody bothered to clean those sets, so they are covered with straw. This movie is to straw as Conquest is to fog.

Sam Coex (Steve Munroe) is a stand-up comedian who can't get booked, so he kills - not like you kill on stage - his rival Joey Myers, buries him in his garden and takes over his career, becoming a big success. He starts sleeping with stripper named Ann all while the zombified Joey starts to haunt him An American Werewolf in London-style.

You have to wonder what the Welsh miners and doctors whose hard-earned money went to funding this thought when they saw the final result. As for its writer and director, Richard Driscoll, he was found guilty of a $2.3 million tax fraud over the invoices for his movie Eldorado, which starred Daryl Hannah, Caroline Munro, Brigitte Nielsen, Peter O'Toole, Rik Mayall, David Carradine, Jeff Fahey, Steve Guttenberg and Michael Madsen. He served three years in jail for the crime. Some would say his worst offenses would be the films that he makes, which are Bruno Mattei-esque jabs at recreating other films like Kannibal (Silence of the Lambs) and at least two movies with a title close to Grindhouse.

Man, now I have a whole new thing to be obsessed about and yet, I know in my heart that the films of Driscoll are not in any way good. Such is how it goes. Also, the lovemaking scenes in this movie disturbed me and I grew up watching the Dark Brothers films, so just imagine the things that I have seen.

So bad, I added an extra star

[martin-bonenfant · 2/10 · 17 August 2022]

Very, very bad.

This is the first time I took the time to share a screenshot of a scene with friends as I wouldn't believe the level of mediocrity I was witnessing. And this was at 13 min in the movie!!! At least, Plan 9 and The Room are entertaining to some level.

This is like watching a slow motion video of toilet unclogging in close-up, with similar feelings involved.

Captivating, but in a very very bad way....

'The Comic'? It should have been called 'The Tragic'.

[haznael · 1/10 · 20 April 2002]

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.

Sam Coex makes Les Dennis seem funny by comparison.

[BA_Harrison · 1/10 · 12 August 2020]

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.

Is this the worst film ever made ?

[theelectricwarrior58 · 1/10 · 3 June 2007]

Like the guy who posted the first comment I bought this film for only 1GBP, I knew the film was going to be bad. I hoped that it would be in the so bad it's good category. It's so much more than that, it's appalling, it's the pits, it is without doubt the worst film I've ever seen, I had to watch it in five sittings. It's 89 minutes of the hoariest clichés and cod psychology. It has the worst cast, the worst sets, the cheapest and nastiest special effects. I could go on but I don't want to over egg the pudding !

I've not seen every film ever made so I'm not qualified to call it the worst film ever made but I can't imagine that any other film could be worse than this. Like the guy who made the first post, I too like bad films. If 'The Producers' (you know, Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder) had picked this script, it would have totally spoilt that movie for their theatre audience would have walked out and never come back.

It's a howler, watch it with a companion because you'll be begging them to kill you before the film is halfway through. Druggies save yourself some money, you don't need any mind altering drugs, just watch this film it will be a trip. If finding the worst film ever is you're Holy Grail, find this, buy it, take it back to your Camelot and stick it in ye olde DVD player, watch it and then write to thank me for putting you on to this.

I will treasure this film for ever. Thank you Richard Driscoll !!!!

PS, does anyone know if any of the cast or crew ever worked again, apart from in McDonalds that is ?

PPS, if you only see one bad film before you die, make sure it's this one.

Absolute cabbage

[chrisgemmelluk · 1/10 · 14 September 2020]

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

That bad its even worse !

[bingobearuk · 1/10 · 7 July 2007]

Saw this film a couple of years back when I discovered it had someone I know in it. What a disappointment it was to see it , a really awful film and with awful acting especially by Gabe Cameron who plays Eddie , seen better acting in Seaseme Street ! Don't waste your money on this even if you see at .01p it may damage your VCR or DVD player If you want to see a film thats the pits then watch this If you want to see Shakespere , then rent out a Kenneth Brannagh Film I wish I could have given this film ZERO 0 , but I wasn't able too The Comic , it was no joke watching this load of tosh !

1 Star as I had to give between 1 or 10 this film should win a razzie

Funny how?

[kosmasp · 5/10 · 26 July 2022]

I think I rather would hang out with Joe Pesci (no pun intended) - also Joe Pesci is the actor obviously and not the character from Goodfellas, so there is that to consider, if you catch my drift? That aside, this odd movie is ... well hard to describe to say the least.

A lot of things seem to boil down to chance and fortune (or misfortune depending on your own view and moral compass). When the budget went ... well extinct, they found a way to carry on.

So maybe you are able to cut this some slack - maybe weird and odd is right up your alley. A lot of things you can take into account. Tough to watch for sure - suspend your disbelief and ... it might just work out for you. Way better than for the Comic ... which one you ask? Well that is a good question ... also be careful what you wish for. And what you hackle for ... which makes this very reletable at the beginning at least.

Die Laughing - Below average slasher

[ninjaalexs · 5/10 · 18 April 2022]

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.

A Staggering Work of...

[junk-monkey · 10/10 · 2 June 2013]

When I first watched The Comic a year ago I dismissed it in my mind as 'a turd'. But I think I may be wrong. The Comic, after having lived in my head for a year, and on another viewing, is, possibly, the greatest undiscovered work of genius film-making produced in Britain since the Sixties - that or a sustained display of amateur ineptitude which, just by being so incredibly crap, manages to completely bypass any form of criticism.

With most bad films you have some idea what the film was trying to do: it's an unfunny comedy, it's a not scary Horror film, it's an unthrilling thriller. With The Comic you don't have a clue. I really haven't got any way to start to work out what the film thought it was other than to liken it to other films which it resembles (slightly - and then almost certainly by accident). Plot-wise I think it's the rags to riches and back again, rise and fall story (think David Essex in That'll be the Day / Stardust) but set in an authoritarian future where jackbooted militia can beat the crap out of people in public for no real reason, then throw them in gaol without trial, and the highest form of culture appears to be the working man's club circuit. It's obviously heavily influenced by David Lynch's unfiltered stream of unconsciousness imagery; uncomfortable, grainy, double-framed shots of nothing much happening are sustained beyond any sensible length. At the end of the film several of these, seemingly totally unrelated shots, are repeated as if they are DEEPLY SIGNIFICANT. There are nightmare/dream sequences with the smoke machines pumping away so much that, at times, it's hard to figure out what is going on on screen.

The cutting jolts all over the place leaving audience confusion in its wake - for most of the film I had very little idea of where any of the 'action' was taking place; apart from a shot of some boats in a harbour and a couple of establishing shots of a big house all the film takes place indoors - even the scenes which are obviously meant to be outside feel like interiors. (Mostly down to the crappy sound work.) The setting is weird too, the street (shot in what appears to be some sort of living museum heritage centre) is knee deep in straw. The rich get about in horse-drawn carriages or vintage auto-mobiles. The protagonist's 'flat' consists of one ground floor room with a door that opens straight onto the street and has shop windows - and some of the worst wrinkled wallpaper-hanging I have seen. A metaphor maybe for all the many layers of meaninglessness on display? A thin covering to be peeled away to reveal even shallower layers of meaningless beneath? And just why does the protagonist's mullet change colour from yellow to orange, then back again, quite so often? What was that grainy, sepia-toned flashback to the granny getting her throat slit by total strangers all about? Who is the whore in the red dress and what has she to do with anything going on in the rest of the film? Why does the hero pay for his daughter to be smuggled out of the country with a small bag of undefined something like a character from a historical movie? and why doesn't the smuggler look to see what's in the bag? - it could be toenail clippings for all he knows! Why is 'the comic' at the centre of the film so incredibly bloody unfunny? the only really funny stand-up delivered joke of the whole film comes from a character we have never met before (and never seen again) suddenly appearing mid-frame to deliver a seriously surreal gag before vanishing from the movie. What. Is. Going. On? This sort of thing keeps me awake at night.

I think producer / writer / director / editor / sounds effects arranger Richard Driscoll was trying to do something very simple - an SF reworking of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in the northern Working-men's club circuit - but somehow, accidentally, managed to make the most accurate, sustained, parody of every bad, overly-arty first year Film Student movie ever produced.

It's comedy heaven.

'The Comic's uniquely melon-twisting dystopia is a monolithically mental micro-genre unto itself!'

[Weirdling_Wolf · 7/10 · 12 May 2022]

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.