Kevin and Perry Go Large (2000)
In 1997, Kathy Burke won the Best Actress award at the Cannes film festival. The jury was greatly impressed by her performance as Val, a defeated abuse victim in Gary Oldman’s powerful council estate drama Nil by Mouth. Oldman’s film is excellent and Burke’s performance remains staggering: an immaculately-detailed portrayal of a life conditioned to expect and endure violence. Three years after shocking Cannes, Burke took the co-lead in Kevin and Perry Go Large, one of the most juvenile comedies ever made.
I often find myself lamenting the fact that so many great screen actors are happy to spend their prime years making mediocre comedies, only occasionally proving their full capabilities in great dramas. Adam Sandler is the obvious example, but what about Catherine Tate? This actress, so brilliant at playing high drama in Doctor Who, was most recently seen in 2022’s The Nan Movie. I always felt that David Schwimmer should have had a better career. Then there’s Burke.
Though always a compelling presence, I wish that Kathy Burke had more fully explored the dramatic routes that Nil by Mouth must have opened up to her. She’s the single funniest element in Kevin and Perry Go Large, a film largely remembered for its novelty rave music and particularly crass gross-out humour. I enjoy this movie, but I’d be profoundly embarrassed to watch it with another human being. It’s a product of the Farrelly Brothers years: the short age when faecal matter, ejaculate and injured penises gained unparalleled prominence on the silver screen.
David Cummings and Harry Enfield wrote a script that gleefully cashed in on this comedic trend, creating a scuzzy and unpleasant movie packed with superhuman erections, floating poo and showers of vomit. Enfield performs well enough as an actor, gurning his way through the story and cracking his voice with aplomb, but Burke is a genuinely special presence. Perhaps it’s foolish to admit it, but I felt a little bit sorry for her. She’s too good to be surrounded by bodily fluids.
In the extremely patchy tradition of converting British television comedy into cinema, Kevin and Perry Go Large follows two characters from the sketch show Harry Enfield and Chums: Kevin Patterson (Enfield) and Perry Carter (Burke). A pair of loser misfit teenagers with dreams of girlfriends and stardom, Kevin and Perry have settled in to a grim adolescent routine. They lounge around suburban London, spat with their parents and regularly embarrass themselves in public.
In a desperate attempt to turn things around and propel themselves to international fame, the pair travel to Ibiza: the club capital of the world. There they meet iconic mix-master Eyeball Paul (Rhys Ifans) and strive to become top dee-jays, working towards their goal of pumping out tunes at Amnesia: the hottest spot on the island. Parents, romance, drugs and gastrointestinal mishaps get in the way.
The film is ugly and revolting. On the small screen, in fuzzy mid-90s TV quality, the Kevin and Perry sketches work very well. In clearer definition the pantomime horror of Enfield and Burke’s performances becomes alarmingly clear. It’s not just that they look nothing like teenagers: their make-up and costuming make them look like gargoyles. The effect is only heightened when they spend time around actual young actors. The film’s hideousness peaks in the most putrid sequence that I have ever seen in any movie, and I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust.
Kevin and Perry meet two compatible young ladies, both of whom retreat to their hotel room to prepare for a double date with the boys. In nauseating detail, the camera follows the girls as they pop spots and clear gunk and hair out of a number of orifices. My sister described this scene to me when I was about eight, and I found it upsetting then. Now that I’ve seen it, I’ll be haunted by it forever. It’s truly nasty.
The film’s unrepentant unpleasantness is its downfall. The original Kevin and Perry TV sketches had moments of cringe comedy, but they found their comedic sweet spot through witty observational humour. Kevin was used as an exaggerated avatar of mopey teenage behaviour, while Perry was assigned the role of the gormless, vacant friend. Enfield’s show used their characteristic patterns of speech and odd habits to craft genuinely funny jokes about teenage behaviour.
My favourite gag in the the whole show sees Kevin bitterly rant at his parents before transforming his personality in an instant. Perry’s mom calls and Kevin becomes sweet and angelic, a perfectly-behaved teenage boy. This is funny because it’s exactly how lots of teenagers behave. When you’re 15, good manners are for other people’s parents, not your own. I knew people like Kevin, and I was probably a little Kevinesque myself. The film completely abandons the sketch show’s shrewdly-observed comedy, preferring an endless series of over-the-top gross-out gags.
Despite everything wrong with Kevin and Perry Go Large, I can mount an incredibly tepid defence of its tarnished merits. There are two or three moments that get a hearty chuckle out of me, most of which are little snippets of cheeky wordplay or funny pronunciations. Kevin’s quasi-French elongation of the word DJ (‘deeee-shaaay’) is inexplicably very very funny to me, as is the affected posh accent that he uses when he tries to chat up his love interest (it sounds like a mix of Irish and Dutch).
I’m not going to pretend that I’m above the penis jokes either. The poo and vomit is groanworthy, but whenever Kevin is given a comically large erection, the corner of my mouth curls into a smile. I can’t help it. I like the film’s breezy holiday feel, novelty music (‘all I wanna do is do it!’) and concise 82-minute running time. It’s become a familiar comfort, a dumb blanket of puerile silliness. Last year, I had a couple of weeks of absolute misery in which I found myself watching the film multiple times. I couldn’t concentrate on anything better, and I found the panto grossness an effective distraction from my woes. There are times (bad ones) when movies like this are all that I want to see.