Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 123

British Film Comedy 119 single sympathetic trait. It’s no t all in good fun for Richie and Eddie, who owe no allegiance to anyone, not even to each other. The major set piece of the film (and one which is craftily exploited in the trailer for G uest H ouse Paradiso) is an unbelievably brutal fight in the hotel’s kitchen, whilst Richie and Eddie are ostensibly engaged in preparing food for their unfortunate guests. Although domestic mayhem is a staple of the Bottom series, as well as The Young Ones, here, with a generous budget and the ability to stage some truly spectacular stunts, Edmondson and Mayall stage an all-out war that rivals anything in The Three Stooges, Chaplin, or Lloyd. In addition, Edmondson per forms a series of truly astounding maneuvers on a motorcycle near the beginning of the film, reminiscent of Buster Keaton’s memorable stunts, in which he falls asleep at the wheel of a moving motorbike, only to crash into the front of the hotel, and, through an intricate series of pratfalls, wind up behind the hotel’s front desk as if nothing had happened, ready to receive visitors. As Edmondson told critic Claire Wills in the November 1999 issue of Flicks, shortly before G u est House P ara diso 's release: The constantly squabbl ing partners in crime have what Edmondson believes is the best battle they’ve ever done, em ploying a variety of painful kitchen utensils, with Richie forcing a meat hook up Eddie’s nose and slamming his head in the fridge door. “We still have great fun inventing fight scenes,’’ Edmondson laughs. “It gets more and more difficult to think of novel ways of hitting each other, and implements to use. The hooks up the nose was a stroke of genius...it looks incredibly painful.’’ So realistic in fact - as is a scene in which a character is raised to the ceiling by his nipple ring - that audiences will wince at ev ery crack and tweak. These antics are all very well, but as Mayall had a near fatal accident a year or so ago, when he fell off and was run over by the quad bike he was riding, weren’t they concerned about the extreme physicality of their performances? “I was very worried,” Edmondson admits. “I talked to his consultant about it, but he said you’d have to give him a really traumatizing hit to make any further damage.” However, they did modify their act slightly. “A lot of the violence happens to me rather than him for that reason. I don’t think he hits his head once.” Instead, Edmondson gets to play fall guy and outdoes the stuntmen in a sequence, which has him falling asleep and mov