My Shudder Pick of the Month is Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break, a Sly British Dark Comedy of Fame and Desperation
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
A kind patron has given me the enviable task of choosing a movie from the popular horror streaming site Shudder for his monthly Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. I like being able to select the film because that’s generally how this column works, but being an absolute genius at self-sabotage, I’ve found a way to abuse that freedom.
There are simply too many fascinating obscurities, cult classics, and great movies on Shudder. I find myself flipping through the essential contribution to the horror world in a manic frenzy. I’ll find a movie that looks utterly irresistible in its transcendent cheesiness, like the 1985 horror opus Hard Rock Zombies, a Cannon release involving zombies, a forgettable hair metal outfit, and, as the villain, a 95-year-old Adolf Hitler who faked his own death so that he could build a fourth Reich in the United States.
That looked like the kind of insanity my audience loves reading about, so I filed that title away so that I could focus on something even less accessible and well known than Hard Rock Zombies.
I selected the 2021 British dark comedy Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break, more or less at random. I’m currently deep into the process of finishing The Fractured Mirror, an epic book about the history of American movies about filmmaking.
I wouldn’t have spent long years researching the book if I was not fascinated by entertainment about entertainment. I love movies about movies, obviously, but I’m similarly obsessed with movies about television, theater, stand-up comedy, ventriloquism, and pretty much every other art form.
Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break is an English analog to The King of Comedy and Big Fan. It’s about the titular loser (Tom Meeten), a deluded nobody whose small, sad life revolves around his loving, indulgent mother and his dream of catapulting to stardom after winning a television talent contest hosted by Jack Tapp (Kevin Bishop).
You probably know Bishop best from his performance as Jim Hawkins in 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island. There are, regrettably, no muppets in Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break. I can see where working with the Muppets as a young man might spoil an actor.
When Bishop booked gigs post-1997, I’m sure he came to the set expecting to see puppeteers and marionettes and even Muppets, which is a portmanteau of puppet and marionette, and was disappointed to find a bunch of boring-ass human beings doing their boring-ass jobs.
Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break is a sly little movie that does just about everything right, particularly with casting. Bishop is hilarious as a Ryan Seacrest figure who is self-centered and narcissistic to a sociopathic degree. He’s a Jekyll and Hyde type who is either egregiously phony in his fake niceness or unabashed in his genuine cruelty.
The dark comedy follows its sad sack protagonist as he tries to make it to an all-important open audition in time. Julie (June Watson), his wheelchair-bound mum, alternately assists and hinders him in his goal.
Julie believes in her son the way only a mother can. She’s his collaborator, coach and cheerleader. She has an indulgent parent’s delusional faith in her son’s abilities, but she’s drawn with a surprising and welcome sensitivity.
Paul Dood’s act might be a retro joke, but the movie doesn’t laugh at him or his mother. It empathizes with them as underdogs and outsiders out of step with the rest of the world.
As someone with ADHD, I know what it’s like to be in a frightful hurry to get to something of supreme importance to you, only to run headfirst into the brick wall of the universe’s supreme indifference to your wants and needs.
Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break captures that feeling on a visceral level. Making it to the audition on time means everything to Paul and his mother and nothing to the strangers and coworkers who stand in his way.
The universe hurls haphazardly obstacles in Paul’s path with a casual sadism. He needs to make brief use of a ramp to get his mother’s wheelchair on a train, but the dreary bureaucrat in charge insists that Paul is not authorized to use the ramp. Only the train employee is authorized to use the ramp. The evil sonofabitch derives a malicious joy in ruining people’s days for no damn reason at all.
Somewhere along the line, Paul loses what matters most to him when his mother dies. Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break is evisceratingly dark but not snarky. The death of Paul’s mom is legitimately shattering.
Paul is lost without his mother and an impossible dream that gives him a reason to get up every morning and keep failing.
Paul finally encounters Jack Tapp after the auditions have ended. Out of fear of negative publicity, Jack lets Paul perform at least part of one song for him before destroying him with his words and cruel judgment.
Our oddly ingratiating anti-hero begins the movie with little. He then loses what little he has. The only upside is that he now has nothing to lose, either.
Mad with grief and frustration, Paul decides to wreak bloody havoc on all of the people he holds responsible for his failed audition. In the third act, the movie shifts from a dark comedy of bad manners and gratuitous cruelty to a horror comedy about a nice man on an accidental murder spree.
Paul is obsessed with a YouTube-like streaming site that empowers talentless nobodies like himself to broadcast their lack of talent to the online world. Paul wants to eliminate his enemies with a sword, but they have a way of exiting existence of their own accord.
For example, Paul is fucked over at one point by a priest and nun who seem to have gotten into Catholicism for the money, sex, power, and sense of superiority that comes with anointing yourself as God’s representative on earth.
Like all of the other heavies, these fake people of the cloth make for eminently hateable villains. So it’s difficult to be upset when the priest and the nun both end up getting run over by a bulldozer, like cartoon characters.
In a particularly wicked touch, a construction worker on the scene flinches and looks away rather than see two human beings become completely horizontal, but he keeps filming with his cell phone all the same. The human body in that state is a thing of horror, but content is content.
Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break begins stronger than it finishes, but I was impressed. I got exactly what I wanted out of the movie. It realizes the comic potential of a nicely nasty premise. It’s executed with malicious wit but also a surprising level of compassion for its anti-hero and his mum.
So, if you are bored and on Shudder and are intrigued by my review, give it a try. I’m glad I did. I will also fill this slot next month with something much better known and more accessible, like Hard Rock Zombies or Chopping Mall. It’s crazy that I’ve nearly made it to fifty without seeing Chopping Mall. I intend to correct that oversight in the very near future.
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