The Adventures of Pegg & Frost

When you think about classic British comedies, you think of Dad’s Army, The Good Life and Porridge, and when you think of a modern classic you think of Red Dwarf, Black Books and Spaced. Spaced was first broadcast 12 years ago, in the prehistoric world of 1999, written by Jessica Hynes, previously Stevenson, best know for her role as Cheryl in The Royal Family and Simon Pegg. The series follows Tim and Daisy (played by Hynes & Pegg) two randomers who after flat hunting meet and decide its much easier to rent as a couple. They manage to rent a ground floor flat from Marsha the 40 something drunk who lives upstairs, and who also has a thing for Brian, the socially awkward conceptual artist living the basement flat.

 

The series was highly praised, an rightly so, and marked, though they had all worked with each other previously, the first major collaboration between Simon Pegg, Nick Frost (who played Tim‘s best friend gun nut Mike) & Edgar Wright (who directed the series)

Skip forward a couple of years, and we arrive neatly, almost as if this ramble was planned, conspiracy? with the trio’s first foray into movie world with, as Pegg has put it, the worlds first zom-rom-com (that’s Zombie romantic comedy) Shaun of the Dead. Its fairly traditional rom-com territory, Boy loves Girl, Girl Loves Boy, but thinks she deserves more, dumps Boy, Boy goes on voyage of self-discovery, attempts and succeeds to win back the heart of Girl, it just happens voyage of discovery sails through the country known only as Zombie Apocalypse..

This was followed up with Hot Fuzz, which took a different tacked than Shaun of the Dead, where that film had smashed two well sourced genres together like a Saturday night reveller hurling their phone at a wall after a drunken argument, Hot Fuzz took another well known genre, the buddy cop movie, taking it out of the traditional big city setting, and moving the it to a sleepy village in Gloucestershire.

Both films were written by Pegg & Wright, starred Pegg & Frost, while being directed by Wright

Recently the trio have gone in different directions, Wright took all the genre fusion lessons he had learnt from Spaced, Shaun of the Dead & Hot Fuzz, and applied them to the frankly brilliant Scot Pilgrim vs. the World, an adaptation of a comic book, based on a made up videogame. While Pegg & Frost have made Paul, written by and starring the pair.

Paul follows two Brit geeks, who after attending the Nerdopia, known only as Comic-Con, rent a campervan and embark on a road trip across America visiting the country’s most famous alien related land marks, such as the site of the Roswell crash, its during their adventure, a car speeds past them, going off road and crashing, while investigating, the pair meet Area 51 escapee Paul, the original Roswell crasher. After being imprisoned for 50 some years, Paul has managed to get a message to his people to come and pick him up, and is off to the rendezvous when he meets the duo.

Theres a moment in the film where Frost’s character Clive says he’s wanted to meet an alien ever since he saw Mac & Me, an 80's film which most people will never have heard of, but which I used to love. Mac and Me is about a wheelchair bound boy who befriends an alien who has escaped from NASA, and goes on a road trip with said alien to reunite him with his family, whom they eventually find living in a cave, everything works out for the best and the family become American citizens, much like Jonny 5 did in Short Circuit 2, despite the alien family having no means of which to support themselves, becoming four more mouths for the welfare system to feed.

Okay so I diverted slightly there, but I needed to tell the uneducated the basic premise of that film, to show you how much of a clear influence Mac and Me is on Paul, Pauls what happens when an alien is discovered by two grown men, rather than a young boy, it’s the same story, with added dick and fart jokes, and it feels like an eighties movie, a ridiculous adventure like the Goonies, or rather a ridiculous adventure the Goonies would be having in middle age.

One of the things that makes the film work is the character of Paul, your stereotypical grey alien, voiced by Seth Rogan (The Green Hornet, Knocked Up) and near perfectly realised in CGI, its this realisation that makes the film work, if it was a rubber suited dwarf running around or CGI of I Am Legend quality this would have been laughable for all the wrong reasons.