Pete and Dud: Rare Live Performances (1975)

Scraping the bottom of the barrel - Pete and Dud: Rare Live Performances review by Count Otto Black

Unfortunately I didn't read the comments by the other reviewers before renting this. Hey, it's 80 minutes of Pete & Dud live, right? Also, almost all the people who previously watched it must have given it 4 and 5-star reviews for some inexplicable reason. So what could go wrong?

An 80-minute feature consisting of 51 minutes of pointless, boring introduction followed by 29 minutes of Pete & Dud footage, that's what! If you reckon you'd enjoy watching nearly an hour of a gaggle of celebrities - and by "celebrities" I mean Neil Innes, Alexi Sayle, and a bunch of D-list comedians I'd never even heard of - saying over and over again that Pete & Dud were really, really funny, accompanied by tiny snippets from sketches that might indeed be hilarious if you could watch them all the way through, you're gonna love this!

The production is horribly cheap on every level. The archive clips - every single second of them - have a distracting copyright notice across the top of the screen, and the Alexi Sayle interview seems to have been shot on a video camera that had something seriously wrong with it. The "celebrities" frequently misquote the sketches they're supposed to be in awe of, and having completely run out of things to say, several of them end up rambling on about how some of Pete & Dud's material was rubbish and they hate it. Even the "Saturday Night Live" footage isn't that great, being a mixture of slightly tired performances of over-familiar material such as the one-legged Tarzan sketch, and below-par new stuff aimed at the American market.

There are other compilations of archive footage available that consist entirely, or at least mostly, of actual performances by the two men you're interested in. For instance, the "Not Only But Also" DVD features most of the sketches this disc samples, and you get to watch them in their entirety. Even those tribute compilations in which celebrity talking heads pop up to eulogize Pete & Dud prove their point by showing you whole sketches, not 10-second mini-clips because that was all they could afford the rights to. Watch any of them rather than this cheap, cynical rip-off. Even "The Hound Of The Baskervilles" is better, because at least the claim on the DVD cover that Pete & Dud feature prominently throughout the movie isn't a lie.