Bun­ny and the Bull

Chan­nelling the abstract absur­di­ty of Mon­ty Python, and the glee­ful com­ic tom­fool­ery of Car­ry On, Bun­ny and the Bull is very much a case of back to the future for British comedy.

Billed as ​‘the Mighty Boosh movie’, Bun­ny is the brain­child of Paul King, the writer-direc­tor who made his name on the com­e­dy series set in London’s East End. And though Bun­ny is its own beast, a lot of what made the Boosh tick is present here – the wild flights of imag­i­na­tion; the para­noid fan­ta­sy; not to men­tion the epic silli­ness, the great one-lin­ers and the ubiq­ui­tous Julian Bar­ratt and Noël Fielding.

But it’s telling that those two take a back seat. Our heroes are Stephen (Ed Hogg) and his best mate Bun­ny (Simon Farn­a­by) whose Euro­pean road trip is re-lived through a series of off-kil­ter flash­backs from Stephen’s flat – an OCD night­mare that mir­rors, blurs with and even­tu­al­ly becomes his own twist­ed brain space.

The road trip, it tran­spires, did not go well. After hook­ing up with Span­ish wait­ress Eloisa (Veróni­ca Echegui) in a Pol­ish Mr Krab (a din­er inspired – as all things should be – by Sponge­Bob SquarePants), the three­some set off for Seville, a semi-myth­i­cal loca­tion where love will be lost, hearts will be bro­ken and lives will be changed forever.

Though inspired by the likes of Lynch, Gilliam and Dan­ny Boyle, King is no TV chancer imi­tat­ing his heroes. He demon­strates the same nat­ur­al gift for cin­e­ma as Edgar Wright, but unlike the Spaced crew, you get the sense that he won’t be tool­ing around the cosy main­stream of British cin­e­ma. There’s an anar­chic spir­it, a crazed cre­ativ­i­ty to Bun­ny and the Bull that puts it out of sight of its peers.

The Boosh aes­thet­ic works bril­liant­ly on the big screen. ​‘Europe’ is evoked through a grab bag of increas­ing­ly deranged card­board cutouts and DIY effects. It’s Gondry on acid, spin­ning cart­wheels through a gym­na­si­um for the imag­i­na­tion. It’s also sharp-tongued, emo­tion­al­ly hon­est and above all very, very funny.

With White Light­nin’ bare­ly hav­ing slipped from cin­e­mas, Ed Hogg con­tin­ues to kill it as a pecu­liar­ly 21^st cen­tu­ry lead – whip-thin, moist-eyed and met­ro­sex­u­al. But it’s Simon Farn­a­by who steals the show: charis­mat­ic, con­fi­dent and with a liq­uid bari­tone deliv­ery. He also gets the film’s best line – a piece of gram­mar-slash-love advice that every man should follow.

This is, in a sense, a ​‘small’ film. Low bud­get, no real stars, unlike­ly to play abroad. But it’s so much more than that, too. Bun­ny and the Bull is an orig­i­nal, inven­tive, occa­sion­al­ly star­tling British com­e­dy that show­cas­es a break­out tal­ent in Paul King. There’s no doubt he could fol­low a well-trod­den path to block­buster glo­ry, but you get the feel­ing that he’d rather take the road less trav­elled. Lucky us.