Kill Keith Review

Director: Andy Thompson

Starring: Susannah Fielding, Marc Pickering, Keith Chegwin, Tony Blackburn and Simon Phillips

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Synopsis: Kill Keith: Volume 1. Keith ‘Cheggers’ Chegwin is a household name and has been at the top of his game for nearly 40 years. He’s an all round entertainer and has lived with us via our TV screens on Swap Shop as kids through to GMTV as parents. He is undoubtedly a national treasure, and for nearly four decades has been much loved by viewers young and old. The year is 2010 and hidden away in a damp dark and blood stain cellar is a stranger, a man, a figure in the dark, someone we’d rather not know. He sits through the small hours torturing himself watching Swap Shop on fast forward over and over again. Cheggers Plays Pop posters decorate the cellar walls. The stranger moves slowly around his memorabilia filled shrine; terrifying equipment of torture fill the cellar together with several slabs of dead meat hanging from meat hooks. In the corner a man is bound and gagged in a cage while being subjected to archive TV clips of Keith Chegwin. The stranger is on an evil crusade. What is this unhealthy obsession with Keith Chegwin? Is the stranger plotting to kill our much loved Keith? Innocent victims from around the country slowly start to disappear. The damp cellar accrues more bodies. The news headlines build of reports of a serial killer. Cheggers continues his daily TV show while the nation lives in fear of evil roaming the country. Body parts begin to surface hundreds of miles from where they disappeared. How safe is Keith? How long before the stranger fulfills his obsessive desires?

So, KILL KEITH. Where do I begin? I went into this movie with the lowest expectation ever. This film has literally everything going against it. It has a very limited run in cinemas in the UK, perhaps the only theatrical market in which it will play, it has a largely unknown cast, a very small budget, and a very tacky feel about it. It’s one of the those films that you get an invite to in your inbox and literally bury your face in your palms and do everything that you can possibly do to get out of going to see it. As the founder of this site, I generally get to pick and choose what I get to go and see. I try and offer everything out to my glorious team of writers and critics first, and then pick up if there is nobody available to attend. That’s just the way it works here, and that what happened in the case of this movie. Nobody available. Over the course of one damp Tuesday a couple weeks ago, I viewed three films in one, which I will add am more than happy to do. They were ARTHUR CHRISTMAS, KILL KEITH and IMMORTALS (all released today), in that order. I dreaded the middle movie. I was not looking forward to it; I didn’t want to see it… but I had to. It’s the way it works here. So see it I did.

The film revolves around a breakfast TV show called The Crack Of Dawn (the main presenter is named Dawn… geddit), and the story goes that the male presenter on this breakfast TV show is leaving; being given the push, so, when a group of replacements are lined up to fill his shoes (they including Keith Chegwin, Joe Pasquale and Tony Blackburn), one by one they are picked up, and it’s up to hapless hero, runner-boy Danny to find the killer and save the day.

Five minutes into the film, I sat there in a relatively small auditorium with no more than ten other critics present, and I thought to myself… I hate it. I hate everything about it. Then I started to think, as I watched it… why do I think that I hate it? Even when I left, I continued to think, why did I hate it? I thought, and I thought…why? I couldn’t, and still can’t answer that, and the reason being is that I don’t hate it. In fact, KILL KEITH is the second best film that I saw that day (after ARTHUR CHRISTMAS, which is totally different altogether). Yes, I rank it above IMMORTALS (also out today folks), which had a production budget ten times the size of KILL KEITH. It’s the movie equivilent of all of Keith Chegwin’s TV career, and I don’t mean it by him physically doing on film what he did on TV, but metaphorically. It’s the movie equivilent of a TV gunging. What is the point in gunging somebody on TV? It’s fun. It’s funny. That what the point of this film is. It’s not going to win any awards, or stay in your mind for days, hours or even minutes after you leave, but if you take it for what it is… it’s actually pretty good. Yes, you read that right. It’s good, so to turn the previous statement from myself on its head and say why I thought it was good as opposed to why did I hate it… here’s why… The filmmakers, and by that I mean writer/ director Andy Thompson has gone out there with an idea… a title for a film even, KILL KEITH, and built a movie around it. He’s obviously got the financial backing, written a script, got the likes of Keith Chegwin, as well as non-actors Tony Blackburn, Russell Grant and Joe Pasquale involved and build a movie, and got it out there. That’s an achievement in itself, and come on; when was the last time that we saw a really good British spoof? Granted, I did wince at some lines in the script, and I wasn’t particularly fond of the Carry On type jokes, like the Crack Of Dawn line; in terms of comedy I think we’re way more advanced than that these days, but generally I thought that it was a solid little Brit film; technically sound with some great camerawork, editing and pace. Nothing outstanding, but we’re not looking for CITIZEN KANE here.

I failed this movie by having preconceptions… something that a film critic should never have, and I let the film down because of that.

It’s a shame that this won’t be playing in more cinemas across the country as I think that after a couple of pints down the pub on a Friday or Saturday night there’s a lot to get out of KILL KEITH. As I said, it’s no work of genius, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin… If it’s not playing near to you, get on the phone to your cinema manager to find out why…

Because of my above statement, I’m going to go and see KILL KEITH again, and I’m going to pay to see it… I suggest you do also…

KILL KEITH  is released in limited UK cinemas from Friday 11th November 2011