(Beyond Entertainment)

Like a moronic pub conversation with a travel budget.

You’re all aware of Nick Frost right? He was the fat and dumb one in the brilliant Shaun Of The Dead. Alternately, he was also the fat and dumb one in the genius Hot Fuzz. You may see a pattern forming here, and it’s one that continues with Danger! 50,000 Volts. The basic premise is that Frost takes the audience through numerous survival situations and advises them on the best path to ensure further living. Pitched somewhere halfway between being comedic and educational (or at the very least, informative), the show fails to achieve either objective, instead becoming quickly unlikeable, as do so many British comedies aimed at the lowest common denominator. Without the laugh track or xenophobic or homophobic jokes of course, but this DVD only contains the first series, so who knows how badly this could spiral out of control? The DVD extras are equally lackluster, with the audio commentary containing nervous giggles and non sequiturs in between incomprehensible mutterings. In both movies mentioned above, Frost’s characters possess the oafish charm of the blissfully ignorant, brimming with fart, mother and dick jokes that generally offset Simon Pegg’s tightly wound neurosis. Leave him to his own devices, however, and his dialogue isn’t snappy enough to be clever and not intelligent enough to be helpful. Wanna know how to escape a bar fight with a bat-wielding maniac? You either pull a silly face or try to disarm the assailant to impress chicks. Despite Frost’s best efforts, I don’t think he’ll be the spokesperson for government safety initiatives any time soon.

**½

MITCH ALEXANDER

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