“Mackenzie Crook and Johnny Vegas star as the bird-chasing, self-proclaimed "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" of Birmingham in this £3 million brit-com about two lowlifes with active fantasy sex lives who deliver potatoes to various restaurants and grocers.” IMDB
The film received extremely negative reviews from film critics. The Times review called it "one of the two most nauseous films ever made" and Christopher Tookey in The Daily Mail called it "the most shamefully inept, witless and repulsive British comedy that I have ever had the misfortune to see". Writer Will Self, writing for The Evening Standard, called it "mirthless, worthless, toothless, useless", while Johnny Vaughan in The Sun stated in his review: "The mind boggles as to how this movie actually got made." Kevin O'Sullivan in The Daily Mirror called it "one of the worst films ever made". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote, "it's a film which isn't in the slightest bit funny or sexy, and is deeply depressing. It also diminishes the reputation of many excellent TV comics, who are made to look tawdry and naff up there on the big screen in an echoing cinema". Catherine Shoard, in a review of the film in The Sunday Telegraph, stated "It's hard to know what to say to this - it's like finding the right words at a nasty accident... Sex Lives of the Potato Men is probably the lewdest Brit-com since Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and certainly the worst". Shoard also described the film as "Less a film than an appetite suppressant"....One of the few positive reviews for Sex Lives of the Potato Men came from Mark Adams in the Sunday Mirror, who stated "Vegas and Crook are a sleazy dream-team and brilliantly cast as the soft-core spud men... After several pints and a curry it could be the lads’ film of the year." Years after the film was released, Sex Lives of the Potato Men was still being described by film critics as an unusually bad film. Hostile critics include Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian,[10] and the BBC's Mark Kermode, who described the film as "absolutely, indescribably horrible, vulgar, stupid, tawdry, depressing, embarrassing, filthy, vile, stinky, repugnant, slimy, unclean, nasty, degenerative and mind-numbing...” Wikipedia
This film has been treated most unfairly. If the message of the film was 'these men are always lusting after and getting sex-isn't that great!', then I would agree with the comments about it being 'for morons' as one reviewer put it......We are not laughing about sex or bodily functions, we are laughing about the ridiculous image that sex has in the media, where everyone is young, fit and beautiful, they all have orgasms every time and everyone is 'at it' day and night with no ill effects.
