A Fantastic Fear of Everything
★★
(2012)
Remember Kula Shaker? Well singer/guitarist Crispian Mills has made a well meaning little paranoid comedy of sorts about a children’s writer with a serious problem. While researching a career changing book on serial killers, he begins to become terrified of life, killers and laundrettes and we get to watch a few days of his mostly preposterous antics. Mills told a Sitges crowd of his love for 60s and 70s experimental cinema but sadly little of that spirit truthfully exists within the comedic bounds of A Fantastic Fear of Everything.
Our writer Jack is played by none other than a long haired, teeth chattering, sweaty browed Simon Pegg. It’s an up and down performance to say the least but when the scenes are good Pegg is good but they are few and far between.Spurred on by his agent to adapt the book for television Jack must gather himself together in the films 2nd section and skip to the laundrette where much of the second half unfolds dreamily. His mission is to wash some clothes for a meeting.
If we’d told you that is what the bulk of A Fantastic Fear of Everything concerns you probably wouldn’t believe us. And rightly so. On the whole this is truly a tightly stretched, gibbering mess. There is a serial killer plot which only becomes interesting or funny much too late in the piece and if it were not for Pegg likability and a great stop motion animation sequence this one would be well and truly in the toilet.
Mill’s own script feels like it may have been devised under similar conditions to Jack’s television series and the frantic comedic lead role aspect which might have worked to buoy the films strength’s ends up becoming desperate, and the parts bloated and over long. Watching Jack cower around his house for twenty minutes with a knife could never have worked even with one of England’s most loved clowns infront of your camera. There are some original set ups here but in a film which must have seemed like such a good idea at the time they are easily forgotten. Points to Pegg and the animation team but not too many left over for anybody else.
