Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo

There are many puzzling things about this movie... even before you get into the cinema. We all know it's a sight gag and all that jazz, but why sit Deuce (Rob Schneider, reprising his role for a sequel) in front of the leaning tower of Pisa on the poster? The movie is set in Amsterdam and surely even the most dodgy geography student knows that is a far cry from Italy.

What is even more puzzling is how on earth it ever got financed? Producer Adam Sandler must surely have paid whatever debt he owed to Schneider by now?

So, step back in time, to the dodgy special effects of the Eighties and couple it with humour that may have been funny circa 1975, but lurches here, like a George A Romero zombie. Off with its head, I say.

Ah yes, head. This is, as the title implies, the adventures of the world's worst gigolo, who is in Amsterdam, hiding out from the cops after a nasty (unfunny) incident with dolphins. Here he hooks up with his pimp TJ (Eddie Griffin, who isn't so bad as a comic actor - he should aim higher).

Deuce thinks his "man-whoring" days are behind him, but after the gigolos of Amsterdam begin to get bumped off one by one and TJ is in the frame for the murders, and being outed as gay (oh the ignominy!), he has to resort to sleeping around to try to catch the killer.

On his travels, he dates a bizarre string of (funny?) women. One has no vocal chords and frequently spits wine from the tracheotomy hole in her throat, another has outsize ears and - get ready to stitch your sides back together - one has a penis for a nose which she keeps deftly hidden under a yashmak.

This is gross-out without the gags (other than the stomach-churning variety) as every stereotype you could possibly name is used and abused to little effect. Nose-knob woman sneezes in someone's soup... oh the hilarity! Elsewhere, there is a smattering of dwarf tossing and a sub-Cheech and Chong druggie scene.

The only light in this otherwise very grim tunnel is Deuce's relationship with obsessive/compulsive Eva (Hanna Verboom). Despite the crushingly awful grotesque of her disorder there is the glimmer of something about naivety and falling in love that, in another movie, might almost have worked. Here, however, it is bullied into a corner by rest of the dross.

There are one or two funny moments, but if you throw enough pebbles in a pond you're bound to hit a frog sometime.

Curiously, I've been watching an old series of Benny Hill on DVD. Compared to this, he looks like a hilarious advocate for the rights of women and minorities.