November 11th Archives - Big Gay Picture Show

Starring: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi
Director: Bruce Robinson
Running Time: 120 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: November 11th, 2011

On paper, The Rum Diary sounds like a sure-fire winner, but in practice it’s slightly more problematic than that. The film sees Johnny Depp returning to the work of Hunter S. Thompson and again playing the kind of Thompson alter-ego that he did so well in Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. Depp has been intimately involved with the movie, to the point where he was the one who told Thompson to publish it, as the writer had stuffed it in a drawer since the early 60s and never let anyone see it. Depp and Thompson were casting around for something else they could film after Fear & Loathing, and came across The Rum Diary, which was duly published and is Hunter’s only proper novel. [Read more…]

Starring: Keith Chegwin, Marc Pickering, Susannah Fielding, Joe Pasquale, Russell Grant
Director: Andy Thompson
Running Time: 93 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: November 11th, 2011

It’s difficult not to read a synopsis of Kill Keith and feel that the whole thing is a very bad idea – a cheesy joke that shouldn’t have been stretched into an entire movie. However this movie about a serial killer targeting British light entertainment veterans isn’t half as bad as you’d think it’d be. That’s not to say we’re going to see Keith Chegwin walking the red carpet at the Oscars next year (I really don’t know what America would make of him if he did), but Kill Keith managed to keep a smile on my face far more than I ever expected it to.

The movie follows Danny (Marc Pickering, who some may remember as R Wayne in Peter Kaye’s ‘Britain’s Got the Pop Factor’), who’s working as a runner on a popular breakfast TV show. The male host of the programme is about to leave, and in a basement somewhere, a serial killer is torturing a TV executive to find out the shortlist for his replacement. [Read more…]

The Rum Diary (Cinema)

Kill Keith (Cinema)