Retro Review: “How To Get Ahead In Advertising”
By Michael Knox, mknox@modernfilmzine.com
This brutally sardonic film is a dark gem I ran across thanks to Mountain Xpress film critic and mentor, Ken Hanke.
I’d never heard about the movie until he mentioned it and when I went to read the back of the DVD cover and discovered it was about a man in advertising who grows a boil that quickly turns into another head filled with evil thoughts… well I just HAD to give it a try.
And I am glad I did. Hanke had already seen the movie recently so we screened it without him, but DAMN if I wished he hadn’t been sitting in the theater so I could ask production questions, because of just how weird this movie is.
Richard E. Grant plays the main character and comes off as an in your face 1980s busines executive who almost has the attitude of a battle weary general on the war front. He’s the king of his game, coming up with brilliant advertising ideas all the time. But when he has to come up with a slogan for a pimple/boil cream he is stumped.
He is so stumped that his nerves get to him, steadily driving him mad to the point he actually grows a boil. And then the boil starts to grow a face that only Grant’s character, Denis Dimbleby Bagley, can see. Before long the boil is a fully formed head. That’s when, believe it or not, things start to get even weirder.
The story never comes out and says, point blank, whether this really is a evil, vicious boil that actually has grown an intelligence that wants to take over Bagley’s life. It’s open to interpretation, where it could just as easily be Bagley being bat shit crazy.
The movie is sardonic and had me cackling in several spots, especially the line about how if Bagley can sell anything to anybody, when he’s berating a group on a train. This is a movie that I don’t want to say to much about, as far as my favorite bits, because I want to keep them a surprise. Because I was not expecting them at all.
One scene I can talk about is when Bagley is trying film a private message to his wife, and tries to keep the boil-head from listening in on the conversation, and puts a cardboard box over his head. The boil still hears enough to complain and demands a cigarette before he’ll shut up long enough for Bagley to finish his video entry. And when Bagley gets the cigarette he walks through the house with the box on, and since people know he’s off his rocker, they try not to notice, making it more uncomfortable for everyone in the room.
According to the Internet Movie Database, here is the basic plot for this great 1989 film of weird, wonderfulness, “Dennis Dimbleby Bagley is a brilliant young advertising executive who
can’t come up with a slogan to sell a revolutionary new pimple cream.
His obsessive worrying affects not only his relationship with his wife,
his friends and his boss, but also his own body – graphically
demonstrated when he grows a large stress-related boil on his shoulder.
But when the boil grows eyes and a mouth and starts talking, Bagley
really begins to think he’s lost his mind. But has he?”
All in all this is a movie that tackles 1980s yuppy society, the advertising industry, people’s commercialism, society as a whole and then tacks on the weirdness of sanity by making the catalyst of the story a battle with a man and his own dark side growing up as a boil in his neck to form a new head.
Watching it there was one point of strangeness were all I could think was, “Damn, who ever wrote this definitely had the BROWN acid. Cause this is just weird.”
The boil effect is done rather well, and could have been cheesy, but really works and gives a real surreal atmosphere to an already abstract movie.
Oh, and the movie’s executive producer was George Harrison, of the Beatles fame. I saw his name in the credits and thought, “Can’t be,” but cross referenced on IMDB and sure enough, the ex-Beatle, is one of the people responsible for bringing this film to life.
George, I never thought you were such a freak, but if you can support a film like this, by God you’ve got my respect and made me happy.
