Town Hall Laugh! Chamber
Review: Russell Baillie
Quite what one might make of the Naked Samoans' latest -- a sequel to last year's Laugh Festival hit Naked Samoans Talk About Their Knives -- had you not seen the original is open to question.
Even with memories of its predecessor about the adventures of dim-witted brothers Vali (Oscar Kightley) and Valia (Shimpal Lelisi), this epilogue comes on surreal enough.
But the quintet's sheer bravura and comedic teamwork somehow gets them through even when, plot-wise, it's going worryingly, truly tangential.
Especially amusing is Dave Fane resurrecting his twin roles of Dad (this time driven off the deep end by Vali's death at the end of Knives) and the brothers' try-hard and now wheelchair-bound "manager" Mackerel.
Fane is a big, wobbly ball of looniness. Hey, and as his personal anti-drugs message -- one of the funnier tangents -- shows, he's one heck of a role model.
Loosely ...Go To Hollywood has Knives' characters attempting, via some divine intervention and a sex-change reincarnation of Vali, to make a film of Vali's tragic life.
Yes, rather than making a film, they've made a play about making a film about their previous play which has actually got a bit of film at the end.
And which takes the Mikali out of quite a few other movies, managing to send up The Piano, Once Were Warriors, Goodbye Pork Pie and Titanic -- as well as the New Zealand Film Commission.
Other excellent targets include pub and club flower sellers, touch rugby (the best action scene) and most everything they skewered last time round.
Still, with its skit-sticking glue not always holding fast, it does have the feel of a work-in-progress or something created to fill this Laugh Festival slot and aiming at an audience keen on broad laughs and ripe language.
But as far as sequels go, it does its crowd-pleasing job neatly.
"Funnier than a square coconut" we said last time. This one's only as funny as that said nut, parts of which have been desiccated in its hasty drop to earth. Which is still really very funny.
Naked Samoans Go To Hollywood continues until Sunday, May 2.
