Fat Slags
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 "Their clothes may be tight but their morals are loose" Yeah, this movie has loose morals alright...
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Fat Slags (also known as Fat Sl*gs) is a 2004 British comedy produced by Artists Independent Pictures and Funny Films and is based on The Fat Slags comic strip by Viz. The film stars Fiona Allen, Sophie Thompson, Jerry O'Connell, Anthony Head, Geri Halliwell, and Naomi Campbell, written by William Osborne, and directed by Ed Bye. The creators had no editorial control over the film. Despite the relative popularity of the comic strip and its celebrity cameos, the film was widely panned.
Plot
The film chronicles the (mis)adventures of Sandra (Fiona Allen) and Tracey (Sophie Thompson), the famously vulgar and crass titular Fat Slags. The pair leave their hometown of Fulchester for London, shagging and boozing their way to fame and fortune. On the day the Fat Slags arrive in London, internationally renowned billionaire Sean Cooley (Jerry O'Connell) suffers a blow to the head that him temporarily insane. When he spots Sandra and Tracey on a daytime chat show he falls for their larger-than-life outlook. A media sensation is brought about when Cooley forces fashion designer Fidor Konstantin (James Dreyfus) to base his upcoming collection on the Fat Slags. In a whirlwind turn of events, Sandra and Tracey take the United Kingdom by storm, hitting #1 in the record charts and inadvertently winning the Turner Prize. As far as the press is concerned, fat is the new black. This new trend leads to Cooley's assistant Paige gaining weight and getting a big belly. Throughout their journey into the world of fame, the Slags maintain their unique, endearing vulgarity, coupled with an innocence that draws the British public to their cause. But in private, jealousy is driving a wedge between Sandra and Tracey as they vie for Cooley's attention. Only when he regains his mental faculties and turns on the girls do they realize that their friendship is the only real thing they have in the mad world they have entered.
Why It Makes Us Say "Oh Lordy", In A Bad Way
- Barely resembles the original comic. For one thing, Fulchester is depicted as a small industrial town, when it's meant to be modeled after the northern English city of Newcastle (Viz's base). For another, the Slags have always been shown as jobless losers; they've certainly never been welders, as they are in the film endowed.
- It was made to cash in on the successes of The Nutty Professor and its sequel, as the movie has similar jokes from the movies, and while those movies' jokes had worked, it's poorly used in here.
- Terrible and predictable plot about the titular slags becoming famous before getting arrested, which is made worse by the film's incoherent pacing, which makes the movie feel like a compilation of awful sketches akin to Little Britain.
- Utterly disgusting jokes that rely too heavily on toilet and grotesque humor, such as the main characters farting while sleeping or Jerry O'Connell's character's weird attraction towards the characters' chubbiness (The magazine the characters were based on did have strong amounts, but not like this).
- Awful editing and visual effects, such as the scene where Jerry O'Connell's character gets accidentally bitten during a blowjob in a car, his eyes pop out, but the effect is technically just the movie pausing while eyes grow slightly larger.
- Another example is the infamous scene where the rat enters the vet as the main characters try to obtain the laptop, which has hideous CGI animation on par with Video Brinquedo films, and the scene where the rat's eyes bulge before he dies is disturbing due to the dark lighting and the aforementioned bad CGI.
- Pointless cameos from Dolph Lundgren, Ralf Little, Naomi Campbell, and Les Dennis, which serve no purpose to the plot whatsoever.
- Hideous fake female fat suits which we see naked.
- Too many pop-culture references that make the film feel extremely dated. In particular, the film's climax spoofs the first Mission Impossible film, which came out eight years before this.
- Pointless subplot with Paige (Geri Halliwell) gaining weight to impress Sean (Jerry O'Connell), and one with the slags' boyfriends getting arrested by immigration before they somehow return.
- There's a very disturbing scene near the end where Sean dies by getting a chair that was screwed on the top of the vent to fall on him in a gruesome manner.
- Annoying music score by David Hughes that actively seems to be trying to sound like flatulence.
- Some jokes make no sense, such as the aforementioned scene where one of the slags burps in a vent to kill the rat.
Redeeming Qualities
- The factory explosion looks pretty good considering the film's low budget.
- Some good songs on the soundtrack, such as the jazzy theme song that plays near the beginning and the end of the movie.
- They at least got the personalities of the two Slags broadly correct, and Fiona Allen and Sophie Thompson give decent enough performances.
- The scene where Tracey throws a flat dog like a Frisbee outside which then hits a gardener before farting and then falling in a wheelbarrow before exploding is pretty funny.
Reception
Fat Slags received nearly unanimously negative reviews and was widely panned by critics. The Sun said "There may still be some diehard Viz aficionados who'll love every second of this film - but I'm one and I didn't," while The Guardian stated "It has plenty of gross-out stuff, but chucked in with an eerie lack of enjoyment or conviction. Depression seeps out of the screen like carbon monoxide." Graham Dury stated that Rita, Sue and Bob Too was a more accurate live-action depiction of the comic book characters. It was also claimed he was so appalled by the film, that he stopped drawing the strips and it was dropped from Viz, though that proved unfounded as the strip was never dropped (though another artist drew the strip for a few months after the film's release). British film historian I.Q. Hunter, discussing the question "What is the worst British film ever made?", listed Fat Slags as one of the contenders for that title, while former Channel Awesome reviewer Film Brain named it as the single worst film he had ever reviewed on his web series.
Trivia
- Viz, who published the original Fat Slags comic strip, has disowned the film due to how bad it was and had no control over its production.
- It was reported that the strip's artist, Graham Dury, was so demoralized by the treatment of his creations that he announced that he was dropping them from the comic altogether. This turned out to be a misquote by an over-enthusiastic press officer and there was no intention of dropping the characters. Dury did not watch the film.