Viva (2008)

There is barely an out and-out gag — and certainly none that’s funny — in the whole two hours of deliberately bad acting.

Viva lasts a staggering two hours (the audience does the staggering) and it doesn't merely end up an embarrassing bore, it gets there within a couple of minutes of the opening.

The plywood acting’s pretty funny, as is the coy sex; what amazes is the beautifully lurid, near-fetishistic set design. At two hours, it’s an in-joke over-indulged, and it’s so camp the camera’s practically winking, but minor cultdom beckons.

At an epic two hours the stilted dialogue and eye-scorchingly oversaturated film stock threaten to test the patience. But as a self-conscious exercise in kitsch graverobbing, ‘Viva’ succeeds.

Great retro design, but as comic satire this isn't so much soft-focus as out of focus.

It’s the sort of attention to detail that would be admirable in a short film. But in a film that plays out at two hours it’s unendurable. Paying ironic homage to bad cinema doesn’t suddenly make it good.

Where her film lets itself down, though, is it's simply not funny; you assume that a certain kind of hipster audience may be tickled by all this, but the laughs will be as forced as those that bray out of the screen at all too regular intervals.

At two hours it's basically an extended sketch stretched to feature lengh and by the end the vibrancy of the never-seen-in-nature colours are reaching migraine-inducing proportions.

For all its garish aesthetics, sly feminism and wall-to-wall nudity, writer/director Anne Biller’s camp-com is almost too much of a good thing, outstaying its welcome at a paint-drying two hours.

Bums and bosoms are in abundance, although there's not enough plot to go around, meaning you'll feel every minute of that two-hour running time.