The Movie:

Obviously inspired by the massive success of Jackass, MTV Europe's Dirty Sanchez is a similarly stupid show featuring rowdy dudes doing stupid things to themselves and to each other. That said, as crass as Jackass was, this crew takes things considerably farther in their attempts to gross us out and make us laugh.

When the film begins, the four members of 'Dirty Sanchez' - Dainton, Pritchard, Joycey and the vertically challenged Pancho - die when a stunt goes horribly wrong. Of course, the four wind up in the pits of Hell where Satan himself (played by someone who looks an awful lot like Keith Richards!) tells the boys that he'll give them their lives back if they return to Earth and commit each of the seven deadly sins. The four guys head back to the Earth's surface, and they're off on a cross-continent tour where they indulge in all manner of unsavory activities.

Highlights of the film, if you can call them highlights, include reasonably innocent pranks such as painting Poncho green while he sleeps so that he'll look like The Hulk when he wakes up, to nastier fare such as chugging the body fat that Pancho has had liposuctioned out of his body should you lose a strange game of hand job roulette accompanied by an under-the-table Thai prostitute. At one point during this game, one of the members asks if this is technically cannibalism. Pritchard decides to break into the Guinness Book of World Records for 'man who can take the most shots at close range from a paintball gun' and, after taking over one hundred shots to his chest and groin, learns that he's been set up - there is no such record in the hallowed book to break in the first place. A voyage to Japan finds the crew successfully out grossing the Tokyo Shock Boys in a series of increasingly repulsive antics that earn the Sanchez crew a proper victory over their Japanese counterparts. It's all very crass, and much of it looks like it hurts. A lot. Pancho falls asleep and has his nostrils glued together, a man has hooks put through his foreskin with perilous results, and the boys get beaten up and tossed into broken glass by a group of Japanese wrestlers.

With Jackass, for the most part, you knew that the guys were going to be okay. Sure they'd get bruised and there were times where you wondered if Steve-O might go a bit too far and hurt himself but there was much more of an element of control there than we see in this film. The Dirty Sanchez crew definitely take things to a considerably more insane extreme than their American counterparts, and whether it be by having a members penis tattooed on camera or making out with some Thai transsexuals in a game of 'guess the lady-boy' we aren't allowed the option of sitting back idly and just taking it in. The film makes us like the guys enough, as crass and nasty as they are, that we don't want them to destroy themselves but at the same time, if they don't, what would be the point of watching? It puts the viewer in an interesting spot, and we wind up basically rubbernecking like a driver passing a car wreck on the side of the highway. We don't really want to look, but human nature being what it is dictates that we do it anyway.

Enough analysis, however. Dirty Sanchez - The Movie is good, horribly unclean fun. It's bloody, it smells bad, it's incredibly foul-mouthed and at times it is beyond disgusting. That said, it's also pretty damn funny. It walks the line between performance art and idiot frat boy antics (leaning closer to the later, obviously) but there's an interesting, if rather perverse, sense of camaraderie here that makes the material a little more endearing than it really has any right to be. It's certainly not a movie for all tastes but those who enjoy Jackass style stupidity will find themselves right at home with this take on similar material. Make sure you watch all the way through the end credits for frozen turd high jinks and a now to Knoxville and company.

Video:

The 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen video presentation looks about as good as anything recorded on a handheld digital video camera has any right to look, particularly when you take into account the conditions under which of this material was captured. Things are a bit dark in spots and a few mpeg compression artifacts show up here and there but aside from that the movie looks pretty clean.