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Review: "Horrible Histories, Rotten Romans" – Hardly Horrible and Rotten Humour

Horrible Histories has a massive reputation as a brand in the UK, and it's appearance in the movie schedules for the Summer holidays will have many parents jumping for joy. The series of books enlivened the discovery of history for many studious (and less so) children, steeped in a mixture of historical fact, fancy and the grossest possible things one human can do to another, all lightly illustrated throughout. But it was with the CBBC television series that Horrible Histories entrenched itself as the premiere sketch comedy series in British television. In classic Python form, it had gathered a number of comedians known, (or unknown) for many other things and told them to get on with it. The central troupe that solidified over five series of the show ha e gone on to create their own film, Bill, fantasy show Yonderland and sitcom Ghosts, all playing multiple parts and preserving that sketch comedy aspect even with ongoing narratives and repeating the Python comparisons.

But Horrible Histories: Rotten Romans is nothing like that. Just as the cast were replaced for subsequent Horrible Histories, so we have a brand new crew, plenty of familiar faces from British and American television screens, including reprising his classic seventies role as Emperor Claudius, but there is so little of the infectious sense of fun that the original Horrible Histories crew conveyed. Without this, the jokes repeatedly fall flat, and the limited budget for crowd scenes doesn't even seem amusing here. When the counter shows Boudicca's army growing into six figures while we only see six on the screen, that could have been funny, but instead seems pathetic.

And there are a few good jokes among the disappointment. Banksy-style graffiti in Rome, a kleptomaniac tribal grandmother, and Nero's insistence that general make clippers clopping noises when moving army pieces on a board. But most was met with silence in a cinema full of kids, a fatal sign.

Not that the film is without charm. The young leads, Emilia Jones as Orla, a daughter of a Nick Frost chieftain, Sebastian Croft as Atti, a know-it-all reluctant roman soldier and Being Human's Craig Roberts' as Emperor Nero himself make for great leads, and the story follows their conflict delightfully, kids trying to be grown-ups. It's just grown-ups behaving like kids that isn't as convincing. Maybe aside from Rupert Graves makes for a truly fearsome, if egotistically hypocritical Governor Paulinus. It's just that their story isn't particularly funny. My own children's take on the film, that it was 'alright', possible the worst thing they've ever said about seeing a film in an actual cinema, usually filled with foreign delights and intrigue.

It's also not particularly horrible. Aside from one initial bloodsplatting scene in the gladiatorial arena, the movie is remarkably unbloody, despite involving serious conflict. The dead bodies hardly pile up, and the blacker humour of the original TV series which delighted in such gruesomeness – because kids love that – is utterly absent. It seems remarkable incongruous for such a film that should be delighting in such excesses to amuse the kiddies. Could an eye on a more squeamish foreign market have caused concern? Or are the BBFC more censorious than the BBC?

Kate Nash plays a great Boudicca and reprises one of the songs from the TV show, rewritten so it doesn't have to carry as much historical exposition as the original, and we get one slushy love song stopped in mid-flow by a centurion played by Lee Mack who demand no singing. That may be the film's funniest moment, though there must be credit given to the film for pummelling his unfunny repeated joke, stuck in Britain yearning for over romanticised tourist brochure descriptions of Rome while a mandolin plays, into the ground until it comes out the other side and actually becomes vaguely funny again. And the observation that the Brits are more likely to fight against themselves than some common for seems as well observed than ever.

But overall? There are sixty episodes of Horrible Histories right now on the iPlayer and the BBC will probably schedule Bill again as well, because this movie is in the cinemas. And frankly you'll probably keep the kids – and parents – happier with the free versions.

There is scope for better. Better writing, better budget, and a cast who have form together. Maybe a sequel could start to give us a film franchise to equal Asterix in France. But maybe, just maybe, you could get the old crew in for more than just a cameo as a Roman streetseller?

Oh and yes, post credit scenes. There are post credit scenes with Rattus Rattus and if you've made your way through the movie, you might as well stick it out to the bitter end.

Horrible Histories: Rotten Romans is in the cinemas now.

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