Dirty Sanchez: The Movie

The less digitally fortunate of you may not have come across the Welsh funsters of Dirty Sanchez: a British version of Jackass, it features four lads from the valleys who are willing to do quite literally anything to shock and appal, all in the name of good old televisual entertainment. The series ran for a good few years on MTV and garnered a reputation for actually out-grossing Jackass (in yuk terms, not money terms) due to the depths the gang were willing to plumb, and although the boyos have been quiet for a good while, a movie version has now been released. Dirty Sanchez: The Movie sees Pritchard, Dainton, Pancho and Dan travelling around the world and performing stunts based on the seven deadly sins. If you've got anything approaching a weak stomach, I'd recommend you stay well away - Dirty Sanchez contains more blood, spunk and vomit than the contents of Pete Doherty's bedpan.

First, an introduction to the Sanchez boys. Matt Pritchard; a Cardiff-born pro-skateboarder who tends to be the most willing to inflict pain upon himself and rarely backs out of a challenge. Lee Dainton is Pritch's partner in crime and the relationship between the two lads is what drives the crew; a relentless battle of one-upmanship that only seems to end when blood is shed. Michael "Pancho" Locke would be the short and fat butt of all jokes who is able to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, no matter how severe the punishment will be. The quartet is completed with Dan Joyce; the member with the least shame, he can regularly be seen drinking his own piss, ingesting his own pubes and generally churning the stomachs of the viewing public - the man's gag reflex just works on a much lower level than the rest of us. Put them together and you've got pure chaos - there's no backing out of a challenge, and while the unlucky chosen bastard is busy smashing concrete pots over his head or donning a spunky condom, the remaining members can always be heard pissing themselves laughing in the background, constantly pushing each other to levels of rage not seen since someone cut up Kenneth Noye on the M25.

Like the Jackass feature film, the Sanchez movie is simply an excuse for more of the same crude self-mutilation, only with material that you'd never see on television, even on a channel with wafer-thin morals like MTV. The stunts range from the silly - spraying a sleeping Panch with green paint and cutting up his clothes a la Incredible Hulk - to just plain stupid - Pritch gets an 'I Love Dainton' tattoo on his penis - but many will have you laughing heartily, unable to shift your gaze anywhere but on screen. Drunken pranks are par for the course for these lads, so the ante had to be upped substantially to gain the attention of the Jackass crowd, most of whom have either grown up or turned to the internet for their fix of video nasties. This is no empty statement: some of the stunts in the Sanchez movie are flat out nauseating. It's genuinely the closest I've ever come to being sick at the cinema, and I sat through all of Rumour Has It.

Example. Chubby short-ass Panch is taken to a liposuction clinic, where the contents of his stomach or sucked through a hose into a jar for all to see. Gross enough in itself, but the fiendish grin on Pritchard's face when he spies the results should give you a clue as to the jar's final destination - the loser of a later challenge, Joyce has to down a shot of it. That's human fat and blood. "I ate a man!" he yells, sour-faced, after necking a glass of Panch's man-fat. "That's cannibalism! You can get sent down for that in some countries!" Desperate to regain his pride after wussying out of an earlier challenge, Pritchard chops off the end of his little finger using a cigar cutter. Joyce then eats it. There is no bar any more: these guys have taken it down, shoved it up their arses, sucked it off, then eaten it. Frankly, it makes Steve-O and friends look like the snickering sixth-form wannabes you see on MySpace.

It's not always a pleasant experience, however, and you'll find yourself clutching more body parts than you'd wish during a trip to the cinema. The Gluttony section falls flat on its face, as the gang must 'survive' in the desert with a barking US drill instructor. One task requires them to kill and eat a live chicken and is genuinely painful to watch: sure, thousands of chickens are culled each day to form the fillings of nuggets worldwide, but killing one in the name of 'entertainment purposes' just seems a tad insensitive. (For the record, a spider and a scorpion are also killed in the same segment, but anything with that many legs is just asking to be stabbed and eaten.) There's also an inordinate amount of full-frontal male nudity on show, and it grates after a while; I guess there really is a limit to how much cock you can handle.

This is obviously extremely puerile stuff and it often gets a little tiring listening to the crew snigger like Beavis and Butthead in the background, spurring each other on with crude insults and cussing like drunken sailors. That said, this is a movie called Dirty Sanchez: it's not exactly going to attract the Jane Austen crowd with a title like that, and anyone willing to hand over the cash for a ticket is going to get exactly what they expected. If you got a sick little thrill watching the gang nail themselves to furniture on the TV, then you'll likely get a bigger, sicker thrill from watching it on the big screen. Exactly what audience it's aimed at is unsure - the Jackass movie surely capitalised on that demographic four years ago - but for those of you looking to be repulsed on a massive scale, you won't find anything more disgusting at your local multiplex than this.