Erik the Viking is Terry Jones’s Yellowbeard, which is to say, essentially, that it’s really, really bad. It stars lots of people who I know ought to be funny, and have been funny in other things, but the end product is just a stillborn misbegotten mess. In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert wrote, “Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes me feel like a human dialysis machine,” and that the movie “represents some kind of comprehensive lack of judgment on Jones’s part.”
As a Monty Python fan, it and Yellowbeard just made me sad. Even Fierce Creatures has Michael Palin running around in a bumblebee costume. (If I had my way, every movie would have Michael Palin running around in a bumblebee costume.)
Now there’s apparently a new “Director’s Son’s Cut” of Jones’s film. I don’t know how they arrived at this odd concept, or who thought financing a new cut of the film on DVD was what the world needed. But the best that Nathan Rabin of the AV Club can offer is: “Perhaps a 15-minute cut somewhere down the line will finally correct the film’s abundant pacing problems and the long, dry stretches between mild chuckles and modestly amusing gags.”
He also warns that “if current trends provide any indication, around 15 years from now, Jones should absolutely kill with Erik The Viking‘s smash-hit musical Broadway adaptation.”
I wish he was wrong about that, I really do.