This comic oddity from Frank Oz (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) is something of a guilty pleasure. There are many reasons to dislike the film –  pacing is irrational, relationships contrived, lines are dropped, plots and subplots routine. Yet for all its misdemeanours, and there are many, Death At A Funeral also provides a number of giggles and one or two laughs amid the mayhem.

At the ivy-covered family estate, Daniel is going to bury his father once the funeral directors bring the right body. This first incident sets the tone for a broad, drawing-room comedy-of-manners in which siblings fight, hallucinogens are mistaken for valium, relations sit naked on rooftops and grumpy old men swear and curse. The clincher is a gold-digging, black-mailing dwarf who reveals he was the dead man’s lover. We’re in Carry On territory which partially explains why the dwarf ends up in the casket. Ho ho.

Death At A Funeral is neither smart nor clever, though Oz isn’t really trying to be either. What disappoints is the thinness of his two-joke movie – wayward drugs and bound dwarves aren’t funny for long. Minor characters are painfully underwritten – Trainspotting’s Ewan Bremner gets to go nowhere at all – and Oz relies too heavily on the questionable comic skills of his stoic leads. Yet there’s something appealing about the lo-brow shenanigans that recalls 1970’s Britcoms for sustained bouts of half-baked zaniness. It’s a long, long way from Oscar Wilde, yet a set piece in which a carbon-copy Ricky Gervais helps loose Uncle Alfie on to the toilet is a text-book example of guilty pleasure. You know you shouldn’t, yet somehow you just have to keep watching.

// COLIN FRASER