SPICE WORLD
UK, 1997, 93 minutes, Colour.
Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton, Victoria Adams.
Richard E. Grant, Alan Cumming, Jason Flemyng, Barry Humphries, Roger Moore, Meat Loaf, Richard O' Brien, Bill Paterson, Clare Rushbrook, George Wendt, Richard Briers, Elvis Costello, Stephen Fry, Bob Geldof, Jools Holland, Bob Hoskins, Elton John, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Ross, Jennifer Saunders, Peter Sissons, Dominic West.
Directed by Bob Spiers.
In the mid 90s, The Spice Girls were a music phenomenon, popular with the girls who could identify with them, Scary, Sporty, Posh, Baby Spice. (and baby spice, M Emma Bunton as well as Melanie Brown had something of a career, but everybody knows Victoria Adams as the wife of David Beckham. In retrospect, this film looks like an extended music video from the period but also looks like a time capsule.
There is a flimsy plot, featuring Richard E. Grant as the girls’ manager, accompanying them on the double-decker bus, with extraordinary fashionable interior, all around London, giving them instructions through a speaker system. Clare Rushbrook plays his assistant. He is also in conversation with two Hollywood writers who are proposing all kinds of preposterous plotlines for a film featuring the girls. There is also a photographer, Alan Cumming, eager to get shots of the girls but often being edged out.
The villain of the piece is a very enjoyable Barry Humphries, sleazy, with some Les Patterson saliva, plotting all kinds of newspaper headlines and articles against the girls, aided and abetted by his assistant, Jason Fleming, and Richard O’Brien? (author of The Rocky Horror Show) slinking around and appearing as a spy to get information on the girls. And Meat Loaf is the driver of the bus.
And, the arch-villain is the Chief, played in mimicry of a Bond villain, by Roger Moore.
So, there is very little plot to speak of, the focus on the girls themselves, their diverse characters, friendships, clashes, rivalries, and quite a number of wisecracks provided by the screenwriter, Kim Fuller, wife of the actual manager.
In fact, there are quite a few laughs throughout – an enormous range of brief guest cameos from Richard Briers as a bishop, Stephen Fry as a judge, Bob Hoskins coming out of the booth, transformed from a girl, Hugh Laurie as Poirot in a Cluedo-like parlour game, Jennifer Saunders as a variation on her screen self, Dominic West as a photographer – and Elton John passing by as well as Elvis Costello and Bob Geldof getting treatment of how he might keep his hair in order.
And, there is a whole range of songs throughout – probably memorable only to those who were infatuated with the Spice Girls at the height of their popularity.
The film was directed by Bob Spiers who, most notably, directed all the episodes of the series, Absolutely Fabulous in the 1990s. In style and in the contemporary British scene, Spice Girls looks like a relation of Absolutely Fabulous.
