Stanley: Every Home Should Have One

Mort Ebsen’s film is very much a precusor to the Yahoo Serious style of humour (Ebsen appeared in Serious’s 1988 hit, Young Einstein as Wilbur Wright) with a story concerns a good-looking eccentric, the eponymous Stanley (Peter Bensley) who finds himself in all sorts of anarchic misadventures and gets the girl (Nell Campbell) at the end of them.

The script, penned by Ebsen (who also trades under the name of Ebsen Storm) has some potential but it remains largely dormant in his hands finally amounting to a series of familiar slapstick gags that, predictably, get more silly as the film wears on and ending in true Yahoo Serious style with Stanley as a medieval knight on a white horse, an idea that pretty much encapsulate the film’s level of wit.

Soapie actor Peter Bensley (who looks uncannily like Mr Serious, aka Greg Pead)plays Stanley in what remains his only feature film appearance, although he has had a reasonable career in television. With a $4 million budget, Russell Boyd on camera and the peerless Graham Kennedy as the paterfamilias of the Norris household this should have been a lot better.

 

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