Review of Tariq Knight`s Sick Tricks

Introduction

If the phrase, `rip-off Britain` normally has you growling "too bloody right" as you chew on your knuckles and spiral into a nail-spitting fit, you may want to call it a day on this review. It`s true, good old Blighty has turned into a consumer nightmare over the past decade; put more in, get less out. House prices continue to shoot through the stratosphere while new builds display such a poor craftmanship, they may as well be made out of jelly and Legobricks. Navigating even the smallest road takes longer than a virgin finding his way round a woman`s ladybits, such is the shear heave of traffic, yet the government is quicker than said virgin in the sack when it comes to hiking up the price of petrol or introducing fun new ways to fleece the driver without directly addressing the problem. And perhaps most importantly, Mars Bars are often over 40p a bar, and yet are so small even London Fashion Week models can eat one without designers hauling them into the bathroom and giving them the old two-fingers-down-the-throat treatment.

`Tariq Knight`s Sick Tricks` does nothing to curb the very British notion of paying a lot for very little. RRPing for a not particularly cheap £9.99, what you get for your shekels is a young street magician of sorts performing a selection of rather gross ... ahem... `street magic` for a whole 18-minutes. That`s right - 18 whole minutes. Knight appears to have his own TV show on satellite channel Trouble TV, which one would assume is based around the same schtik as presented on this undernourished DVD from Prism Leisure.

Video

A decent, if unspectacular full-frame transfer with a little noise.

Audio

Dolby Digital 2.0 of the `nothing much to say` variety.

Features

On the bonus front, the disc has an entire section devoted to explaining the tricks - which used to be a cardinal sin in magician circles; indeed, when Paul Daniels gets wind of this, there`ll be a hell of racket coming from that 4x4 box Debbie McGee keeps him in. The disc also features a highly uninteresting photo gallery.

Conclusion

It`s easy to view the material the disc has on offer and label Tariq Knight as `David Blaine for the Dirty Sanchez generation`, and it certainly wouldn`t be far off the mark. But the truth is Knight is far more engaging as a performer than personality vacuum Blaine ever was; likeable and enthusiastic, and displaying a real energy for what he`s doing. But the repertoire of `sick tricks` he displays here is fairly lame - either old hat or obvious - and are likely to get a rise only from fans of the low-rent `Jackass` wannabe. The tricks range from squeezing spots and eating his own scabs to messing around with `snot` and poking out his eyeball; a fairly limited range, then. There`s some entertainment value that comes from the reactions on the faces of some of the teenagers who act as his marks, but Knight is far too entrenched here in being gross-out that he forgot to put the magic in magician. Twinned with the rather stingy running time, it`s certainly a hard one to recommend, although the man himself may hold a lot of potential for the future.