Save Your Legs! (Blu-ray)

(Twilight Time, 7.8.2014)

Following a bumbling Australian cricket team during a visit to India, 2012’s Save Your Legs! seems to have the basic ingredients for a crowd-pleasing sports comedy. Unfortunately, director Boyd Hicklin situates the movie in an uncomfortable territory somewhere between shameless pandering and repellant scatology. Restraint is not one of Hicklin’s strengths. In addition to the aforementioned lapses in taste, he has a tendency to over-direct, relying on unnecessary freeze frames, graphics, and sound effects. Directing his first scripted feature, he seems determined to demonstrate his understanding of the medium, but his clumsy execution has the opposite effect. A rare misfire from Twilight Time, this movie may prove more tolerable for devoted fans of cricket and/or gross-out humor. All others beware.

As always with Twilight Time, this Blu-ray is limited to 3,000 copies, available exclusively through Screen Archives and the TCM store. Extras include the theatrical trailer, an isolated score track, and liner notes by Julie Kirgo. This disc also includes a commentary featuring most of the cast and crew. As expected, they keep it relatively lightweight, predictably ribbing one another, laughing at their own jokes, and recounting some grotesque Indian health struggles.

Bound 4 India with Ted & Col is a 6-minute short featuring two of the film’s characters as they consider remedies for, you guessed it, travel-related health problems. Less glossy than the feature -- and seemingly improvised -- this clip suggests what a more laid back version of Save Your Legs! might look like.

This is taken even further in the disc’s most substantial (and worthwhile) extra: the Hicklin documentary (also titled Save Your Legs) that inspired the feature. Stripped of the arch affectations that plague the later movie, this more modest, down-to-earth effort offers a credible look at real people and culture. This sensibility proves to be far more palatable than the more cartoonish variant that makes the feature such a tedious experience. -- Jonathan Doyle