There’s been a long tradition of British comedians, popular on home soil, trying their hand at the American market and finding the differences in humour a tough nut to crack. Some made it – Stan Laurel, Simon Pegg, Sasha Baron Cohen, James Cordon – but many, from Morecambe and Wise to Jimmy Carr, have found success in the States elusive. In 1991 it was the turn of Rik Mayall, the anarchic and unpredictable star of The Young Ones (1982-1984), Filthy Rich & Catflap (1987) and Bottom (1991-1995) when he appeared in Drop Dead Fred, a comic fantasy part-funded by the British Working Title Films but squarely aimed at the American market.

Sadly, this wasn’t going to be Mayall firing on all cylinders. He invariably wrote or co-wrote all his best material but here, writers Carlos Davis and Anthony Fingleton have no affinity with his brand of mayhem and their limp script merely expose Mayall’s shortcomings as an actor, leaving him trussed up and toeing the line. In almost every one of his appearances you can feel his frustrations, sense his barely controlled urge to just let rip and be Rik Mayall, something that director Ate De Jong seems to want never to happen.

Lizzie Cronin (Phoebe Cates) is having the lunch break from Hell – in the space of an hour she loses her purse, her car, her job and her husband, philandering used car Salesman Charlie (Tim Matheson). Against the advice of her best friend Janie (Carrie Fisher), Lizzie moves back into the home of her cold and unloving mother Polly (Marsha Mason) and finds a jack-in-the-box toy from her childhood. When she opens it, it frees her unruly childhood imaginary friend Drop Dead Fred (Rik Mayall) whose turbulent behaviour had helped her through an unhappy childhood. But for the adult Lizzie, Fred creates havoc in her already disorganised life and as she tries to reconcile with Charlie, she also starts taking medication that will banish Fred from her life forever.

It doesn’t help that the script wasn’t written with Mayall in mind. Drop Dead Fred had originally been offered to director Tim Burton (his influence is all over the film, particularly the weird “house of the mind” scene towards the end) with Robin Williams being pursued to play Fred. And that might have worked. Burton’s surrealism would have brought a darker tone to the proceedings and Williams would have been far more adept with the film’s sentimentality that really doesn’t fit at all with Mayall’s style.

The film is at its best when Mayall takes centre stage – even half speed Mayall is worth a watch – and in particular his relationship with the young Lizzie (Ashley Peldon) is often charming and very funny. But you can’t escape the feeling that he’s being held in check when what we really needed was his full-throttle insanity. Co-producers PolyGram weren’t particularly impressed with Drop Dead Fred when they saw the finished version (nor were the critics who almost universally panned it) which makes it all the more depressing that they didn’t just go for broke and let Mayall off the leash completely.

Cates does well to keep pace with Mayall and makes for an appealing lead, though her wardrobe is appalling and the film derails together when we start to question why such a likeable, level-headed character would see anything at all in the appalling Charlie, let alone become so obsessed with him. Perhaps the point was that she was mentally unbalanced, traumatised by a difficult childhood but if that is the point, it’s poorly made.

Carrie Fisher is a lot of fun as Lizzie’s hippy-dippy best friend though she’s sadly underused – we could have done with a lot more of her really. Her therapy-centred approach to live makes for a nice contrast with Marsha Mason’s cold and distance mother whose relationship with her daughter seems to have been the reason why Fred turned up in Lizzie’s life in the first place.

Davis and Fingleton can’t quite make up their minds what they’re trying to say with Drop Dead Fred. The message (and there’s always a message in these sort of things) is very odd, that her imaginary childhood best friend (if he’s imaginary how does Polly see the note he left Lizzie?), a psychopath who encourages you to wish death on your mother and commit acts of petty vandalism, will be the only way for Lizzie to deal with the highly contrived problems of her adult life. They possibly thought they were being profound in some way but it never comes across like that on screen. It’s all a bit of a mess that degenerates into a series of set-pieces that never amount to anything substantial.

There are some funny moments along the way and at least one great scene that hints at a more interesting film – the moment when Fred accompanies Lizzie to a child psychologist and meets up with the other imaginary friends who have accompanied their young wards and are sitting in the waiting room, a scene reminiscent of the waiting room scene in Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988). But it’s never as funny as a vehicle for Rik Mayall should have been. It’s hard to gauge what the intended audience was as it’s too grown up for kids and too juvenile for most adults.

It comes across a bit like Harvey (1950)’s misbehaving younger brother and for all its superficial anarchy, it’s a deeply conservative film that concludes with Lizzie becoming “normal”, casting off childhood “friends” and looking to start another grown-up relationship. The only spark of hope is that Fred has found a new friend and is never going to be far away from Lizzie – but a more satisfying ending would have been for her to simply accept the madness and find a way to integrate the untameable Fred into her new life.

Parents at the time of its release expressed concern over the film’s effect on their young children but those who saw Drop Dead Fred as kids seem to love it while those of us who came to it too old find its charms eminently resistible. Mayall returned home for the altogether funnier and wilder Bottom, a series that he co-wrote with co-star and long-time collaborator Ade Edmondson and which was a far sillier but more suitable vehicle for his comedy.