Respectable

Maxted Headroom

Respectable - The Mary Millington Story
UK 2016 Directed by Simon Sheridan
Odeon Films DVD Region 2

When I read on Twitter that Simon Sheridan, the writer responsible for the excellent book about Mary Maxted (aka Mary Millington), Come Play With Me - The Life And Films Of Mary Millington (reviewed by me here) had written, produced and directed a new documentary film about her, I was expecting something like a more seductive, pop culture approach to the lady’s life which would be a kind of abridged version of the book... but in no way a substitute for it. As it turns out, Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is both less and more informative than the tome in question. Which is a bit of a bonus, as far as I’m concerned.

The film starts off with the sound of film... proper film, none of that digital rubbish... running through a projector and, as you can hear the stock threading through on the soundtrack, the screen is dark and we hear the first of many recorded sound bites from Mary herself. We then get a quick rundown of the trajectory of her tragic life as a kind of précis of the film to come, in quick inserts from the various ‘talking head’ interviews which, as always in a film of this nature, fill up the majority of the running time. Which is what you would expect when the writer has obviously gone to the trouble of getting so many interviews with people who either knew her, encountered her or could bear expert witness due to their being in a similar profession (and it was really great seeing Linzi Drew again, to be honest). Anything else and the audience would feel somewhat short changed, to be sure.

Now, if you have read the aforementioned book on Mary’s shenanigans then you might feel that her early life story is somewhat glossed over here, perhaps. What you have to remember though is that you can’t throw all that detail in about a person from a book and expect the documentary, which is not that much shy of two hours anyway, to be either interesting or pacey. I think certain things are said which hit the key points and, if not all the facts and issues which may have gone into the lady’s psychological make up are highlighted here, they are emphasised enough that one can glean the main issues which led to certain behaviour later on in her life, perhaps. Either way, it doesn’t matter because anyone interested in reading more about the subject matter can purchase the aforementioned book and find out for themselves.

That being said, there is also a lot of stuff in this movie which I hadn’t actually heard before, to be honest and, unless I was sleep reading before, wasn’t included in the volume in question. It’s also quite possible that some of the stories and anecdotes which come to light here were either not available or actually not allowed to be printed at the time that the book was first published for various reasons. The first printing was released, after all, about 17 years ago. So, for example, I never realised... or at least it never hit home in my brain before... that Mary’s notorious short porn film Miss Borloch was actually one of the prize winners of what was the first ever porn film awards, The Wet Dreams Festival, at Amsterdam in 1970. Everybody who went to the event had to go naked and the judges included famous feminist writer Germain Greer in their number. Mary Millington was an even bigger star in Europe, it seems, than she was initially as an illegal, ‘under the counter’ star in the United Kingdom, at the time.

Another story new to me involved her, sometimes official, prostitution antics (for want of a better word), where it is alleged that Coleman’s Mustard once hired Mary to sleep with the head of Tesco so they could get their brand of product into the supermarket chain. Which is a bit of an eye opener, if this is true.

Other stories, like a more softened down version of her encounter with prime minister Harold Wilson are also present (if you want more details, buy the book) and her meteoric downfall involving the tax men, a corrupt police force (it would seem... who Mary paid protection money to but still managed to have them constantly raiding her sex shops), her increasing but completely unnecessary kleptomania and various other factors which culminated in her early suicide are all thrown into the mix. There’s also some things that don’t, necessarily, add up when it comes to taking a closer look at that suicide. It’s often noted that, in light of another brush with the law where they threatened her with a prison sentence, she retired to her room without her husband (who slept elsewhere in the house that night and who she was in the process of divorcing), wrote some goodbye notes and then ended her life by taking a large amount of pills washed down with vodka. And that’s indeed the story that the autopsy confirms. However, there is a big question mark in the involvement of certain other people, or a specific person, which is quite pointed in terms of the remembrances of some of the guests on this documentary and it’s interesting that several of them mention that Mary would never drink alcohol. Just being around the smell of beer made her feel sick. So... yeah... interesting stuff, I would say.

The way the film itself is shot and presented is very pacey and the whole thing never flags as the director balances the various interview footage of people such as members of Mary’s friend and family (which are heartbreaking in some cases), various lovers and major celebrities such as François Pascal and actor Dudley Sutton (who worked with her in the film The Playbirds - reviewed here) with excerpts from Mary’s films, recordings of Mary herself and the occasional bit of documentary footage of London in the 1970s... which I personally found most nostalgic since I was a child model at the time, working in my school holidays in various locations around London. Sheridan also adds the nice touch of coming back to new footage of the source of some of the on screen audio and visual excerpts... so he might precede an excerpt of a film with a shot of a projector showing it or go into a sound bite of Mary while showing a tape recorder playing the sample. He doesn’t do this a lot but he does it enough to make an impression and I kinda liked this way of handling it, all of which adds to an interesting watch.

Above all, from the various testimonials caught here, I got the impression that Mary Millington was much more about living a life of moral justice, far above the issues of the legality or illegality of what she was doing at any given time. So, for instance, she would stock illegal, ‘under the counter’ items in her sex shops because she believed it was the right thing to do and shouldn’t be against the law at all. There’s a lovely line from one of the interviewees in the film which, for me, summed up Mary’s brand of enlightened naivety very smartly. It's mentioned that she was a lady who carried "the spirit of the 1960s Summer of Love well into the seventies with her." I kinda like that idea and it’s maybe something we should all think about doing more of, methinks.

So there you have it. Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is a truly great little documentary that’s written, produced and directed by someone who has had an interest in Mary’s life for a very long time and can be considered something of an expert in this field, I suspect. In other words, a truly informative, sometimes thought provoking but always entertaining look at a tragic but very influential, in some ways, lady who also happened to be Great Britain’s first, bona fide porn star. The disc comes with the usual amount of interesting extras that are the normal expectation of an Odeon DVD release of one of Mary Millington’s films and this one gets a big recommendation from me. And if you do take a look at this movie and like it... then you can always go buy the book, too.

The Playbirds

Softcore Giallography

The Playbirds
UK 1978 Directed by Willy Roe
Odeon Region 2 DVD

Warning: Yeah, this is going to have spoilers for those
of you who care about such things in these kinds of films.

Okay. So you may remember I reviewed the Mary Millington sex comedy Come Play With Me on here a little while ago (click here for my review). I remember being rather surprised by the lack of actual soft core pornography in it and amazed about the general tone of it which is, pretty much, the same as a Carry On movie. So... populated by loads of British character actors of the time but with sex and nudity inserted into the story. If you can call it a story.

Well, I thought that experience would have at least prepared me a little bit for watching Mary’s second big breakthrough movie, The Playbirds, which takes its name from The Playbirds magazines which were one of the cornerstones of producer David Sullivan’s porn empire, and which featured Mary as the regular figurehead/mascot. However, although the movie does have some sex and nudity scattered at intervals throughout the picture, this one is a complete sea change from the previous picture and it’s a much more sombre affair. In fact, given the small part that nudity and sex play in the finished product and it’s preoccupation with a police procedural plot as a serial killer murders centre spread girls from the magazine, I’m going to go right ahead and call it right here...

The Playbirds is, pretty much, the British equivalent of a giallo movie.

It really isn’t about sex... although that is the currency which it uses to forward the story. Instead, it follows a police investigation which becomes a giallo style whodunnit in exactly the same way that the Italian movies would fix it so it’s almost impossible to guess the identity of the killer... implausible jumps in logic included. Like The Playbirds, though, it stars a wealth of British characters who you wouldn’t expect to see playing in a movie of this... um... calibre.

The film follows the exploits of Chief Superintendent Holborne and his partner, Inspector Harry Morgan. Holborne is played by Glynn Edwards and, if that name is not familiar with you, he played the pub landlord on the TV show Minder for many years, as well as starring as one of the title roles in Burke and Hare (reviewed here) along with Derren Nesbitt (who also has a small role in this movie as one of the pornographers responsible for printing the titular magazine). And if you think that piece of casting is extraordinary, his partner Morgan in this is played by none other than Gavin Campbell and, for anyone who used to watch the TV show That’s Life with Esther Rantzen... oh yeah, that Gavin!

The two go around trying to patiently solve the murder of various girls who have all been strangled (mostly with no clothes on... it’s a Mary Millington movie, after all) by a man in a Sherlock Holmes style Deerstalker... and then numbered with lipstick on their foreheads by someone who presumably doesn’t like their involvement with The Playbirds magazine. The magazine, of course, is highlighted constantly in the movie and I’m sure Mary Millington can be seen in some posters in the background of the printworks in some shots, even though the character she is playing is not in any way associated with the magazine until the end of the movie. I’m not sure how early metatextual references like this started appearing in what are considered, technically, British softcore movies but I’m guessing this was one of the first.

So who is Mary actually playing in this movie? Well, the film starts off with a model in a naked photo shoot and then, after a brief scene highlighting a racehorse which Holborne keeps betting against and which serves absolutely no purpose as a subplot of any relevance at all, although its referred to all the way through the movie, we first meet Mary walking the beat on the streets of London as Sgt. Lucy Sheridan. Yep, she’s a copper although, given her attitude and opinion of her majesty’s constabulary in real life, it seems a bit of an ironic role for her to have taken on. She’s also accompanied by a truly terrible theme song which is a shame since the movie was scored by David Whittaker, who worked on a couple of Hammer films and who also provided a pretty good score for The Sword And The Sorcerer. Mary keeps cropping up throughout the movie and even has an attempt at a foot chase at one point in the film but, for the first three quarters of the movie, she has more of a peripheral role until her unique talents are required to further the plot, such as it is, by the end of the movie.

And what we have is a movie set on the streets of 1970s London (which is always lovely to see, as I best remember it, back in the day) with character actors like the aforementioned cropping up. Also on the police force are Kenny Lynch (remember him?) and Holborne’s boss is played by none other than Windsor Davies (who you may remember as the Sergeant in the TV show It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). We also have Dudley Sutton in here, looking exactly the same age as he has for decades, playing some kind of bizarre and religious fanatic.

In between the police procedural scenes we have various Playbirds photo shoots going on as, presumably, an essential part of the plot. For instance, an occult theme is brought into the spreads and a shoot based, quite loosely I suspect, on shenanigans at The Hellfire Club is shown as one big orgy including a lady having sex with the underside of a rocking horse... surprised the BBFC let that through, actually. There’s also a witch being burned at the cross naked in a photo shoot scene too, which goes horribly wrong when the killer somehow manages to turn it into a real burning... although the way the special effects, such as they are, have been shot here may well mean you take a while to realise that this is actually what’s happened, it has to be said.

And we also have another nice tie in to the Italian giallo movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s in that one of the victims is found, by Gavin, in a room lit with both red and green lights. The effect of this, of course, is like a poor man’s Mario Bava has been on set so, yeah, I’m still sticking with this giallo parallel because it makes me wonder what kind of movies the director and cinematographer had been watching at the time. It does kind of compliment that style of shooting very well, especially in this scene.

And then we have Mary herself. The police get the idea to plant a girl working for Playbirds who will start at the massage parlours and then work her way into being the cover girl of the month so she can be bait for the killer. What this means for the audience, of course, is that we have Holborne and Morgan ‘interviewing’ hitherto unseen lady members of the police force by having them do a sexy strip routine so they can give the job to the most likeliest person to succeed. It’s almost like the film suddenly stops for a while so the director can showcase various ladies stripping for the audience... well... um... yeah. And, of course, Mary’s character wins hands down and it’s not long before she’s the magazine owners girlfriend... which I understand she more or less was in real life for a while, despite being married to someone else.

The really hilarious thing about this movie, bearing in mind the age of the film, is the police relying constantly on getting their leads by punching in information to be analysed in the ‘computer room’. And, yes, it’s a room full of cheap computers where nobody really looks like they know what they’re doing and with a printer which gives our heroes leads when the correct information is, somehow, or other, fed in. Let me tell you, though, those computers back in those days must have been absolutely miraculous. The police learn the identity of the killer thusly: They see a head looking out of a window on a photo and they get the computer to enhance and blow this up (not that you see any of this, of course). Once the shape is blown up they get the computer to take ‘x-rays’ of the face on the photo so they will reveal the bone structure of the person and then they compare it to the bone structures of x-rays of suspects in their computer records. What the f***? Quick, someone alert Microsoft and Apple now that someone has managed to figure out a way to take ‘x rays’ of a person from a still photograph. They need to get that patented fast.

The ending of the movie is almost as equally astonishing and certainly way more downbeat than you would expect from this kind of sub-genre. The killer is unmasked by the police and taken into custody. In the last scene of the movie we see Mary Millington answer a phone call from her police colleagues and receive the news that he’s just been locked up. How then, can he suddenly crash into her apartment and strangle her in a really downbeat ending, leaving her naked body floating in the bath. Does he have some kind of supernatural powers that we’ve previously not been made aware of over the course of the film? Seriously, this is just the kind of twisted, deranged anti-logic that lets a lot of gialli down and, sadly, this film does exactly the same thing. I have no idea how this ending can even work within the context of everything else we’ve been told but... well, there you have it.

So, yeah, the movie is mostly a load of old cobblers, to be honest, but it’s certainly also entertaining to be watching all these distinguished character actors prop up a soft core porn film which, in itself, seems to be less about porn and more about being a thriller. Certainly a curio in both cinema in general and also, I suspect, in the soft porn genre. As such, I would kind of tentatively recommend it to film goers who have seen just about every kind of movie and want to see something just a little bit different to what they would comfortably expect a producer and director to be able to get away with. Certainly, it’s not a rerun, by any means, of Come Play With Me... the two are like chalk and cheese. So whatever you say about The Playbirds, it certainly isn’t cashing in on the success of the former film.  One to... possibly... look out for.

Mr. Forbush And The Penguins (Cry Of The Penguins)

For-sight

Mr. Forbush And The Penguins (Cry Of The Penguins)
1971 UK
Directed by Alfred Viola
Network DVD Region 2

Warning: Sorry for the long lead in to get to the actual review 
on this one, but I had to get this stuff out of my system.

Mr. Forbush And The Penguins is written by the famous Anthony Shaffer (identical twin of Peter Shaffer, apparently) and based on a novel by Graham Billing.

Cry Of The Penguins is what this movie was known as in America... and even then it didn’t get a release over there until a full ten years later than the UK got it (which is why some of the actors and actresses involved have this listed in their IMDB filmographies as coming out in 1981, although one look at just five minutes of it should be able to signal it as a product of the late sixties/early seventies to anyone half interested in the short history of cinema).

I didn’t know about the American title and release date until today... but I did know of the film because it’s always been a lurking presence in my mind since I used to catch snatches of it on television in my pre-teen years throughout the seventies. Back in the dark ages, that is... before the commercial release of video recorders, when you caught what you could catch at whatever time the TV channel in question decided you were going to have the opportunity to watch it... and even then in the wrong aspect ratio.

It’s a film I’ve always had a vague memory of being very impressed with as a child, but one which I have never been able to catch up with properly until now. The timing of which was a bit of a tiny miracle in itself seeing as it was obviously bubbling up in my mind again. I used to check out the listings on Amazon regularly for a while to see if it would ever turn up some day. Maybe I should have been looking for Cry Of The Penguins after all, eh?

The story of this review, though, starts just a few short weeks ago, on Saturday 7th September 2013, at a celebration screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law to mark the completion of a film called Noirish Project, to which I have done the promotional campaign and provided opening credit cards for. After the screening I got together with a bunch of people in a restaurant/bar thingy and had, what I worryingly call in my fear of such incidents... a social situation.

It was a strange day because I had been angry with one of my best friends, Chris B, for about four years now. Four years where I hadn’t been able to forgive him something he’d done to me and, consequently, hadn’t seen him or talked to him for all that time. This was partially my fault too, though, because of being in a bad and suicidal headspace when he did what he did, so it took me four years to cool down again and contact him. Which I did, and I arranged to meet him on a Saturday... forgetting that I had already committed to the director of Noirish Project to go to the aforementioned Down By Law screening. So I met with Chris in a pub for two hours before, so we could hopefully forgive each other, and then I took him along with me to this screening where we met a bunch of cool people at the aforementioned restaurant/bar thingy and had a thoroughly good time. I don’t do well in social situations and tend to stay quiet and characteristically dumb under such cordial hostilities, but the people at this thing were all pretty bubbly and so the “Talky Tawny” part of my personality came out to play and regale everyone with complete nonsense at a substantially energetic rate.

At least that’s how I felt about it anyway.

Present at the event, who I actually talked to, were the great writer/director and co-starring actor of Noirish Project... James Devereaux, the astonishingly lovely, actress extraordinaire Lian-Rose Bunce, who also has a role in the film, the incredible soundscape composer Jay Harris, expressive character actor John Giles and, last but not least, the film's other main co-star, the always hat-worthy thespian and Carry On expert, Mr. Alfie Black. 

Oh, there was also another sexy goddess woman there with fair hair on our table who was properly interested in world cinema, sitting to the right of me, but I never caught her name and so she will have to remain, sadly, un-highlighted in this article.

So there we all were and my friend, Chris B, was regaling a few of these people of the story of the day he met John Hurt at a signing... well met may be the wrong word but it’s good enough for this already interminably long blog post, at least. I chipped in with my... “Oh. I’d love to see Mr. Forbush And The Penguins again but, sadly, it’s never been released on home video, from what I can tell.” Everyone, and when I say everyone I mean, not everyone... just a few people, looked at me blankly. “You know.” I went on, “The one where it’s just John Hurt and a load of penguins.” Glazed eyes and the thoughtful looks of people trying to sugar coat an answer met my outburst. Finally, my mate Chris, being as he’s lost none of the definite lack of panache which has rubbed off from me like an acid eating away at ones subtlety, chimes in with... “Hmm. Yes. Well there’s a reason these films don’t get released, you know.” Which everyone laughed at, including me, because, ha, it was good to see Chris again and be with all these wonderful people. Plus, I always give him an equally hard time about a multitude of minor sins whenever we’re in the same room together.

So that was that evening which was, frankly, one of the better “talking with real people” evenings I’ve had in a very long time when, less than 48 hours later, midway through the following Monday morning, I got a mailshot from Network video telling me that this weeks new release was, yeah you guessed it, Mr. Forbush And The Penguins. I leapt into action immediately and ordered it from Amazon that very evening.

And yesterday it arrived.

As I slowly started to watch it, the film felt odd at first. I can’t remember if I ever, before, saw it all the way through or not. I suspect I had, but even if that was the case, I certainly couldn’t remember the beginning of the movie. Which is a shame because it sets up the arrogance of John Hurt’s rich and privileged title character immediately, by showing him failing to show up for his graduation ceremony because he has been in bed with a gal all night. The cross cutting between the two situations, John Hurt in his apartment and his awaiting graduation ceremony, are used to both highlight his main concerns while also proving you with a name check with who he is. It’s quite nicely done and, although this kind of thing was done a lot more in this era of cinema, it’s not so common these days when big movie studios don’t trust their younger audience to make even the faintest leap in their brains from two sequences without some kind of over defined establishing shot thrown into the mix.

We then go through a nice, comedic half an hour which establishes three very important things about Mr. Forbush. One is that he has a very brilliant mind. Two is he is very rich, spoiled and ultimately rarely interested in anything outside of his fairly small and narcissistic world. Three, the only thing he is interested in is sleeping with a number of attractive young women and this is what gives the movie its thrust. When one of these young maidens, played by Hayley Mills, says “No” in many ways and in no uncertain terms to him, it suddenly becomes very important to him to do something big enough to impress her and attempt to win her heart. Being as he is seen as something of an embarrassing and unmanageable prodigy, he is offered the job of spending 6 months in Antarctica* in Shakleton’s old hut to observe and research the penguins when they arrive back, give birth and attempt to fend off attacks by hostile birds, called skuas, before they leave their cold stomping ground until the next time.

Much to Forbush’s surprise, he ends up accepting the job role, stocking up on Beluga caviar, champagne and the like, just to help get him through those cold, Antarctic days and nights. He says good bye to his friends and relatives, including such character actors as Thorley Waters, Joss Ackland and Dudley Sutton, and its off to the cold climate for him. The fact that he has a girl who is now interested in him is a shrewd move because when he writes letters to her or tapes recordings of himself to send to her in her flat in London, we get to hear his inner thoughts about his lonely life with the penguins and we get to see how he changes.

Yeah, I know. He changes.

Changed by the things he sees in the Antarctic into a more humble and generally warm blooded human being while he is away... a cliche, to be sure, but it’s all done quite well and young John Hurt is a wonder to watch and listen to as the tale plays out and we start to sympathise with the plight of him and his, now beloved penguins. We  see him slowly go mad and when human interaction takes him by surprise, like when Dudley Sutton’s Starshot character, who is entrenched in a similar job somewhere not too far away, in husky and sled terms, drops in for a Christmas celebration (Forbush is unaware, even, that it Christmas)... he almost rejects human company and has to remind himself what it is to be in the land of the living again.

The movie is more than competently filmed, with long looks at the landscape which make up in sheer beauty and desolation what they might lack in shot design. Being as it is, at least on some level, a silent movie for much of it’s last hour (not literally, but certainly metaphorically), it does tend to rely on a lot of montage sequences to get its message across, which is fine actually.... it doesn’t feel too overdone and it’s the best way to solve certain situations and get the right kind of tone across, I think.

Two scenes which stood out in my memory and which I relived again in the movie yesterday were the sequence where John Hurt battles a blizzard (and barely wins, it has to be said) and the ‘almost climax’ of the movie where he builds some kind of elasticated trebuchet device to attack the ‘headquarters’ of the skuas, before sanity finally catches up with him and he once again remembers his place in the great scheme of mother nature, and all who sadly sail in her. Unfortunately, when John Hurt is shouting his heart out at said birds and yelling at them to die, his voice does sound a lot like a Dalek and you can certainly imagine him replacing that word with “Exterminate!” quite easily. Ah well, maybe that may serve him well in the upcoming Doctor Who 50th Anniversary story being broadcast on November 23rd, later this year, in which he plays a “dark incarnation” of The Doctor.

It was great seeing this movie again. I even remembered bits of John Addison’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes irritating, score for the picture, a 40 minute suite of which is included as a maddeningly unsearchable or in any way wind-able/rewind-able extra on the new Network DVD. I can appreciate that anyone who didn’t grow up seeing bits of this on TV back in the seventies may find it a bit clunky and unwatchable in places, but personally I found it a joy to behold and it’s a film which is definitely all about performance. Thankfully, when you get an actor like John Hurt in a role like this, even in his early thirties, before he was properly internationally famous, you really cant go wrong. An actor’s film perhaps... but one which everyone can enjoy, I think.

*I recently found out that Antarctica is the only place on Earth that doesn't have ants. I find this very strange, given its name.

Cockneys VS Zombies

Bow Bells VS Hell’s Bells

Cockneys VS Zombies 2012 UK 
Directed by Matthias Hoene
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: ‘Ere, there’s bleeding spoilers in this review, 
so if you don’t want to know what’s coming, you’d better scarper!

Well... since I could only find this movie playing in Central London, I was expecting to be a little disappointed with it, figuring if it was a competent film it would be playing at my local multiplex. But I loved the trailer and I really wanted to see this one, so I braved the streets of London once more. As it turns out, I’m really glad I did.

Cockneys VS Zombies, like a lot of movies with the abbreviation VS in their title, is one of those films that delivers exactly what it says on the tin. That the film does so with such stylish panache and good humour is just the icing on the cake.

Two brothers, Terry and Andy, their cousin Katy (played by Michelle Ryan of 4321, Doctor Who, The Bionic Woman and Eastenders fame) and a couple of accomplices, go off to rob a bank in an effort to get enough money to stop the old people’s home that their grand-dad runs from being demolished. Due to a freak of timing, their expected haul of thousands of pounds accidentally ends up as 4.5 million... but they are cornered by the police and have a nutter in their gang who just makes things worse.

Luckily for them, this occurs on the same day as a local building site excavation uncovers a zombie infested tomb which starts to infect the whole of the East End of London. With the military sealing London off it’s up to our team of rag tag cockneys to grab the money, tool up with weapons from their “colleague” Mental Mickey’s lock-up, rescue the old people from their granddad’s home and then fight their way out of London. And if you think this little set up is ripe for comedy mayhem and oodles of gory violence, then you’d be right. Cockneys VS Zombies delivers in spades (quite literally in some scenes) as the group bungle their way through to rescue the old people, played by the likes of Richard Briers (his star turn with a 9mm Uzi taped to his zimmer frame will be something I’ll remember for a while), Honour Blackman (who proves herself still able to nicely wield a machine gun), Dudley Sutton (wheelchair guy with a shotgun riding... er... shotgun) and Tony Selby (you’ll believe a man can batter a zombie to “undeath” with his artificial leg).

The real star turn of “the old buggers”, as I shall affectionately refer to them, is Alan Ford as the war hero grand-dad. He is totally gung ho and a flashback sequence to the second World War where he single handedly takes on a small bunker of Nazi’s will both have you in stitches and visually demonstrates everything you need to know about his character.

There’s also both serious tension and comedy to be found with the psychotic Mental Mickey, who you do no want to get on the wrong side of. Both living and undead need to watch their step where this guy is concerned, but there’s also a couple of inventive zombie genre gags I’ve not seen before connected to his character. Doesn’t mean to say they’ve not been done before... it’s just that I don’t remember seeing them before...

The first gag is when Mickey gets bitten in the arm and Michelle Ryan blows the zombie away at the head. However, the teeth and jaw bones are still left in Mickey’s arm for a while until he can find a way to get them forcibly open.

The second gag takes place once Mickey has “turned” into a zombie, as you know is going to be inevitable. When our heroes try to kill him off with multiple gunshots to the head, the bullets just blow away the flesh and bounce off his head, revealing the metal plate in his head that he’s had since his recent experiences in the military. It takes a little while to get rid of him.

All this and a few more good, visually inventive zombie themed gags make the film a pleasure to watch. They even had Chas and Dave turn up for good measure, singing a catchy refrain on the end credits of the movie quite apart from their cameo spot...

We’re going ‘ead to ‘ead, 
with the undead, 
we’re gonna fill ‘em full o’ lead, 
‘cause they won’t stay dead. 

Catchy... it gets almost as infectious as a contaminated zombie bite as the credits wear on and if you’re not careful, you’ll be singing it in your head as you come out of the cinema, just like I was.

The film is typical of a zombie film in that, when the humour is originating from the zombie angle, as opposed to the cockney angle, the comedy is pretty dark and there’s a spectacularly non-PC shot in the movie where a zombie-toddler get kicked across a yard and hits a target on a sign reading “Targetting child cruelty.” Bleak, but hilarious within the context of the surrounding scene. The comedy scenes are, naturally, hit and miss but this film did make me smile quite frequently so they are certainly doing something right. The action sequences, too, are not edited too choppily and everything makes sense, with no confusion as to who is doing what at any one time. As is usual with these kinds of films, no explanation or interest is given as to why the protagonists have a zombie outbreak on their hands but, if you’ve seen enough of these things as I have, you’ll know that this isn’t really a problem.

The ending on this one doesn’t disappoint either and it’s a much more optimistic film in tone to what you normally get on these affairs. One thing I will say though is that this movie should have got a wider distribution. If they’d have showed this at my local for a few weeks I’m sure word of mouth would have got around and ensured a big turn out down my way. If you’re a lover of zombie movies, this is easily one of the more watchable and enjoyable ones on offer (which, given just how many of this genre are made every year now, usually on a tight or practically non-existent budget, really is no mean feat). The cockneys in the movie, old and young, are all great little actors and this work deserves a bit more recognition than it’s currently getting, I believe. It’s a British movie and it needs some support. I reckon this could do really well in the US if the marketing is handled correctly. A great little treat for all fans of the shambling undead.