I indulged my guiltiest of filmic pleasures on Sat night, one so ridiculous, I'm almost ashamed to mention it. I'm speaking of 70s Brit smut extravaganza Come Play With Me - wait!, come back!, let me explain... This film was reputedly one of the biggest UK grossers of the decade, it ran for years in certain porno cinemas (remember them!), it made millionaires of sleazebags like producer David Sullivan - 40 odd years ago this was forbidden fruit of the most exotic type, labelled 'strong' and 'uncut'. Old bag Mary Whitehouse feared it would end civilisation as she knew it. Needless to say what we're actually looking at here is the biggest movie con job this side of Snuff. It's basically a no-joke carry-on style movie populated by male gargoyles like Tefryn Thomas and Harrison Marks and a gaggle of page 3 slappers who can barely read their lines. There's painful 'joke skits', including a neverending one involving a parrot and a fortune teller; detumescently (is that a word?) unerotic sex is interperesed with shots of leering old geezers in long johns, actors visibly corpse in front of camera (God knows why, it's not the hilarity of the script), song and dance numbers break out like herpes sores, the plot is so vague and obtuse as to border on avant grade. In short the whole affair is so ghastly, so awful I find it hopelessly addictive - to think people actually wanked to this in the 70s! In cinemas! A time capsule of the weirdest kind - I'II cherish my News of the Screws freebie disc always! Merry Xmas to one and all!
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