I picked up this series as a second-hand DVD. It had Charles Dance and Claire Skinner from Outnumbered in it so it looked promising. Well, there you go.
Take 2 cups of the 1970s Confessions sex comedies, a couple of tablespoons of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, 100mg of Brideshead Revisited, a dash of Grange Hill, a few pinches of James Bond and a soupçon of Phantom of the Opera. Mix it all together and what you have is a nasty brown sludge.
It was filmed in 2009 but it has a real 1970s vibe to it. Plenty of gratuitous sexism, racism and classism and a chunk of sexual assault. The one black guy gets off fairly lightly but there is a gormless Welsh girl with the world's worst mock-Barry accent, and a pair of 'comedy' oriental girls, to name but 3.
They have shamelessly aped Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure in the 2 ostensibly comic characters, though what they are doing in such a supposedly august college only the script writer knows.
The mad scientist has a cupboard full of puppets which he has to burn on a bonfire. We never find out why. It's a pity, as they were less wooden than most of the acting.
The screenplay seems to have been written by a teenager. One of the students dies, and inexplicably is given a sort-of Viking funeral in the school grounds.
The secret society which forms the heart of the plot is called the Dandelion Club. Another old name for this wild flower is Piss-the-bed. They certainly managed that with this series. I expect Charles Dance and the other proper actors wish they could burn every copy of this horror.
