Aventuras de un detective privado

All B-Movie boggled eyes are sure to be on glistering Giallo Glamour Girl Suzy Kendall who sizzles sensationally in serial smut-wrangler Stanley A. Long's riotously ribald, stupendously silly, bra-burstingly boorish comedy misadventure 'Adventures of a Private Eye' (1977). Witness the blissfully bawdy, barrel scraping buffoonery of charisma-challenged Christopher Neil's brainlessly bumbling private dick enthusiastic attempts to get to the bottom of things, and frequently getting more than his own knickers in a twist!!! One of muck maestro Stanley Long's frivolously frothy, fitfully filthy film's many highlights is the legitimately fabulous burlesque routine by the distractingly delicious Adrienne Posta, energetically performing her rewardingly 'not-so private', eye-catchingly exotic Liza Minnelli Cabaret routine! The more forgiving fans of prosaic Carry on-style pratfalls, dribble-entendres, juvenile jackanapes, and grubby-fingered, saucy postcard piffle will certainly dig on the asinine antics and retrograde tomfoolery of Christopher Neil's scurrilously salacious sleuth, plus the surprisingly glittering cast is a burnished Brit-cult dream, featuring the estimable acting talents of Jon Pertwee, Harry H Corbett, Diana Dors, Ian Lavender, Anna Quale, Irene Handle, Liz Frazer and William Rushton.

'The 'Adventures of a Private Eye' is an unapologetically lurid, lowbrow B-Movie bacchanal of puerile bottom-pinching perfidy, and, sadly, we shall never see it's inglorious like again!

British pop singer Christopher Neil stars in this Carry On film Adventures Of A Private Eye. It has the look of a Carry On movie without the cast of Carry On regulars.

Cinema fans will also recognize the plot premise from Bob Hope's comedy from the 40s My Favorite Brunette. That's the one where Hope is asked by Alan Ladd to watch his office and take messages. Of course Hope decides he'd rather survey Dorothy Lamour.

Neil has the same situation as Jon Pertwee just asks him to mind the store, but Neil wants a chance to soar and Suzy Kendall certainly makes him soar.

In fact this film has the look and feel and general raunchiness of a Carry On film. But it would have been so much better with Carry On regulars.

The second of the "Adventures" series, this one features Chris Neil as Bob, an assistant to a P.I. who tries to crack a case when his boss is on vacation. The whole ordeal is done in a slow, boring, unfunny, contrived sort of way.

However, the film perks up when Adrienne Posta comes in. Posta delivers a superb impersonation of Oscar-winning actress Liza Minelli (named Lisa Moroni here) who gives him shelter when the bad guys attempt to eliminate him when he's starting to get a bead on solving the case. Posta portrays Minelli from her role in Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" and looks and sounds like her as well. It's a darkhorse candidate in my book for the best mimic job in the history of cinema. Otherwise, there's not much here to like.

For those who won't have been around at the time that this film was released they will look at the cast and wonder.There is Jon Letters,Dr Who,Harry H.,Corbett,Steptoe,Ian Lavender,Private Pike.Additionally Diana Ford,Irene Handel and Fred Emney.The reason for their participation in this film is that other than spin offs and a few American financed films this is the only type of film that was being made.So the actors were prepared to take What they could get.Now you can have some funny sex films but this wasn't one of them.It is unfunny and truly dreadful.It took the British film industry many years to get out of the doldrums.

Adventures of a Private Eye introduces us to a number of dense, almost unsolvable mysteries: has Britain ever produced a worse director than Stanley A. Long? why does Long not know, despite spending over 15 years in the film business prior to making this film, how to pace a sequence or end one on a proper punchline? why does he hire enormously talented actors like Harry H. Corbett, Irene Handl, Diana Dors, Jon Pertwee, Anna Quayle and Julien Orchard and give them absolutely nothing to do? why did 70s English audiences flock to see absolute rubbish like this in their droves? It can't be the sex, as compared to the likes of the then-contemporary Swedish and French cinema, there's hardly any flesh on display here, and none of it is even remotely erotic; nor can it be the comedy, which is a lot of things (incompetent, mean spirited, offensive, banal, ignorant, half-hearted, old hat) but not even remotely funny; it can't be the story, which makes British comedy capers of the period which were less successful at the Box Office (House in Nightmare Park for example) look like Chinatown.

To be fair, Private Dick is a smidgeon better than the first entry into the series, purely because it actually has some kind of story as opposed to being a merely string of idiot vignettes. And the film does look good, especially on the new Region 2 Dvds, where the gorgeous lighting of the interiors and night time scenes is genuinely impressive (catch the shot of photographer Scott walking towards the mansion after dark, the screen awash with breathtaking colours). And Adrienne Posta does a mean Liza Minelli impression, supported would you believe by the boy from the Tomorrow People playing a Bugsy Malone-type Italian gangster, all school play amateurism and elbows.

"Bloody amateurs" is a phrase a police inspector in the film uses about private eyes, and it's apt given the star of the movie can't act: Christopher Neil is a nullity into oblivion as the title character, taking over from Barry Evans (who instead chose to appear in the flop sex comedy Under the Doctor). Yet another document on the sexual, spiritual and social dereliction of the UK in the 1970s. It does bear the distinction of having a cameo by Shaw Taylor, tipping the wink to TV's then current Police 5, which just goes to show how narrowly culturally specific an audience of TV morons the producer was aiming at with this.