Landslide

In a small Welsh town, a theatre box-office cashier is murdered. When a landslide occurs, all the occupants find themselves trapped in the building with the murder among them and a potential for more victims.

A low budget murder mystery and disaster movie all in one, it says what it is on the tin, but not much more. With a better budget and director, it feels that more could have been done woth this film with potential.

Lacklustre crime drama, starring Jimmy Hanley and Dinah Sheridan (who would marry five years later). Members of a theatrical troupe are trapped inside a Welsh theatre by a mudslide, only to be killed off one by one. Very much a B movie. 5/10.

LANDSLIDE is a murder mystery set in and around a natural disaster - a landslide which seals actors inside a Welsh theatre. Not only must the trapped survivors contend with the usual clichés of the disaster genre: a lack of oxygen, dwindling supplies, no hope of rescue - but there's also a murderer on the prowl, and he's one of their own.

Everything about LANDSLIDE screams quota quickie filler. It seems to have been written in a hurry with no real attention to facts or realism, and the repeated attempts at humour don't really play out very well. It's also rather obviously a low budget production, but I was surprised at the effectiveness of the landslide scenes, which are well staged.

The murder mystery stuff is less effective given that the identity of the murderer is obvious from the very early scenes. There's also a lot of over the top acting on display here, with various characters displaying larger than life mannerisms and others given over to hysterical laughter. Still, the film is notable for featuring the double pairing of the young Jimmy Hanley and Dinah Sheridan, two actors who would go on to marry five years later.

"Quota quickies" - don't you just hate them? Cheap, formulaic plot, casting and and performances with sets so small and minimal that they would make a newsreader claustrophobic and not stretch his/her dramatic abilities. I give them a rating of 5 meaning that I don't care if I watch them or not. Not irritatingly bad, just neither here nor there. This film is extravagantly imaginative and boldy goes over the top and almost off the rails.

An end-of-the-pier theatrical review troupe facing a catastrophe not just life-threatening but genuinely claustrophobic too. The troupe are reminiscent of JB Priestley's in his theatrical perennial The Good Companions (1930s version) - gossipy and superficial. How would they behave facing real disaster: unified and calmly? Landslide defies comparison indeed almost defies description but is spirited and quite entertaining. Visually too, it boldly goes with the special effects and set. Two of the stars would later rise to stardom in Britain (and then the Dominions) Jimmy Handley and Dinah Sheridan.

One of a kind. A slight shadow over it being the real events of just 20 years later in the same Welsh Valleys - the landslide which enveloped a school killing nearly all children and staff.

That film preservation moves in mysterious ways shows in the pristine print of this incredibly obscure quota quickie aired in the small hours this morning on Talking Pictures. Even this is historically interesting, however, since it stars Jimmy Handley & Dinah Sheridan when they were just teenagers, five years before they married.

Donovan Pedelty's films were usually set in Ireland, but for a change this one's set in Wales (not that you'd know it from the accents of most of the cast, who are obviously as Welsh as the dance troupe they're members of, 'The Famous Orientals', are authentically Chinese).

Describing it as a mystery-thriller is already a spoiler, since for the first third of it's already short running time it seems more like a revue film (and includes a cod Victorian melodrama about a dastardly mine-owner called Jasper Johns, which I hope doesn't lead to any careless researchers claiming the nonegenarian pop artist was once a child actor).

Although people get murdered by a maniac and buried in a landslide (thirty years before Aberfan) nobody in the film seems particularly perturbed by either, and it all sounds far more dramatic that it actually is to watch. The climactic fracas when the killer is eventually almost casually unmasked is so ineptly staged it's fascinating.