Come Play with Me

British sex comedy/crime caper with a host of very well-known UK TV names of the time, along with several 'adult entertainment' actresses - the best known of which was easily the ill-fated Mary Millington (she committed suicide just two years later). I remember seeing it not too long after it came out and thinking it was very daring. Watching it now it plays out like an extended Benny Hill sketch but with full nudity (Bob Todd and Henry McGee from The Benny Hill Show are in it); too bad it isn't anywhere near as funny as Benny Hill. There were rumours of a 'hardcore cut' although as far as I know it hasn't surfaced. Nostalgia ('spot the long forgotten face'), a lot of very cute girls, and (especially) Mary Millington get it 3/10.

Here's another of these bawdy, saucy, naughty, eye candy flicks, that the English do so well. Set on a sex health farm, with hotties and open nudity, a plus, we have two money forgers hiding out. They're quiet and demure amongst the much other younger guests, and with good reason, but really these two aren't the sociable type. With an intrusion of half clad hotties waking them up, they hardly even react. This verging cult hit has some great songs, one music choreographed number, done by some of the actors I couldn't get, out of my head. As in other sex farces too, some recognizable faces, you wouldn't expect to see in this, pop up. This movie too, gives a whole new meaning to irrigation, I don't want to go into. Come Play With Me is actually a saucy little entertainer with way enough nudity, to get your hormones rising, humor, and some likable forgers. A very naughty, raunchy comedy, London Style.

COME PLAY WITH ME is an astonishingly awful British sex comedy from George Harrison Marks, never known for making quality productions in the first place. This one's an interminable nudie feature set in a health resort, where various characters come together and butt heads in a story I can't make head nor tail of. The astonishing thing about all this is the number of well established and familiar faces they've roped into appearing; you don't expect the likes of Irene Handl and Alfie Bass to feature but here they are, dragging their reputations through the mud all the same. Non-stop nudity from the likes of Mary Millington does very little to make up for the appalling quality of this deeply unfunny production.

As a child of the seventies I grew up with the Myth that this movie was a great porn classic. I first managed to see "Behing the Green door" first and was both as excited and impressed as a young teen could be. I then soon saw this steaming pile of dog excrement and I think it almost put me off sex for a decade. There is nothing that isn't terrible about this movie, (except for Mary Millington who was lovely to look at but was to acting what Dom Deluise is to gymnastics.) I once met the Great Alfie Bass and after enquiring about "The Fearless Vampire Killer" and working with The Goodies I bravely mentioned this. He shook his head in shame and told stories of George Harrison Marks being so drunk he directed most of the movie asleep or vomiting.It shows. The songs are so awful I think I would chose a slow death than ever hear them again. A movie to avoid at all costs.

British sex comedies are kind of like "Lake Woebegone" in-reverse--they're all below average. And then some of them are downright awful. This was one of the most famous films of the genre since it featured sex star legend Mary Millington. But she has about as big of role here as she did with her brief cameo in "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle", and that movie is a lot more fun to sit through than this one.

There's no shortage of naked dollybirds, of course--like "The Playbirds" this was produced by British porn magnate David Sullivan and features a lot of the same "actresses" pulled from the pages of his nudie magazines (Millington, Suzie Mandel, etc.). Unfortunately though, it also has a plot: two counterfeiters (Alfie Bass and George Harrison Marks, who also directed)go on the lam from the law and hide out at a Scottish health spa run by a septuagenarian (Irene Handl). Then a bunch of strippers also start working at the spa for some reason (OK, so it's not much of a plot). What we have here is the same old problem--the Brits can't seem to make a straight-out sex film, so they have to try to "class" it up by throwing in a bunch second-rate, over-the-hill comedians. Bass, Marks, and Handl have an unfortunate amount of screen time and they're all painfully unfunny.

Like all sex films this movie is horribly cheap, and the incompetent film-making makes it seem even cheaper. I have no idea why it was so popular in Britain. At the time, I guess, they were such a sex starved country (due to stringent censorship laws) that their movie audiences would apparently just watch anything. This was a popular film in a certain time and place, but now it's little more than a curiosity