Murder on the Blackpool Express

This is a good, solid light comedy and drama in the mould of an Agatha Christie-style one-by-one murder mystery, as you'd guess from the title. It's not trying to be big, loud or cutting but has much more of an 'ITV special' feel too it.

I do like my strong, punchy comedies and I also do like my highly enjoyable comedies. This is the latter and its seasoned cast do a beautiful job of delivering a strong script liberally scattered with witticisms and gags. I had a lot of fun watching it.

Not usually a fan of comedies, but the dramas I have seen lately were very poor so checked this out. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought the dialogue was clever & humorous; I laughed out loud at several points. Nothing was particularly original, but it wasn't a carbon copy of anything else in particular just another who-done-it with a finite group of people traveling/staying together with members dying one by one. I liked the character choices; the senior citizen ladies were delightful yet not the stereotypes often seen in show of this type.

I thought this was a delightful movie, well worth the time to watch it. With a bit of a surprise to me at the end.

I enjoyed watching this over the top romp with great character actors hamming it up cleverly. You have to be in the mood to suspend completly rational thought for a while. The second movie, "Death on the Tyne" also was very funny and used a lot a few of the same character actors. I give it an 8. However. The 3rd installation "Dial M for Middlebrough" fell flat and ran out of steam, I couldn't keep watching it. I rate it a two just because I like the charater actors.

Then they attempted to make a series of them being detectives.

This is already totally implausible, because they were so horribly bad at it. I tried to watch the first of three episodes, I couldn't make it ten minutes. The first two are good, give the rest a pass.

This film concerns a seemingly disconnected group of people on a bus tour of fictional murder sites with the egotistical author of several murder mysteries leading the way. However, at each site, a murder of one of the tourists occurs and the sprightly tour guide and cynical bus driver find themselves playing detective.

This whole scenario is definitely played for laughs and it's really a joke-a- minute kind of enterprise. And that works well for the first hour. However, I think this kind of approach to comedy-murder is hard to sustain and by the time it ends, the "jokiness" gets a bit wearing. And the murder mystery itself is at a "Murder She Wrote" level of complexity. The performance of Johnny Vegas as the bus driver helps a great deal. He makes for an unusual "detective" and his jokes are the ones that land the most often.

This was good fun, perfect pre-Christmas/Bank Holiday viewing.

With a great cast (including Johnny Vegas and Sian Gibson) this comedy take on Murder on the Orient Express had lots of laughs, and some famous faces sending themselves up (Nigel Havers) along the way.

Apparently it has led to two further outings, but I have not seen these.

This could do with a DVD release.