Carry on England

During WW II., a short but aggressive major tries to regulate an experimental "mixed" military team, consisting of both men and women.

One of the worst in the series that was really at the end of its tether, a dimly unamusing comedy with feeble and well-telegraphed jokes and very uncomfortable cast. An appalling and alarming sign that too many new faces appeared on both sides of the camera, none of which having much fun.

Unable to raise a few laughs, CARRY ON ENGLAND is the swan song of the serie. Even afterwards, CARRY ON EMMANUELLE or/and COLOMBUS made it too painful to live through.

The screenplay is simply non-existent, just a symptom of one. The lead characters are poor. The cinematography is plain Tv-movie like. The routine is based on trousers taken off, shoutings, lovemaking then trousers taken off, shoutings, lovemaking then, oh, I forgot, some breasts quickly shown. Simply NOT FUNNY.

Joan Sims has a ridiculous part and it's real shame, being the only decent actress all around. Judy Geeson is awfully bad, giving the worst performance of her career with Norman J Warren's INSEMINOID. Peter Rogers & Gerald Thomas were incapable of finding a new breath in the Carry On serie : the new actors just don't work together and the screenwriters (they were two!!!) just try to put some rehash of some stuff made years ago and way much better.

I really missed Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor and the whole bunch. They were worth watching any Carry On even though the screenplays were really poor, like in CARRY ON AT YOUR CONVENIENCE. But I guess everything has an end, but this one is really painful to watch. My fast forward button still remember it!

If you want to try something really funny, then get CARRY ON MATRON or CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER, these are are true gems. But you can pass that one.

2/10

There was an urban myth doing the rounds back in the seventies that this film was part-financed by the Beatles' Apple Corps company. If that is the case, then the fab four must have ingested more dodgy chemicals than anyone would have thought possible, because this is as bad as it gets. Patrick Mower and Judy Geeson are to comedy acting what sealions are to light engineering, and every moment they're on screen you'll want to hide behind the furniture. Kenneth Connor has little to do that isn't embarrassing in some way (his impersonation of a Nazi plane has to be one of the most cringe-making moments in the history of cinema) and the few loyal Carry On team members who could be bothered to turn up for this lazy, crude, shambolic outing are thrown away in cameo parts. The only part that raised a smile with me was Diane Langton attempting to operate the steering mechanism on the anti-aircraft gun, only to be thwarted by her protuberant bosom. Then Peter Jones, whose lines are intentionally awful but rendered even worse by his drab playing, completely kills the scene with his comment about "keeping abreast of the situation". One can only dream of what Talbot Rothwell (the screenwriter who bowed out of the series two years before) would have had Sidney James saying about this seaside postcard scenario...

A slow-action and grimly humourless replay of Carry On Sergeant, Carry On England misjudges the saucy seaside charm of the franchise and, in an attempt to keep pace with comedy trends, replaces it with on-the-nose smut and low-level sex action playing out like a misguided, mash-up episode of Dad's Army and It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Even with the ever-enthusiastic Windsor Davies and Melvyn Hayes playing almost carbon copies of their respective characters from the latter sitcom, the paucity of the script and concept behind it is plain to see. The sexual frustration, constant innuendo and innocent banter have been completely abandoned and in its place is a more vulgar and arrogant style of comedy that struggles even with lavatorial humour; besieged by a steady stream of dreadful puns, single-handedly having to put across the worst selection of jokes in Carry On history with conviction. The more open-minded attitude to sex, with sequences featuring topless nudity only adds to the feeling that the series is, by now, clutching at straws. Even with a couple of funny moments and a clutch of actors always worth watching regardless of poor material, for a comedy, Carry On England is a pretty dismal affair as if the entire life force and humour have been drained from it by some vampiric entity. A shambolic mess consisting of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to lewd humour and pathetic attempts at slapstick, it plays more like an obscene parody of a Carry On film than an actual Carry On film.

Rubbish. Along with Carry on Emmanuelle this is the worst of the series. I've got a lot of time for these films, but this was inexcusable. By this time (1976) the joke was no longer funny and the juice had run dry, as Sid James might have put it.

Only two of the Carry On regulars are in this and even they look bored. The jokes are staid and formulaic, delivered with the speed and panache of a postman. The budget for the film appeared to be £2.50.

Even Windsor Davies' Sergeant's bellowing couldn't save this.

1.5/10