As I've been watching the Hammer films along with the "House of Hammer" podcast, two words have begun to strike terror in my heart. It's not "Dracula" and "Frankenstein", it's not even "Lee" and "Cushing". The words "Wartime" and "Comedy" though will bring me out in cold sweats. But maybe "Don't Panic Chaps!" will be the opposite and succeed where your "I only Arsked" and "Up The Creek" failed so miserably. Nope... it's maybe the worst of the lot.
A small group of British soldiers are sent to a tiny island in the Adriatic with instructions to watch for enemy movements ahead of refocusing efforts from North Africa into Southern Europe. They eventually discover that they share the island with a small group of German soldiers, who were guarding a cache of supplies, but seem to have been forgotten by German command. As both groups are of similar size and temperament, rather than fighting to death or capture, the German command proposes a truce, and that they share resources until someone, from either side, comes to collect them.
I've not made it sound very funny from that plot synopsis and that was clever on my behalf as indeed it's not very funny. There is a bit a of farcical element to it, as the English discover that the Germans are there, and then later when the decide to make an idiot cook. Later, inexplicably, a woman - Elsa, played by Nadja Regin - washes up on the island. She doesn't actually advance what little plot there is and only really appears to be there so the boys (and presumably us in the audience) can go "Phwoaaaar". You also get to see George Cole's naked bottom, if somehow that was on your bucket list.
What I'm saying is that this is rubbish. It's the first act of a premise of a story - but again it's one that goes nowhere leading to a particularly anticlimactic ending. I've wondered, with these comedies, whether it's all just timing and that it would have had them rolling in the aisles back in '59, but it appears the reviews of the time thought this was awful too. They were right.
