manchester_england2004
This is one of those films that I describe as "so bad it's good". This is an often-used term by people to describe films that are usually ineptly produced and fail at delivering what they intend yet end up being incredibly funny, albeit for all the wrong reasons. I remember reading in a review for another film elsewhere on IMDb that this term can never be applied to a comedy, since a bad comedy is, according to that review, one that isn't funny. In theory I should agree with that since it makes sense. But then I watch COME PLAY WITH ME once more and realise that I don't.For reasons totally unknown to me and to everyone else who has reviewed this film, it was a massive box office hit in the UK, breaking records to become the longest running film to ever grace a UK cinema screen. It ran in cinemas for an incredible four years.The plot is as follows - two forgers go on the run from a bunch of crooks and hide out in a health farm. From there the plot expands to include a government official on their trail, along with the crooks, a health farm where there are virtually no staff, and a bunch of young women turning up on a coach to run said health farm.Lots of familiar faces from the period show up in this film, including Alfie Bass, Ronald Fraser, Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Ken Parry and many others. For none of these people is COME PLAY WITH ME their finest hour. But they are all fun to watch and the film is kept moving along nicely. The lovely Sue Longhurst, a veteran of the 1970s sex comedies, is present too and that was a wise decision on the part of the producers. She's always great to watch.George Harrison Marks is unintentionally funny playing one of the forgers. It's well-documented that he was drunk during the making of the film and it's evident in most of his scenes. But it is funny to see him dressed up in a Victorian-era outfit (complete with horrible wig and false teeth), looking like he stepped right out of a 1930s music hall production, and into the 1970s. There's one scene where he's lifting a trunk out of the back of a car. I don't know why but I laugh every time I see it, even though there are no intentional "sight gags" involved.The editing is very sloppy in places, with Henry McGee looking at the camera at the end of one scene for example. This provides some of the amusement to be found in the film. The dialogue comes across as being improvised on the spot at times, the absolutely awful song called Pretty Girl plays out over quite a few scenes and Ken Parry's character is just written out halfway through the film as though his part in the plot was left unfinished. I think you're getting the idea now what I was getting at when I suggested the film was inept.There are a few sex scenes but they are all very softcore (made more so by censorship edits). People watching the film in this day and age won't be surprised to find that the marketing of the film as some kind of hardcore pornography effort was just a con trick on the part of the producer. The sex scenes aren't particularly erotic or funny and serve only to slow the film down a bit while adding the obligatory "T&A" to ensure this qualifies as a sex film rather than a straight comedy like the CARRY ON films for example.COME PLAY WITH ME is funny mainly for all the wrong reasons but it does provide a lot of entertainment and seems to get funnier with each viewing. There isn't more one could really ask for when watching a very low-budget film from the 1970s.
jaibo
It is hard to defend this film against the criticisms aimed at it by other reviewers and most film critics. It is incoherent, it is poorly scripted (to say the least) and it is, emphatically, a repulsive spectacle. But it also has the virtue of being an extremely odd movie, a relic of a past age which not only offers some valuable social history but which also preserves on celluloid a long-dead era of British vaudeville and girlie shows. Far from being what it was promoted as at the time - a cutting edge 70s sex romp - Come Play with Me hearkens back to the age of the Windmill Theatre with its comics and nudes, the nudist films of the 1950s and 60s and the tawdry dance clubs and strip shows of old Soho. This is the film which John Osborne's character Archie Rice (in The Entertainer) would have made for the "inert, shoddy lot" in his audience.The film mixes two impulses, as did the shows at the Windmill: there's comics doing second rate turns and sketches, and there's pretty girls with their clothes off. That the comics are well past their sell-by date only ads to the sense of an era dying which emanates from every foot of the film. Alfie Bass, once a popular pantomime, comedy and TV actor, plays one of the two lead characters, a forger called Kelly. Bass is made up to look like a grotesque cross between Charlie Chaplin and Oliver Hardy, and when not engaged in the laborious details of the plot (forgers on the run from gangsters and hiding out in a health club come knocking shop), he is let loose to go into some old time Jewish shtick and patter straight out of a music hall routine. Bass, a talented comic with a slightly repellent line in ingratiating self-pity, is teamed with the the film's director, former glamour photographer George Harrison Marks, as a classic but extremely clichéd double act, stumbling around in black suits and hats as the nudes cluster around them. At times, the film looks as if Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon has stopped waiting for Godot and gone off for a bit of saucy fun.Irene Handl gets top billing, and her performance gives us the chance to once again study her extraordinary performance style: the high-falutin false airs at first make her delivery seem amateur, but one soon realises that she is not only taking the mickey out of people who put on airs and graces in reality, but also suggests subversively that all social dialogue is a put-on job, and that her characterisation is a typical example of a human social performance. Marks the director does at least give her and the rest of his down-at-heel comics the chance to give us their turns, unlike the Adventures films of Stanley Long, which hire good comics and then give them nothing whatsoever to do. Here, the grotesque likes of Talfryn Thomas, Queenie Watts, Rita Webb (brilliant as a gypsy fortune teller), Tommy Godfrey and Cardew Robinson (resplendent in bright red track suit and full highland regalia) are given some golden screen moments, and after this film the British entertainment scene never saw their like again: true clowns, with all of the horror and sadness the word "clown" invokes, and blessed with grotesque faces which would have thrilled the Dutch painter peasant Bruegel. That these bodies and faces are so clearly heading towards the grave only adds to the splendidly repellent quality of the film: it's a kind of striptease of death, with pretty young flesh surrounded by living Memento Mori.Anecdotal evidence has it that Marks was inebriated on the set, and the film certainly seems like the ramblings of a drunkard. The plot veers from one wildly unbelievable scenario to another, flitting between the antics at the health farm, where a gaggle of pretty nurses seem inexplicably willing to have sex with some of the most decaying, ugly or obese old men ever to have existed, and the misadventures of an MI5 agent on the trail of the forgers - a monumentally inept comic turn by the wobbly and camp comic actor Ken Parry. The scenes with him in drag on Brighton pier give the scenes where Divine is parading through the streets in the early John Waters films a run for their money in terms of eye-popping drag weirdness. Parry corpses and struggles to remember his lines for much of the time; in other scenes, Henry McGee looks straight into the camera, and that wonderful British character actor Ronald Fraser is palpably half-cut.Mary Millington, the supposed "star" of the film whose name was emblazoned all over the posters and publicity material, has a small supporting role as one of the nurses. She has a brief lesbian sex romp, and also does a comedy sex scene whereby she massages a muscular lump and them gives him some painful colonic irrigation. The sex elements of these scenes do look like shots from a hardcore stag movie, and you glimpse what Millington could have done if she'd have gone to America and hooked up with someone like Gerard Damiano or Radley Metzger - the woman was a superbly lubricious performer with some charisma. Fellow model Suzy Mandel is even more delightful, a real cheeky charmer, in her brief scene addressing her nurse-troops.It would be wrong to pretend that Come Play with Me is anything like a good film; it's not even a film, really - more a forgery of one, to coin in cash and document the last gasps of a vaudevillian tradition. I couldn't help quite enjoying the film, and think that it does have a dollop of genuine madness and weirdness in it which is missing from so many of the other British sex comedies of its era.
