It took four goes before my DVD player accepted the disc for "The Flesh and Blood Show" - it evidently had some difficulty digesting it. When it did finally stutter into life the first thing on screen, apart from a muted, grainy sea-scape is the legend: "The final sequences in this film have been photographed in THREE DIMENSIONS". It then advises me to reach for the "coloured viewer" provided on my entrance into the theatre. Balls. I will now never be able to enjoy "the pleasures of the THIRD DIMENSION".
The caption dissolves into the murky sea and, once a spectral mist lifts, we see the west Pier at Brighton hove-ing* into view, like Lina Romay parting the veil at the start of "Female Vampire". The camera moves slowly towards the pier and the soundscape distorts from lapping water and wheeling gulls to a snatch of "Othello" extravagantly applauded and as the camera moves down amongst the blackened supporting struts beneath the beleaguered structure, to a woman's screams. And there on the dark water we see a slick of Kensington Gore coiling through the tide. It's a surprisingly effective opening, or it would have been if the print wasn't so horribly muddy and indistinct.
We cut to a London "pad" where the doorbell rings in the middle of the night. The flat's occupants, two girls in their early twenties, one of whom is naked, bicker about answering the door. This being the seventies, and a film, the naked one goes. It's Luan Peters, Hammer-babe and all round good egg. On opening the door, still naked, she encounters a man clutching a knife which is buried deep in his chest. He stumbles into the flat, stumbling and painfully rising to his feet again, like James Brown winding up a show. In fact it is the two girls he has been winding up and he produces the fake knife with a flourish. What a good joke! Turns out he's an actor; they're all actors. That's why instead of phoning the police about this unfunny mad-man, Luan slips on a dressing gown and makes everyone coffee, ready for a chin-scratching session about cahier de cinema.
It turns out that all three of them have been invited to perform in a theatrical piece called "The Flesh and Blood Show", rehearsals starting in an old abandoned theatre on the pier at "Eastcliffe-on-Sea". This isn't so much clumsy exposition as the entire plot being given away early so we can see the cast being hacked to pieces as quickly as possible. So what's next? Meeting the cast; a series of human scabbards each more dopey than the last. We've met bosomy social nudist Luan already, as well as her plain-Jane flat-mate and chuckles the comedy stab-victim. Next up is Jenny "Magpie" Hanley, as an up-and-coming starlet, tied to the engagement with an iron-clad contract and desperate to get away. There's throbbin' Robin Askwith and his familliar bum faced grin, an exact cross between Brian Jones and Doctor Zaius. Ray "Mr Benn" Brooks brings his usual pragmatic charm to the proceedings and the rest of the cast are made up galumphing "New Generation" types with voices like "I speak your weight" machines and the sort of rangy, gangling bodies you just don't see any more: austerity kids who didn't see a Sherbert Dab until they were 15. There will be a winnowing. A muddy and unecessarily murky winnowing, where breasts could be knee-caps and thighs could be shoulders and the best cuts are all over the floor of the editing suite. Luckily the explanatory dialogue is as thick as the shit smeared over the camera's lens.
First murder: hearing screams the thesps go and investigate. In the bowels of the theatre they find a row of wax masks. Wait a minute - THAT'S NO WAX MASK! After the gruesome discovery a long tracking shot with a gloved hand stuck on the end of it hyperventilates over the corpse. Well there's your baddy!
(an aside)
The soundtrack by Cyril Ornadel (well known to...well to me as the composer of "Sapphire and Steel"'s theme music) is surprisingly varied and affecting; the mournful oboes giving it a sort of "Small Films" melancholy. It would never be allowed today where everything would be Murray Gold-ed to the max, but here, with this creaking narrative and submarine palette, it adds much needed colour and detail.
The actors descend upon a local cafe and are loud and rude to the staff in a way that suggests they are "Free-Spirits". They meet a retired major there who is very taken by them and they refuse his offer to go back to his. Then Candace Glendenning turns up to replace the murdered girl that nobody, save Ray Brooks, gives a shit about.
Murder 2: Our bosomy pal goes for an unbelievably inky stroll along the pier after an arguement with her boyfriend. Not a good idea. She gets chatting to some sort of wheezing tramp who subsequently attacks her in a way that's not immediately obvious as the screen is basically black throughout. I wonder if a young(ish) Derek Jarman sat through this. She survives but weirdo stab-myself-in-the-chest-guy has disappeared.
Candace's aunt has a guest-house and they de-camp there for baths and tea. Candace's aunt starts, unprompted, to tell them the story of the famous actor Arnold Gates who performed on the pier during the war and disappeared mysteriously with his young wife and another actor. She goes into this in some quite exacting detail. Then the boring major turns up and Jenny Hanley is rude to him. He doesn't mind, he's just happy with the company of the young people, but she is getting de-ja-vuey all over the place! There may be something afoot!
I have to say, even discounting her bosom's bra-vura performance, Luan Peters is pretty good in this, about the only actor who impresses. Her Carol is, in turn, snippily sarcastic, a sneering bitch, fluidly theatrical and itchily panicked. She spent most of her career, sadly, as a pair of comedy tits in ITV sitcoms but she is he only one in this film, apart from dependable Brooks, who appears to be acting at all! Of course this is a Pete walker film and acting in a Pete Walker film isn't everything - in fact it's rarely anything! She dies, falling out of the bottom of a pier. You don't really see it. It IS filmed but you don't really see it. Then Candace dies, tits out under a spotlight, and knackering the actor's chance of free bed and board with her aunt. That's the final stroke for Ray who immediately works out who the real villain is prompted by the mysterious major.
No spoilers here, well no further spoilers here, but pretty soon we're in 3D murder recreation scenario-land. You couldn't call Pete "Unlikely Stand-up" Walker a meat and potatoes director, this is some pretty thin gruel, but there's lots of ace fun to be had with a great cast and lots of early seventies "physical theatre" bollocks contrasted with Arthur Gates fruity Donald Wolfett stylings. I really wish you could see what was going on though: this is like a glass-bottom boat-ride without the glass-bottom-boat: there's lots to see here but no way of seeing it.
*east sussex coastal town pun, there.
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