GB
1980
40mins
Dir: Kenneth Rowles
Starring: Gloria Brittain and Derrick Slater
The adventures of a schoolgirl and her two friends
This soft-core adult ‘drama’ is an appalling spectacle, with no redeeming features whatsoever. The incoherent 40 minute rambling is a very poor production, but to understand why a film as poor as this even exists you need to know that at the time this was produced, apart from favourable tax breaks, there was a scheme called the “Eady Levy” that ensured that a portion of the box office made its way back to the producers. Consequently, there was an undercurrent of low budget film making which didn’t need to be any good at all. And this one really isn’t any good at all. Right at the very end our character Mandy is tied to a railway line in the style of the famous silent ‘Perils of Pauline’ series. Our protagonists have clearly not done their homework though, as the line she is tied to is an overgrown and out of use branch line, not a busy main line. This ridiculous sequence is interspersed with an equally poor backlit shot of a passing 8-car formation of 4 CEP EMUs, filmed somewhere in Kent. As the train passes, the narrator tells us to watch out for the next ‘Perils of Mandy’ installment coming soon – but thankfully no such installment was ever made, for this one is so bad its likely there were no box office receipts!
