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The Playbirds (1978)

Dir: Willy Roe

1970’s England.
A killer is stalking the centrefold models of porn magazine (sorry erotic publication) ‘Playbirds’ magazine, owned by medallion wearing playboy Harry Dougan (Alan Lake), who have been taking part in Witchcraft themed photo shoots and who have links to horses and horse riding (!)

The Police are not so hot on the killer’s tail and as the murders stack up the Cops in charge, Inspectors Holborn (Glynn Edwards) and Morgan (Gavin Campbell) resort to desperate measures.
They decide to put a woman Police officer undercover (or undie-cover if you will) in Dougan’s mini porn empire to ‘pursued’ him into making her the next ‘Playbirds’ cover girl/centrefold and thus lure the killer out.
After a number of striptease auditions (surely not in the Scotland Yard rule book!) the lucky WPC picked for the job is Lucy Sheridan (Mary Millington) and with a bubbly passion for getting the job done she throws herself breast first into her mission…..

 

This rather bizarre mixture of tacky 70’s English Sexploitation’ film and salacious Giallo styled murder mystery has a fascinating history in it’s make-up.
British porn baron David Sullivan had already had a truly massive hit with the generally considered awful sex comedy “Come Play with Me”, in which the much loved English model Mary Millington was shoe-horned in to film some additional scenes to perk up the movie’s woeful sex content, as such he was eager for more money spinning movies and with “The Playbirds” he was on to a win win situation.

Sullivan not only got another vehicle for his girlfriend/most popular model Millington but he also got to have his own magazine as the one plastered all over the film as the fictional Dougan’s publication.
‘Playbirds’ the magazine is not only constantly mentioned (it’s even the name of Dougan‘s race horse as well, just to ensure as much verbal coverage as possible!) but also frequently seen coming off the printing presses and being looked at by the Cops.
Sullivan himself even gets mentioned in a racetrack tannoy announcement!
As well as all that, the real ‘Playbirds’ magazine (and his other mags like the cheekily titled “Whitehouse”) became itself a long running free advert for the film as Sullivan filled issues with the models in the film and teasing editorials to tweak his readers interest into his upcoming epic.
It was utterly classic Exploitation marketing 101!

The cast is also a fascinating one in it’s mixture of soon to be household name Sit-com/TV stars, then hip nudie cuties, faded starlets and soon to be personal tragedies.
Self styled stud Alan Lake (“Don’t Open till Christmas”) has fun as the Sullivan stand-in Dougan as he auditions various women (“Make yourself comfortable and take your clothes off”) and frolics around with lots of naked chicks during his wild pool parties. He does all you could as for as such a character.
Lake would later kill himself after his Wife Diana Dors (the one-time platinum blonde British bombshell) died of cancer.

Post “Get Carter” but pre-household fame (via the long running TV series “Minder”) Glynn Edwards and pre-family friendly TV host (via the outstandingly popular at the time fluff “That’s Life”) Gavin Campbell share the majority of the screen time as the useless Cops and spend that time eyeing up naked ladies, sitting around in their amazingly unrealistic Police station (it looks like a penthouse suit with one of those huge 70’s computers dumped in it) and running after suspects with little enthusiasm.

Also in the cast are the ever-wonderful Dudley Sutton (“The Devils”, and who will forever have a place in my heart after, in a TV documentary about the cutting of Ken Russell’s infamous opus, he called the censors “Cunts”) as a Bible thumping, sandwich board sporting religious nut and possible suspect, TV comedian/singer Kenny Lynch (“Dr Terror’s House of Horrors”) as an unlikely Police Doctor, a pre-TV fame (via much loved Army sit-com “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”) Windsor Davis as an Assistant Police Commissioner who slugs back whiskey and never leaves his day-glow green curtain clad office.

We also have one-time blonde and buxom 50’s starlet Sandra Dorne (Lindsey Shonteff’s/Bryant Haliday’s “Devil Doll”) as Dougan’s matronly secretary, a plump, bearded and almost unrecognisable Derren Nesbitt as Dougan’s publishing partner (still best remembered for his delightful turn as the ruthless SS officer in the ever popular “Where Eagles Dare” but who would lose his shirt financing the British sex flop “The Amorous Milkman), Ballard Berkeley (immortalised as the dotty Major in the TV comedy classic “Fawlty Towers”) as Dougan’s horse trainer and Suzy Mandel (“Confessions of a Driving Instructor “, then another extremely popular and high-profile nude) as one of the would-be victims.

Mary Millington herself, despite her star billing and almost exclusive coverage in the advertising, comes late into the film and is really given a glorified support role.
Mary, bless her bubbly cotton socks, can’t act for toffee and even a wooden four word sentence is a chore for her. But what she has is something you can’t make up or mould…she has a lovable, enjoyable, natural, charming presence that ups the energy of the film whenever she appears.
As the sexy WPC Sheridan she is given plenty of opportunities to strip off (a massage parlour rubdown, a totally gratuitous Lesbian scene - “You mean it’s good with a girl”? - and the utterly crazy audition sequence when she has to strip off in the Police station to impress Inspectors Holborn and Morgan) and does it with great aplomb and looks suitably sexy in that all natural/girl next door 70’s way. Though even she can’t make blue eye-shadow anything less than horrible!
Millington would sadly be dead within a year, after taking her own life (click HERE for more info on Mary and that life and you will also see how ironic it was she played a Policewoman).

The film is a victim of it’s dual identity though.
The ‘raincoat brigade’ looking for saucy porno goings-on would find that there are some long waits between the nudity as Police procedure, general walking around and horse racing (there is a ridiculous amount of needless horse racing footage used to pad out the already overlong running time) take precedent over the Sexploitation content, and the genuinely nasty strangulation murders and half-hearted Giallo murder mystery don’t really gel with the comedy music backed nude/sex scenes and nudity set-pieces.
But at least (despite sharing a basic plot with the non-Sexploitation flick “Cover Girl Killer” from ‘59) it’s a pretty unique blending of styles, genres and attitudes and turned out to be yet another big hit.
Iin fact it was British Sexploitation films of all kinds that literally kept British cinema alive during the late 70’s/early 80‘s, whether it’s trendy to sneer at them today or not.

Talking of attitudes the aforementioned ‘strip for your bosses’ auditions for the undercover job (where a shy and thus unsuccessful applicant gets the reply from Holborn, “What’s girl like that doing in the force”) and an utterly mad and amazingly offensive line of dialogue by one of the victims, “Oh goody I’m going to be raped, I’ve never been raped before”, mean that the attitudes to women are as firmly stuck in the 70’s as the décor and fashions!

Dialogue is a joy throughout the film in fact. The most infamous line comes from Inspector Morgan as he cranks up his brain to get a line on the motives of the killer via his unexpected knowledge of Celtic myths, “In a deranged mind it could mean there are three forces of evil at work; Sex, Witchcraft…and horses. The Unholy trinity”!
A sub-plot/another suspect comes in the form of a puritan anti-porn politician who goes on TV and utters great lines like "Pornography is the heroin of the soul!", before being shown to be a porn-consuming peeping tom (a less than subtle dig at those same politicians hassling Sullivan and his ilk in real life) and only in an English film could an about to be murder victim utter the line “Wait, I must turn my kettle off” before being pounced on.

The murder sequences are few and far between but their combination off a killer who throttles the life out of someone, mild nudity and flashes of underwear and a mean that there is a satisfyingly exploitative element to the film away from the tame (but almost constantly full frontal and hairy) striptease/photo shoot nudity.
The biggest Exploitation surprise though comes in the form of the amazingly messed-up, badly made, barely explained ending (listen carefully to a single line of shouted dialogue to have any understanding AT ALL of what just happened), where the film truly leaves any saucy sex flick frivolity far behind as a most depressing final shot fades into the credits.

In fact most of the film (despite an obviously okay budget) is badly made. Check out the Cameraman in the mirror during the massage scene and a, blink and you won’t miss it, massive lighting rig that looms into shot behind the women during the Lesbian bedroom scene like some electrical Triffid!

As we are basically dealing with photo models and magazine publishers making the film the nude photo-shoot sequences are very well done though and their Witchcraft set-ups are a lot of fun.
We have a Libertine orgy sequence (with very energetic, underneath the belly , rocking horse riding), a delightfully cheesy ‘bowing down to The Devil sequence’ (where a bit of man meat makes an appearance) , a crucifixion/nude dancing sequence and a great burning at the stake set-up that delivers not only a fine pair of breasts but a very hot and unexpected climax!

Another pleasure are the opening shots of 70’s Soho, London’s sex ghetto whose fortunes have peaked and plummeted with every decade and where here the low rent, sleazy sex shop and (genuine as opposed to the criminal gang con jobs we have now) strip shows ruled supreme. It's footage to cherish for any fan of porn/exploitation history.

Overall then “The Playbirds” is an overly long and padded, sometimes technically poor, generally badly and/or flatly acted hodge-podge of ‘kill the pretty girls’ Exploitation flick and saucy English “Confessions of a Window Cleaner” type Sexploitation frivolity, but it still manages to overcome most of it’s problems to be at the very least an enjoyable ‘see it and hear it to believe it’ slice of entertainment with a wonderful back-history and of course Mary Millington is a very pleasant on the senses way to spend 90 minutes.
Hell of a shame about that fluffed finale though, but it has to be said that only in an English psycho killer skin flick could the killer make his escape…on a bicycle.