This is a curious mixture of sex comedy and giallo crime story, with a lunatic stalking and killing cover-girls from top-shelf magazines and a couple of clueless coppers going after him; they get nowhere, so a luscious policewoman is sent undercover to infiltrate the sex trade and track down the killer.
There's something strangely compelling and entertaining about The Playbirds. The 70s mores on display are very redolent of that bygone era, with pornographers waging an ongoing battle against the forces of repression, prudery and censorship. As this film was produced by Britain's most successful pornographer David Sullivan, it doesn't exactly debate an even argument - the anti-porn characters are either psychotic or hypocritical. The film is in essence one of the most daring product placement campaigns in cinema history - the murdered girls appear on the cover of Playbird magazine, a real mag published by Sullivan whose industrial, mass-production printing presses are the most compelling things on screen here, spewing out copy after copy of his nudie mags. The film stars the doomed Alan Lake as a Sullivan surrogate and the equally doomed Sullivan pin-up model and business associate Mary Millington plays (one can't quite say acts) the part of the undercover policewoman. With Millington in the part, the policewoman was never going to have any difficulties with the sexual side of her assignment, and she (the character and the actress playing her) throws herself with brio into various gratuitous sauna, bed and nude posing scenes.
The giallo aspect of the film begins well, with some creepy stalking, nasty deaths and a colourful array of suspects. Yet it all goes rather pear-shaped in the final third, with a loss of suspense, a number of ludicrous plot-turns and a final twist ending which doesn't earn its place at all, although it does leave a compellingly nasty taste in the mouth, as Millington is violently strangled in her bath followed by the end credits - a genuinely shocking denouement.
The film has a good pace, and some fantastic exterior location work which really does convey the bleak abandoned industrial awfulness of the UK in the 70s. The set dressing in the interiors leave something to be desired - check out the Police Chief's office for a case study of an unbelievable design, although with "shut up!" Windsor Davies playing the top cop, I suppose that realism was always going to be in short order in these scenes.
There's no way a film as technically ragged and politically incorrect as The Playbirds would get into national cinemas now, which is a a shame, as under all of the propaganda and the poorly-thought-through amateur dramatics, you do leave the film with a genuine feeling for the atmospherics, values and tensions of the time it was made.
There's something strangely compelling and entertaining about The Playbirds. The 70s mores on display are very redolent of that bygone era, with pornographers waging an ongoing battle against the forces of repression, prudery and censorship. As this film was produced by Britain's most successful pornographer David Sullivan, it doesn't exactly debate an even argument - the anti-porn characters are either psychotic or hypocritical. The film is in essence one of the most daring product placement campaigns in cinema history - the murdered girls appear on the cover of Playbird magazine, a real mag published by Sullivan whose industrial, mass-production printing presses are the most compelling things on screen here, spewing out copy after copy of his nudie mags. The film stars the doomed Alan Lake as a Sullivan surrogate and the equally doomed Sullivan pin-up model and business associate Mary Millington plays (one can't quite say acts) the part of the undercover policewoman. With Millington in the part, the policewoman was never going to have any difficulties with the sexual side of her assignment, and she (the character and the actress playing her) throws herself with brio into various gratuitous sauna, bed and nude posing scenes.
The giallo aspect of the film begins well, with some creepy stalking, nasty deaths and a colourful array of suspects. Yet it all goes rather pear-shaped in the final third, with a loss of suspense, a number of ludicrous plot-turns and a final twist ending which doesn't earn its place at all, although it does leave a compellingly nasty taste in the mouth, as Millington is violently strangled in her bath followed by the end credits - a genuinely shocking denouement.
The film has a good pace, and some fantastic exterior location work which really does convey the bleak abandoned industrial awfulness of the UK in the 70s. The set dressing in the interiors leave something to be desired - check out the Police Chief's office for a case study of an unbelievable design, although with "shut up!" Windsor Davies playing the top cop, I suppose that realism was always going to be in short order in these scenes.
There's no way a film as technically ragged and politically incorrect as The Playbirds would get into national cinemas now, which is a a shame, as under all of the propaganda and the poorly-thought-through amateur dramatics, you do leave the film with a genuine feeling for the atmospherics, values and tensions of the time it was made.