RavenGlamDVDCollector
Years ago, I saw SEX & FAME: THE MARY MILLINGTON STORY and learned about this tragically doomed (and victimized!) British pseudo Marilyn Monroe, and while researching this on the Internet decades later, I opted to purchase COME PLAY WITH ME. Only to learn ominously from the helpful included booklet that Mary scantly (!) appears in the movie. And what a mess this movie is! I concur with Mr Riley's 2001 review word for word. Why they had to have caricatures as main characters, is, well, not actually beyond me. It's how the infantile repressed mind works when finally given an opportunity to express itself.False advertising to the highest degree. Does an injustice to sex comedies. Avoid all these trashy films from that era like the plague.By way of constructive criticism, the movie needed a much younger male cast, somewhat dashing, in the lead parts. As it is, all they had going in the right direction, were the girls themselves. A total script rewrite, a total plot rethink. In short, a colonic irrigation for the feeble minds behind this atrocity. Starting with George Harrison Marks. Who is deceased, so I shall attempt to retain a modicum of class by not speaking ill of the dead. But really, a much better movie could have been made just from their starting point of a dozen or so stocking-clad dolly birds. Anything less risible would have been a marvelous improvement. And doubtlessly no-one would refute that previous sentence.On the plus side is that night-club performer in the semi-contorted pose early on in the movie when that fat little guy goes to Burlesque. The one with the black lingerie Valentine designs to cover her, uhm, modesty. Wow. That ribcage, and those 1977 natural breasts. Nowadays we don't see sculpted waists like that (AnnaLynne McCord of 90210 excluded of course) and breasts are all too often surgically enhanced. Another nice one in this flick is that girl in the gymnasium who walks away across the screen on tip-toe. Another wow.However, nothing can move me from giving this one the lowest score possible, and you know what? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, it didn't even deserve a 1, but dear ol' IMDb is too kind- hearted a soul to have included 0/zero/zilch/big fat nothing as an option.
lazarillo
British sex comedies are kind of like "Lake Woebegone" in-reverse--they're all below average. And then some of them are downright awful. This was one of the most famous films of the genre since it featured sex star legend Mary Millington. But she has about as big of role here as she did with her brief cameo in "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle", and that movie is a lot more fun to sit through than this one.There's no shortage of naked dollybirds, of course--like "The Playbirds" this was produced by British porn magnate David Sullivan and features a lot of the same "actresses" pulled from the pages of his nudie magazines (Millington, Suzie Mandel, etc.). Unfortunately though, it also has a plot: two counterfeiters (Alfie Bass and George Harrison Marks, who also directed)go on the lam from the law and hide out at a Scottish health spa run by a septuagenarian (Irene Handl). Then a bunch of strippers also start working at the spa for some reason (OK, so it's not much of a plot). What we have here is the same old problem--the Brits can't seem to make a straight-out sex film, so they have to try to "class" it up by throwing in a bunch second-rate, over-the-hill comedians. Bass, Marks, and Handl have an unfortunate amount of screen time and they're all painfully unfunny.Like all sex films this movie is horribly cheap, and the incompetent film-making makes it seem even cheaper. I have no idea why it was so popular in Britain. At the time, I guess, they were such a sex starved country (due to stringent censorship laws) that their movie audiences would apparently just watch anything. This was a popular film in a certain time and place, but now it's little more than a curiosity
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.
