User Reviews

Talking to my dad about what he has been reading on fourms recently,I got told about a movie starring Cilla Black,which he was told is unavailable anywhere.Recognising the title,I spoke to a DVD seller a few days before my dads birthday,and was thrilled to find the film,which led to me going to work.

The plot:

Whilst everyone else in town works at the high-tech DICE Corporation, Valentine Brose is determined to be his own boss,and to grow psychedelic mushrooms. Uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy and the number of jobs that DICE's machines are taking,Brose decides to take the town on a trip.

View on the film:

Spinning on a psychedelic trip adapting Henry Livings's play, Jeremy Brooks intriguingly grows the film towards current issues such as high-tech invasion of privacy and the loss of jobs to machines. Keeping the ground under Brose's feet constantly moving,director Peter Hall & Dr.Strangelove/Star Wars cinematographer Gilbert Taylor trip the psychedelic flashes into delightful Sci-Fi,with DICE being filled with chunky robots and endless beeping warnings.

Presenting the flick as a mood piece,Hall and Taylor keep Brose's head spinning with circling camera moves gliding on the yellow and white psychedelic.Joined by a debuting Elizabeth Spriggs, Cilla Black gives a very good performance as Betty Dorrick,with Black giving Dorrick's romance with Browse an off-beat feel. Joined by a classy John Steiner, David Warner gives a terrific performance as Brose,thanks to Warner pinning his mischievous nature with a sinister undertone,as Browse goes to work.

In 1973 I was thumbing through the TV guide and the name Cilla Black jumped out at me from the page since her little-known 1968 song "Step Inside Love" was one of my top favorite songs of all time, and in America she was a little-known singer, so I was astonished to see any mention of her at all by the '70s. Therefore when this movie came on TV that week I recorded part of it on cassette tape, and was rewarded by capturing there another appealing, catchy song of hers--"Work is a 4-Letter Word"--played in full at the end of this movie, a song I hadn't even known existed at that time. I had not yet been able to obtain any recording of "Step Inside Love" yet, much less this film's theme song, and had never seen what Cilla Black looked like, either, so this movie was of high interest to me then.

As for the film itself, even though I was glad to have seen it and recorded it in audio, I was somewhat disappointed in the typical '60s stupid style of humor. Decades later, when the '60s had receded even more into the past and had become a revered period of history, and after I had obtained copies of the two Cilla Black songs mentioned and had obtained photos of her as well, I began to wonder if my original impression of this film from my youth had been accurate for my modern tastes, so I wanted to see the film again, but it wasn't available anywhere. Then in 2018 someone posted a copy on YouTube so I got to see it again for the first time in 45 years.

Honestly, I actually disliked the film the second time. The main character Val came across strongly as a lying, deceitful, self-centered punk, too strongly reminiscent of Alex in "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) for my taste, who here marries only to get a job at a place where he can grow mushrooms, and then constantly deceives his newlywed bride on their wedding night so he can check his mushrooms, and only then admits he's homeless and that they must spend the night in a bathroom at their workplace. With today's pervasive homelessness and chronically lying street people everywhere, most of whom are equally obsessed with getting stoned and resort to violence as a first resort to any type of conflict, that entire scenario hits too close to home. In the ensuing chaos of the film's climax, set in the steamy plant, people slip and fall from oil, get stuck in metal tubes, and get violent with each other, but it's all supposed to be alright and humorous because they are stoned from the mushrooms growing there. All this somewhat creeped me out.

In my opinion the only worthwhile parts of this film are Cilla Black, her theme song of the movie the end, and the now-very-applicable comments relating to artificial intelligence and machines replacing people. If you want to see some humorous stoner movies, see "Pineapple Express" (2008) or "Space Tripping" (2017) instead.

A parting piece of trivia: Cilla ended up getting a nose job because she didn't like the way she looked in this movie after it was released. I think she has always looked cute, but try to convince a movie star of that.