The Playbirds

The cover girls of a famous sex magazine are murdered one-by-one and the easily baffled British police can only think of one solution: To send one of their own in undercover.

In the late-70's/early-80's there was a Betamax versus VHS battle which VHS won hands down. When the battle was nearing an end Betamax users threw in the towel and converted flooding the market with old cheap machines with all the tapes that came with it. Through this history I got to see Playbirds not once, but twice.

I hated the 70's - a horrible time for me and this country (the UK). The British film industry had died (to be reborn as a big budget television industry and US workshop) and the video revolution hadn't fully taken off. The only thing getting the punters interested was horror, sex and bawdy comedy -- preferably mixed so that you could justify seeing it more. UK sexual censorship was hard-line, so the films were soft -- as well as cheap and cheerful.

(Playbirds is - indeed - cheap, but they forgot about the cheerful part!)

I am glad that another reviewer pointed out that this is a remake/rip-off because I had thought that the producers had come up with an original idea! Indeed with a bit of rewrite and more talent (or even people that care) you could just about film this as a straight Hammer-style B picture.

There are two camps involved here - the eye-candy talent who know they are not going anywhere and the proper actors who are slumming it, probably as the films producer (David Sullivan) put it "so they didn't have to sign on the dole that week." Being an actor is a frustrating and humiliating business anyway, but this must be like being put on a medieval rack.

*THE BAD*

The film is low budget and clunks from scene to scene with a care usually reserved for television. The treatment of the girls is quite cruel in that while there is a murderer about no one seems to really care too much about it. Even the police can't quite get themselves to wide awake about the case. Suspects are lined up and listed (by an early computer) but the feel is more like a Hammer Horror where sudden death can be forgotten about quickly.

*THE SAD*

It was hard to see Alan Lake without thinking about the tragedy of his later life. Killing himself after losing his well known wife Diana Dorrs to cancer. Same with the nominal lead Mary Millington (the undercover cop) who killed herself rather than be squeezed in a vice created for her by the Inland Revenue (see didn't think she should pay any tax) and the police who were on her trail for a variety of crimes, including (according to Sullivan) drug trafficking. What a happy ship!

*THE MAD*

For unknown reasons the protagonists stop the film to watch horse racing - something that has nothing to do with the plot. To indicate that Millington is up for the undercover job she is required to take all her clothes of in the police station (Scotland Yard?) itself while the two detectives look on!

Yes Playbirds is pretty dreadful, and features pretty dreadful people both sides of the camera. The deaths of the cover girls are treated as a bit of a joke and the whole show ends with a sour and very cruel plot twist.

"The Playbirds", which I found - to my great surprise - in Netflix' catalogue, is a movie that really can't decide what it wants to be. Shall we go for a raw and mean-spirited British giallo about a serial killer who targets nude models in London's raunchy underbelly? Or do we aim for a simply and profitable sexploitation flick? That's what the producers must have been discussing about before landing on the unwise decision of doing a combo. And, to make things even worse, there's also a lot of irrelevant gibberish around witchcraft and too much boring horseracing footage.

The (strictly blond) centerfold models of the London nude-magazine "Playbird" are found brutally strangled in their apartments; - not raped but with serial numbers marked on their foreheads. The magazine's editor-in-chief is the police's principal suspect, but he's mainly just interested in bedding the models and gamble on horse races. After four victims, of which the last one was killed practically in front of them, the incompetent police inspectors are under so much pressure they decide to use a sexy female cop as undercover bait.

The suspense and whodunit aspects are vastly inferior to showing as much full-frontal nudity as humanly possible. The absolute low point of the film is when the two inspectors hold "casting sessions" themselves, during which they call in policewomen into their office, request them to strip off all their clothes and leave again. It doesn't get any more gratuitous than this.

Producer David Sullivan was determined to make his then girlfriend Mary Millington into a star. The Playbirds goes for a giallo type crime thriller with some soft porn.

Centrefolds who have recently appeared in a sex magazine are being murdered by a serial killer. Suspects include the occult loving magazine publisher or the religious zealot who goes round Soho railing against sin.

The police are under pressure to catch the killer. So they get traffic cop Lucy (Mary Millington) to pose as a fledgling model. Lucy is keen to go undercover as she is bored slamming parking fines.

Millington's acting does not mount to much. She is there along with other young females in the movie to go nude. This includes a scene where female cops have to strip in front of their bosses to show they have the attributes to be a nude model.

There is at least a plot here, sort of borrowed from 1970s American grindhouse movies.

The movie is a touch misogynistic and surprisingly given that this was meant to be titillation. It opts for a bleak downbeat ending.

This is an absolutely terrible British stab at the giallo genre, crossed with more traditional "skin flick" elements. Pedestrian, nonsensical, endless, with lots of horseracing footage (if you're an enthusiast). (Barely) escapes a zero-star rating because of some nice stripping / posing scenes, as well as an all-too-brief lesbian interlude.

If you're British, this movie no doubt has a lot of baggage attached to it. Two of the lead actors committed suicide soon after, and it was made right at a time when the once vaunted independent British film industry basically imploded. If you're not British, however, this movie is. . .well, pretty damn weird actually. A fanatically religious, horse-obsessed maniac is killing the nude cover girls of "Playbird" magazine. The police are frustrated in their efforts to stop him, so they send a sexy police woman (Mary Millington) under the covers to crack her case--I mean, undercover to crack the case. If you just want to see a lot of naked dolly birds, you certainly won't be disappointed. There are numerous scenes of the magazine's photo shoots, most of which involve a hilarious satanic/witchcraft-oriented theme. And the police don't just take the first attractive volunteer for the undercover job--no, they have to have to "audition" ALL their female staff members for the job before settling on Millington. The movie is obviously sexist (which is par for the course), but it's also surprisingly unpleasant and borderline misogynist. All the girls are topless or naked when they're murdered, for instance (except for one girl whose mini-skirt conveniently rides up while she's being strangled). The most disturbing scene perhaps is one particular magazine pictorial of a naked "witch" being "burned" at the stake which goes horribly awry when the killer comes along and (literally) adds fuel to the fire.

What's most amazing about all this is that there really is (or at least, was) a "Playbird" magazine, and its publisher was the producer of this movie! It's certainly hard to imagine Hugh Hefner, or even Larry Flynt, producing a movie where his own centerfolds are slaughtered in such an often unpleasant manner. (Apparently, all the censorship of sex and violence in Britain over the years hasn't resulted in the sexual attitudes there being any more wholesome than anywhere else--perhaps the opposite). I would also guess the publisher/producer owned a race horse or had some great interest in horse racing--how else to explain the killer's bizarre obsession with horses, which otherwise seems pretty unrelated to anything (or maybe this movie was inspired by the Richard Burton film "Equus" the year before?).

The best (and perhaps only) reason to see this is that it is a good showcase for cult actress Mary Millington. Millington certainly had a nice body, and viewers (like numerous male and female characters in the movie) will become VERY familiar with it. Her generally awkward acting, however, gives no indication of why she became a such a cult figure. On the other hard, it's even more difficult to see why the British moral authorities considered her such a threat to society that they had to harass her to an early demise. I definitely would not recommend going through the time and expense I did to see this movie, but if you happen upon it, it's a good chance to see Millington in action and it's KIND OF interesting in spite of itself.