Tuesday 12 September 2017

PLAYGIRL KILLER

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SINGING

The trouble with Netflix (or at least the main trouble) is that there's really not much on there: certainly not enough to justify the sub, which is why I'm likely cancelling once I've seen the half-dozen titles on my watch list that aren't on DVD. If you're looking for anything odd, anything a bit strange, anything made before 1980, then you're out of luck because the murky byways of the movie swamp really isn't their territory. The trouble with Amazon Prime, on the other hand, is that there's too much: hundreds of old spaghetti Westerns, Euro obscurities, Hong Kong martial arts movies, 70s drive-in cheapies and the occasional bonkers giallo, some presented in the wrong ratio and/or with sub-third generation VHS picture quality, and little of it available anywhere else. Occasionally a gem will turn up (I'm actually having some mindless fun with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer knockabouts) but it's sometimes a chore wading through the almost daily additions of yet more junk. First world problems.

Playgirl Killer is a scarcely noteworthy thriller-type thing from 1966 in which a man kills his girlfriend with a speargun because she wouldn't sit still while he tried to sketch her. Going on the run, he eventually turns up at the home of two sisters, one of whom has just left for college with her boyfriend (Neil Sedaka in what the IMDb suggests is his first, last and only dramatic screen role). The other is a colossal tease forever wandering around in her skimpies; she hires him to help close up the house for the season, but then she won't sit still while he tries to sketch her. A woman turns up at the door in response to a job advertisement, but she won't sit still while he....

I kind of like the fact that someone's dug this twaddle out of the vaults and put it online, but I can't figure out to what end: is there that much money to be made from it? Was there a huge clamour for Playgirl Killer to be disinterred for a whole new generation to be bored senseless by? It's all very tiresome and it never comes to any kind of life: if you nodded off for half an hour you honestly wouldn't feel like you'd missed anything. There are three absolutely horrible songs (two rock numbers in the first twenty minutes, one of them performed by Sedaka, and the third one is in French) and a fantastically annoying jazz score full of sleazy sax that does nothing for what we're supposed to call the drama, none of the characters are interesting and it's not even fun as throwaway drive-in trash. Honestly not worth the effort involved in clicking the Watch Now button. (Incidentally, Amazon's artwork bears no resemblance to anything in the film.)

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