The Flesh and Blood Show (1972)

Director: Pete Walker

Cast: Ray Brooks, Jenny Hanley, Luan Peters

Synopsis: Actors rehearsing a show at a mysterious seaside theater are killed off by an unknown maniac.

Let’s face it, no movie with a title like The Flesh and Blood Show is going to be a work of high art or groundbreaking cinema.   In fact, it’s likely to be a piece of trash, so it comes as something of a surprise to find this was actually quite reasonable.   It can’t be described as good filmmaking, that’s for sure, but it does have a certain quaintness that keeps you on its side for much of the time.

Ray Brooks (House of Whipcord) plays an actor/theatre director who meets up with a group of young actors in a deserted theatre at the end of a desolate pier in an off-season seaside resort.   Amongst these actors are Robin Askwith, who would go on to gain dubious fame as the hero of the series of cheaply-made ‘Confessions’ sex comedies of the mid-1970s.   The yummy Jenny Hanley, who will live forever in my memory as the yummiest of Magpie presenters, also shows up.   Usually, actors graduate from kids’ TV to acting roles, but Ms. Hanley clearly went the opposite route.   Anyway, this group of young adults find themselves being offed in murky ways – usually off-screen.

Director Pete Walker betrays his sex-movie past by having his actresses disrobe for the flimsiest of reasons.   In the movie’s first scene, for example, a couple of sleeping women are awoken by a ringing doorbell, and one of them rises to answer it in the nude.   All this female nudity does at least provide a pleasant diversion when the plot starts to sag – which it rapidly does, despite a fairly intelligent script for this kind of thing courtesy of screenwriter Alfred Shaughnessy. Ray Brooks also does well in the lead role.

(Reviewed 7th March 2012)