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She'll Follow You Anywhere
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Year: |
1971
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Director: |
David C. Rea
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Stars: |
Keith Barron, Kenneth Cope, Hilary Pritchard, Philippa Gail, Richard Vernon, Penny Brahms, Sandra Bryant, Anna Matisse, Andrea Allan, Josephine Baxter, Mary Collinson, Madeleine Collinson, Linda Cunningham, Valerie Stanton, Me Me Lai, Bob Todd
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Genre: |
Comedy, Trash |
Rating: |
         4 (from 1 vote) |
Review: |
Mike Carter (Kenneth Cope) is taking the train home from his work at a perfume manufacturing laboratory one afternoon when he gets to reading about a recently conducted sex survey in the newspaper, but is interrupted by a woman across the compartment asking him for a light for her cigarette. He obliges, but no sooner than he has returned to his paper than the lady starts paying him a lot of attention, kissing him much to his surprise then chasing him along the carriage until she corners Mike in the lavatory. She then strips to her underwear and he is powerless to resist, not something he is ever going to mention to his wife June (Philippa Gail), though his colleague and best friend Alan Simpson (Keith Barron) is very interested...
The British sex comedy was getting into the swing of things in 1971 which brought the world one of many aphrodisiac yarns, the self-explanatory She'll Follow You Anywhere, the thought that there was some magic formula men could use to get the women turned on and available for seduction one that proved irresistable at the time - to the makers of movies like this, if not the women themselves. When that aphrodisiac in this case is an aftershave Mike and Alan have devised purely by accident, the parallels between their invention and the more modern date rape drugs were difficult to deny when watching this today, especially as the ladies involved would have had nothing to do with these berks without chemical influence.
Therefore this effort has something of a mountain climb if you were going to enjoy it unironically as a straightforward smutty comedy, and indeed the rapey element was just one of a number of issues the twenty-first century viewer may have with it. For a start, rather than at least being eligible bachelors, our protagonists are well and truly married, Alan to the husky voiced Hilary Pritchard as Diane who happens to be friends with June, both of them having suspicions raised when their hubbies are working late just about every night. The reason for that is Mike and Alan are out in the unlikely location of an Army bunker in the woods just outside the appropriately-named Effingham (about the nearest this gets to a decent joke).
They have transformed this into a red lampshade, double bed, patterned scarf-festooned boudoir not unlike what the average seventies bloke would imagine a high class brothel would look like, which is somehow supposed to render this more acceptable. But then there's the details: whenever the targets get a whiff of the aftershave, they immediately envisage the man of their dreams to be Alan or Mike, so we get a brief still of George Best to indicate thus, though when the still is of H.R.H. Prince Philip this is simply getting bizarre. Or even offensive: one German girl brought back to the bunker sees a "celebrity" from her homeland, yes, who else but Adolf Hitler? This also turns her into a fiend for sadomasochism as she chases Alan around the room trying to whip him with the handle of a feather duster.
International bones of contention aside, one problem the audience may have had with She'll Follow You Anywhere was filmmakers' reluctance to ask the actresses to strip off to anything less than their underwear, indeed we saw more of Keith Barron than we did of most of them, though sadly for comic potential at no point did he get cramp. Mind you, if these characters were against their will parading around in their birthday suits it might have been even more uncomfortable to watch than it was already, the fact that Alan and Mike are depicted to leave us in no doubt that they were idiots not really soothing any concerns. Sure, they feel a bit guilty, but like addicts seeking their next fix they pursue the perfect combination of concoctions, leading to various drawbacks such as Mike having to visit the clinic where his member is examined by a doctor who lifts it with the tongs he uses to put sugar lumps in his tea. After lecherous boss Richard Vernon gets in on the act, the only course is to leave us with the obvious punchline seeing revenge visited on the experimenters. So there you go, men are pigs. Music by Gordon Rose.
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Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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