Straight On till Morning

OUT 29 January / CERT 18 / 96 Mins

One of the stranger Hammer Films — mashing together several seemingly irreconcilable strands of swinging ’70s cinema, modishly directed by Peter Collinson as a bizarro follow-up to The Italian Job. Rita Tushingham comes out of a realist tradition as a glum Northern girl who has left a grimy town for fabbier London climes — intending to go the whole miserable movie hog by becoming an unmarried mother. She runs into Shane Briant, a floppy-haired, sheepskin-coated gigolo-cum-serial killer fixated on children’s stories. He is searching for a Wendy to play opposite his Peter — though his gothic lair contains taperecordings of what happened to previous Wendys who didn’t pan out. Tom Bell and James Bolam sport seriously eye-abusing Carnaby Street clobber, there are bursts of psychedelic music and dancing which prompt a lot of tilted angles and jump-cutting, and it ends on a sour, sad, creepily downbeat finish.