The Sweeney: Thin Ice

 "I merely strangled the hound with my bare hands..."

This is the best episode yet. Oh, the plot is clever and entertaining, and we're getting to know Regan, Carter and the rest of the Flying Squad, but more than anything else this is just bloody good writing.

This episode is basically ten dimensional chess between three parties. Bishop (Alfred Marks is a splendid presence) is a criminal  mastermind on the run to France, and there's a rivalry between Regan and one Superintendent Pringle (a perfectly cast Peter Jeffrey) on how to deal with him, and how. It's fun to see how things play out, with Regan ultimately outsmaring both his adversaries.

Yet it's more than that. It's dialogue that is witty but also very real. People talk at cross purposes, there's wordplay, there's perfectly played cynicism. These characters feel real, despite us not knowing them much, purely because of the deftness of the words and the performances. Little things, like the unfriendliness of the local constabularty or the dark hints of domestic abuse at the end.

Yes, this is certainly the quintessential showabout maverick '70s cops who cut corners to get results. But damn, it's clever.

Scream and Scream Again! (1970)

“That bloody chicken wasn’t killed- it died of old age!”

 This is an odd film, not at all what the marketing, title and poster lead us to expect, but unexpectedly a rather good one.

The film's selling point is, of course, that it can boast the holy horror trinity of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the same horror film. But instead we get an utterly bonkers science fiction conspiracy thriller in which Cushing has but a brief cameo and the other two are not exactly in starring roles.

This is a gritty, realistic police procedural with slickly gritty direction, naturalistic acting and a basis in the more down-to-Earth end of science fiction. The plot may be utterly mad but pays off well, with the two apparently unrelated subplots- people being kidnapped and having their limbs surgically removed, while a sinister man with apparent superpowers commits a series of murders to climb up the greasy pole in a dodgy, unnamed, military dictatorship.

This all works rather well, as does the "A" plot of the pursuit of a serial killer with vampire-like attributes who kills girls whom he meets in nightclubs, which takes up an awful lot of the film. The film is, I suppose, rather disjointed, but it doesn't feel like it and is all drawn together in an effective climax. The overall effect is of a film which defies expectations in hat type of film it turns out to be, but in fact turns out to be surprisingly good.