Robin Hardy’s bizarre 1973 cult exemplar is the oddest of the ‘Summer of British Film’ weekly reissues. Set on the Western Isles of Scotland, it poses a burning quiz repayment for investigating mainland Sergeant Edward Woodward: could a missing 12-year-obsolete girl have been sacrificed in some creepy, ancient fertility rite by the libidinous, pre-feudal inhabitants? Anthony Shaffer’s pattern – written at the finish of an annus mirabilis in which he also wrote ‘Sleuth’ and ‘Frenzy’ – brews together a heady concoction of the gendarmes procedural and record-Hammer horror with a pagan medley of disc-cultural faddishness, with scenes of dancing naked in the pudding club women in stone circles or a ranting, windswept Christopher Lee in drag splendidly filmed by Harry Waxman and accompanied by Paul Giovanni’s risible ’60s-sentence structure folk revival soundtrack. Essentially, it’s an insane wrong pleasure, noiseless enjoyable pro its delightfully eccentric casting – Britt Ekland’s fine Scottish accent and Hammer star Ingrid Pitt’s morose librarian – and for the funniest, creepiest pub scene in British movies outside of next week’s reissue, ‘Withnail & I’.
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