3 Dev Adam (1973)

There is a long and noble tradition in Turkish cinema of churning out knock-offs of Hollywood favourites with little care for subtlety, logic or copyright laws. 3 Dev Adam (which translates as 3 Giant Men) continues this, taking two beloved Marvel characters and a Mexican wrestling legend and crapping on their characters reputations from a great height.

The plot is in there somewhere. It's something to do with antiques or counterfeit US dollars. Spiderman is not your friendly neighbourhood web-slinger.

Instead he is a childish but a psychotic gangster, who gleefully buries a woman up to her neck in sand and then decapitates her with a speedboat propeller. Captain America, who has no shield but does have a girlfriend has come to Turkey with legendary Mexican wrestler Santo to sort Spidey out.

Who cares about the plot though. What you get is 90 minutes of war speed delirious nonsense, with a constant energy that means the film never gets dull. At one point, Spiderman tortures an enemy with a rodent oriented headset straight out of 1984, expect that instead of rats he uses a cute guinea pig. Oh, and Santo's favourite filing system for incriminating documents is to shove them down the front of his spandex trousers. He seems to do this a lot.

Things come to a head at the end where it turns out Spiderman can clone himself, or he has a lot of lookalikes lying around. I forget which. My brain hurts. It's a film where hairy men in stag do superhero costumes beat and grope each other into submission. Sometimes you don't need to over analyse things.

Carry On Girls (1973)

Carry On films often have a saucy seaside postcard sense of humour, so it is entirely appropriate to set one entirely at the seaside. Carry On Girls may lack the freshness (and several key cast members) of some of the earlier films, but it is still silly and enjoyable, albeit dated, fun.

Set in the fictional English seaside resort of Fircombe, the story sees local councillor and entrepreneur Sid Fiddler (played, naturally, by Sid James) plotting to use a beauty contest to boost business in the local area, a scheme that also involves his PR guru friend Peter Potter (Bernard Bresslaw), the dignity (and trousers) of the town mayor, Frederick Bumble (Kenneth Connor) and the seafront hotel run by his long suffering girlfriend Connie (Joan Sims). However, he has not counted on his arch rival, fellow councillor and head of the local Women's Lib, Augusta Prodworthy (June Whitfield) and her band of gender crusaders, who are prepared to use any means necessary to stop it.

Carry On Girls is the 25th film in the series, and some of the cast are showing their age a bit, in particular, Sid James, and the sight of him leching and chasing after young ladies gives some of the scenes a rather unsavoury atmosphere, albeit one entirely in keeping with the character of Fiddler.

Less enjoyable is the character of the Admiral played by Peter Butterworth, whose sole raison d'etre is to grope women and then look innocent when they complain, and playing sexual harassment for laughs, leaves a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth nowadays. Another cringeworthy aspect is Jimmy Logan playing the camp, lisping TV producer Cecil Gaybody (or, as Sid keeps calling him, “Mr Gayboy”), something which only goes to highlight how integral actors like Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey were to the success of the series

However, before I start to sound too much like Mrs Prodworthy herself, there is still plenty to enjoy in the film. Firstly is the story, which, with the clearly defined opposing sides and the big climactic event, is pretty tightly structured, with little padding. Meanwhile, the cast, despite a few more wrinkles and grey hairs, carry of the most tired and lame puns and innuendoes with a great sense of energy and fun, especially the other series regulars such as Barbara Windsor, Patsy Rowlands and Jack Douglas.

What remains fascinating about Carry On films of the 1970s is the dark undertones, and unflattering picture they sometimes paint of England and its inhabitants. The opening shot of Carry On Girls is of a miserable looking family, sitting in the rain on the seafront pier, simmering with resentment and bitterness. The film ends with that classic horror movie trope, the angry mob, and one that is happy to revel in the misfortunes of others, but turn nasty in a second when similar things happen to them.

Carry On films often finish on a rather traditional happy ending, with the young hero marrying his sweetheart, but this is not the case here. Hounded by the baying mob, with his money stolen by his girlfriend (to offset the damage he has done to her business), Sid has no choice but to leap on a motorcycle and ride off into the sunset to an uncertain future with a buxom blonde.