TV Cream

Films: W is for...

What A Carve Up!

Horror paperback editor Kenneth Connor and bookie Sid James are challenged by Donald Pleasence to spend a night in a haunted house in what could easily have been Carry On Screaming! if it had been made a few years before Hammer got into its baroque era. Anyhow, with Sid and Ken in fine Carry On form, classic duff lines from Ray Cooney (‘It’s like Burke and Hare all over again!’ ‘The only berk round here’s you, mate!’) and sometime Carry On visitors Esma Cannon, Stanley Unwin and Shirley Eaton, there’s Onnishness aplenty on show. That is, until you get to the disturbingly ‘dark’ denouement, which no Carry On would have dared flirt with. The appearance of Dennis Price, at the outset of his Brown Ale Years, makes this a must-see. And at the start Sid James has a bookie’s kit which is a doctor’s bag with ‘Honest Sid’ written on it, which is the most descriptive prop ever devised.

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