From an original story by Colonel Foster off of UFO! David Essex is Barry Sheene – well, sort of – urged by his dead brother’s widow Diane Keen to take the bike bro had been building to Silverstone success. The only fly in the ointment is unscrupulous, moneyed Yank rival Beau Bridges, and the scene is set for a rather boring underdog-makes-good story, with a rather shocking ‘just when you thought he’d won it’ perfunctory ending that was tidied up for overseas sales. Harry H Corbett, Ed Bishop and Lis Sladen inhabit the authentically seventies-overcast landscape, and the soundtrack thrums to The Real Thing, former Val Doonican backing singer Victy Silva and Dave’s own majestic Silver Dream Machine. Alas, the planet’s bums remain obstinately distanced from those all-important Odeon seats, and the Rank Organisation turns back to its photocopier royalties for solace. No more would darkened Oscar Deutsch fleapits reverberate to the dubbed-on strains of Ken Richmond in just his pants stroking a giant plaster crumpet with an outsize cotton bud.
Tom Ronson
May 23, 2022 at 12:49 am
There was a kid at my middle school who raved endlessly about this film to anyone who’d listen, so it was quite a shock when I finally got around to seeing the bloody thing, only to realise how unutterably dull it all is. Even the bike doesn’t look half as cool as Sting’s Vespa in Quadrophenia, and that’s tragic.