This is one of those films that I describe as "so bad it's good". This is an often-used term by people to describe films that are usually ineptly produced and fail at delivering what they intend yet end up being incredibly funny, albeit for all the wrong reasons. I remember reading in a review for another film elsewhere on IMDb that this term can never be applied to a comedy, since a bad comedy is, according to that review, one that isn't funny. In theory I should agree with that since it makes sense. But then I watch COME PLAY WITH ME once more and realise that I don't.For reasons totally unknown to me and to everyone else who has reviewed this film, it was a massive box office hit in the UK, breaking records to become the longest running film to ever grace a UK cinema screen. It ran in cinemas for an incredible four years.The plot is as follows - two forgers go on the run from a bunch of crooks and hide out in a health farm. From there the plot expands to include a government official on their trail, along with the crooks, a health farm where there are virtually no staff, and a bunch of young women turning up on a coach to run said health farm.Lots of familiar faces from the period show up in this film, including Alfie Bass, Ronald Fraser, Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Ken Parry and many others. For none of these people is COME PLAY WITH ME their finest hour. But they are all fun to watch and the film is kept moving along nicely. The lovely Sue Longhurst, a veteran of the 1970s sex comedies, is present too and that was a wise decision on the part of the producers. She's always great to watch.George Harrison Marks is unintentionally funny playing one of the forgers. It's well-documented that he was drunk during the making of the film and it's evident in most of his scenes. But it is funny to see him dressed up in a Victorian-era outfit (complete with horrible wig and false teeth), looking like he stepped right out of a 1930s music hall production, and into the 1970s. There's one scene where he's lifting a trunk out of the back of a car. I don't know why but I laugh every time I see it, even though there are no intentional "sight gags" involved.The editing is very sloppy in places, with Henry McGee looking at the camera at the end of one scene for example. This provides some of the amusement to be found in the film. The dialogue comes across as being improvised on the spot at times, the absolutely awful song called Pretty Girl plays out over quite a few scenes and Ken Parry's character is just written out halfway through the film as though his part in the plot was left unfinished. I think you're getting the idea now what I was getting at when I suggested the film was inept.There are a few sex scenes but they are all very softcore (made more so by censorship edits). People watching the film in this day and age won't be surprised to find that the marketing of the film as some kind of hardcore pornography effort was just a con trick on the part of the producer. The sex scenes aren't particularly erotic or funny and serve only to slow the film down a bit while adding the obligatory "T&A" to ensure this qualifies as a sex film rather than a straight comedy like the CARRY ON films for example.COME PLAY WITH ME is funny mainly for all the wrong reasons but it does provide a lot of entertainment and seems to get funnier with each viewing. There isn't more one could really ask for when watching a very low-budget film from the 1970s.

Here's another of these bawdy, saucy, naughty, eye candy flicks, that the English do so well. Set on a sex health farm, with hotties and open nudity, a plus, we have two money forgers hiding out. They're quiet and demure amongst the much other younger guests, and with good reason, but really these two aren't the sociable type. With an intrusion of half clad hotties waking them up, they hardly even react. This verging cult hit has some great songs, one music choreographed number, done by some of the actors I couldn't get, out of my head. As in other sex farces too, some recognizable faces, you wouldn't expect to see in this, pop up. This movie too, gives a whole new meaning to irrigation, I don't want to go into. Come Play With Me is actually a saucy little entertainer with way enough nudity, to get your hormones rising, humor, and some likable forgers. A very naughty, raunchy comedy, London Style.

British sex comedies are kind of like "Lake Woebegone" in-reverse--they're all below average. And then some of them are downright awful. This was one of the most famous films of the genre since it featured sex star legend Mary Millington. But she has about as big of role here as she did with her brief cameo in "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle", and that movie is a lot more fun to sit through than this one.There's no shortage of naked dollybirds, of course--like "The Playbirds" this was produced by British porn magnate David Sullivan and features a lot of the same "actresses" pulled from the pages of his nudie magazines (Millington, Suzie Mandel, etc.). Unfortunately though, it also has a plot: two counterfeiters (Alfie Bass and George Harrison Marks, who also directed)go on the lam from the law and hide out at a Scottish health spa run by a septuagenarian (Irene Handl). Then a bunch of strippers also start working at the spa for some reason (OK, so it's not much of a plot). What we have here is the same old problem--the Brits can't seem to make a straight-out sex film, so they have to try to "class" it up by throwing in a bunch second-rate, over-the-hill comedians. Bass, Marks, and Handl have an unfortunate amount of screen time and they're all painfully unfunny.Like all sex films this movie is horribly cheap, and the incompetent film-making makes it seem even cheaper. I have no idea why it was so popular in Britain. At the time, I guess, they were such a sex starved country (due to stringent censorship laws) that their movie audiences would apparently just watch anything. This was a popular film in a certain time and place, but now it's little more than a curiosity

This movie - which amazingly was a box office smash in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s (it ran non-stop between 1977 and 1981 in London's West End) - embodies everything that was bad about British so-called `sex films' of the era - namely a lame and tedious plot, a second-rate cast of comedy has-beens and never-were's, poor acting and very little actual sex and nudity. A version of the film containing very steamy and explicit sex scenes was actually shot, but in the puritanical climate of late-70s Britain with its notoriously restrictive anti-porn legislation sometimes known as the `Limp Dick Laws' (and sadly things haven't really changed much in the intervening 20-odd years), this was deemed unacceptable for screening to UK cinema audiences and never saw the light of day (no sex please – we're British!!). Instead, the only version of this movie that has ever been released is this sorry excuse for a film, which concentrates more on the pathetic, supposedly `funny' antics of a group of elderly crooks and the septugenarian matron at a health spa, being brightened up only occasionally by stocking-clad beauties portraying nurses. These girls are the film's only redeeming feature and indeed they should have been what the movie was all about. Instead, the few (I think there are about 4) short `sex' scenes have been so brutally edited that they come to a sudden, grinding halt just as things are getting warmed up, and we're back to the silly goings-on involving the `comedy' characters. And silly they truly are. It's almost painful to watch sometimes, encapsulting stupid, slapstick `mucky postcard'-style antics in the very worst traditions of the equally lamentable `Confessions' and `Carry On' movie series of the same era. The publicity blurb surrounding the movie at the time of its release claimed that it was `entertainingly funny and blushingly saucy', `fantastically erotic', `the sexiest sex comedy screened' and `of a highly explicit nature'. The makers should have been hauled before the courts on charges of multiple violations of the Trade Descriptions Act, because it is nothing of the sort. According to a recently published book about one of the film's more glamorous stars, the late and sadly missed Mary Millington, only one print of the uncut and unseen version is known to still exist, which is a pity. It's perhaps being a little optimistic to hope that this will one day appear on DVD as a more fitting testimony to the Mary Millington legacy.