Flipside 6: Man of Violence & The Big Switch

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
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Re: Flipside 6: Man of Violence & The Big Switch

#26 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Nov 05, 2014 7:23 pm

"This, as you may or may not know, is London. Headquaters of devaluation, socialism and....the permissive society"

I liked The Big Switch much more than Moon. It has a much simpler plot, though much of it is also shrouded in mystery for three quarters of the film. It begins with a Hitchcock-style wrong man plot as our hero (called John Carter, though not of Mars) picks up a girl called Samantha who immediately gets murdered in her flat while he pops around the corner to buy cigarettes. He thinks better of calling the police and immediately leaves the girl's flat (though not before leaving fingerprints on the gun, the body, the telephone, the doorhandles and a cigarette butt in an ashtray! :roll: ) and then finds that mysterious forces conspire to get him fired from his ad agency job that seems to involve posing topless girls holding a stick of deodorant seductively for his camera. He gets told he is in debt by a bunch of toughs who break and enter his apartment and play strip poker while they wait for John to return (the female member of the gang obviously isn't that good of a player), and he gets forced by the nightclub boss who they work for to ferry one of his female employees to a Brighton branch of his business for unspecified reasons and await further instructions. After the reasons why they are there get revealed, the pair make a break for freedom and we get a quite neat climax on a wintery Brighton pier, through its amusement arcade and inside a ghost train (which again perhaps suggests that Pete Walker was interested in horror material even at this early stage!)

The whole plot is completely ludicrous and full of plot holes (such as the whole opening murder sequence, which is rendered completely irrelevant by the final act of the film. And the assassin never turns up again as one of the henchmen, which just raises more questions! Was he just a hired thug? Or just a nightclub employee given a task to do? Was he a Russian too? I guess we'll never know!), although there was at least a happy ending! Although one that conveniently involved the police ignoring the bodies lying about the place to wander off with our new happy couple!
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And why couldn't Samantha have staged her own death? The only reason an actual assassin needed to be there would be if they wanted John to track down a suspicious killer briefly walking past him, which he shows no interest whatsoever in doing! So other than that, the only reason is to misdirect the audience that the killing was a real one, and not expect them to remember that by the twist halfway through the film!
I did like the idea that comes up once John and Karen, the employee he is escorting, get to Brighton. They both get individually taken into the back room to have their pictures taken, but it takes the form of being roughed up and pushed around whilst the other person behind the camera takes photos. It is like an abusive version of a photo-shoot, and contrasts nicely to John's previous 'professional' photo-shoot earlier on.
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The final convoluted revelation is that John and Karen, who have both outlived their usefulness, have been manipulated and been held captive by the nightclub boss while he smuggles a Russian gangster and his wife into the country to then have them take on John and Karen's appearances through plastic surgery (via the finest plastic surgeons that Brighton can offer!), at which point John and Karen will be killed. It is a weird sci-fi plot that feels a little like Seconds. But it is really just a bizarre McGuffin to justify continuing the action in the same way that the opening 'murder' of Samantha was, rather than there being any particular extra meaning beyond that.
So it is a fun, if silly, B-grade film. There's is a bit of arch dialogue here too, but nothing on the level of Moon to come. The constant chirpy television-style score gets a bit wearing after a while too, but its not too bad.

On the longer, more nudity packed 'export cut' of the film, normally I would always suggest watching the longer version of any film, but here the extra scenes are often so incongruous and poorly inserted that I think the shorter version is probably the originally intended one. It was fun though to watch the shorter version first and try to guess which scenes would get the extra nudity bump up! I did correctly guess that the last act sex scene, in which a girl is under the covers in the shorter version, would be re-done with her on top of the covers. And I also guessed that the deodorant commercial scene would get more nudity, but I couldn't have prepared myself for the film at that point to turn into basically a full frontal almost dialogue-less stag film running for a couple of minutes whilst the girls try to stifle their giggles holding the can and spraying it at each other!

In fact the way that everyone is larking about and barely suppressing laughter in these extra scenes is something that suggests that there wasn't even a pretence that these scenes were seriously intended to be a part of the film. However a couple of them go into seriously weird, almost fetish, territory. I was expecting that the strip poker scene, which in the shorter version has the girl in bra and panties, to go further in the 'export cut', and sure enough the girl pops her bra off after losing at cards, but then:
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while in the original film John is taken into the back by a couple of goons and we hear him being roughed up in the background whilst the head goon watches the girl dress before they all leave, in the 'export cut' the head goon and the topless girl go into the bedroom with John and the other thugs and while they hold John down the girl climbs on top of him and proceeds to burn him with the lit end of a cigar! Which begins as quite a shocking scene, but then ends up getting drawn out so much that after the sixth time it just ends up with the girl mushing wet cigar leaves into John's chest while he pretends to be in pain! Then the head goon and the girl retire back to the front room where we get a shot of him fondling her breasts before she dresses.
One area that I didn't expect the nudity was in the scene in Brighton when after Karen gets her abusive photo-shoot, John has the same thing done to him. In the shorter version John just gets roughed up the same as Karen does, with the thugs telling him to take his shirt off, at which point the film cuts back to him getting pushed back out of the room, but in the 'export cut':
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there is a hilarious scene in which the two thugs say "He's all yours now girls", at which point two women come in and start fondling John whilst the actors playing the previously self assured pistol toting thugs sheepishly inch their way along the wall trying to move outside of the camera's gaze! Then we get two minutes of a longshot of the guy and two girls doing some softcore fumbling whilst trying not to burst into laughter!

What was the point of inserting this scene! It's not particularly erotic or explicit, and given that a major plot point a couple of scenes later is that John seduces one of these girls anyway to find out about the plans for him and Karen, it makes it seem a bit stupid to have not asked the questions during this earlier threesome scene!
Oh, and the 'export cut' pads out its running time an extra five minutes or so by throwing in a opening strip tease sequence under some different credits from the shorter cut. Which is a pointless, though I have to admit eye-catching, addition! I've never seen such a liberal use of body glitter before, and I should also admit that I burst out laughing at the violent whipcracking sound effects as the lady lightly stroked herself with a kind of soft-looking brush implement!

Weirdly, the strong clips from almost all of these 'export cut' additions get used in the theatrical trailer for the film! Talk about false advertising if it was being done to lure punters into seeing the shorter version!

However for all of my incredulous laughter and teasing comments aimed at both Moon and The Big Switch, this was still an interesting set of films and great fun to watch! Just don't expect anything close to 'gritty gangland realism' from either of these films and instead approach with more of an exploitation mindset and you'll be fine!

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Flipside 6: Man of Violence & The Big Switch

#27 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Nov 07, 2014 9:12 am

I've read the booklet with this release now and this is a prime example of how such writing can add some excellent insight into even relatively mediocre films. I particularly liked Cathi Unsworth's essay on Moon, which links the larger than life themes and characters in the film to real social events such as the Northern industrialist Bryant seemingly being modeled on John Poulson, and his Southern gangster counterpart Grayson seemingly based on Johnny Bindon.

And David McGillivray's comments on The Big Switch are also fun, with the Seconds-style plot instead apparently having instead been lifted wholesale from His Kind of Woman!

(I also had not previously realised that McGillivray was Julian Clary's gag writer! This means that I suddenly need to know his thoughts on that notorious gag about Norman Lamont that almost got Clary blacklisted!)

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budthechud
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Re: Flipside 6: Man of Violence & The Big Switch

#28 Post by budthechud » Fri Apr 17, 2015 10:23 pm

Can anyone here who has the dual format edition of this answer a few questions:

Is this really region free (both the dvd and blu-ray0?

Does the dvd have both versions of "the Big Switch" on it? The old stand alone dvd only has the shorter British cut.

thanks.

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MichaelB
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Re: Flipside 6: Man of Violence & The Big Switch

#29 Post by MichaelB » Sat Apr 18, 2015 8:36 am

The DVD only has one version. The BD has both.

And yes, the entire package is region-free.

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