Directed by: Willy Roe
Stars: Mary Millington, Glynn Edwards, Gavin Campbell
Language: English
Country: Uk | Imdb Info
Also known as: Secrets of a Playgirl, The Playbird Murders
Description: The models of Playbirds magazine are being murdered one by one. Each victim is discovered with a number marked on her forehead, apparently corresponding to the issue in which she appeared.
Detectives Holbourne and Morgan struggle to find a connection beyond the magazine itself. Their suspects include photographer Terry Day, a fanatical street preacher, morality campaigner George Ransome, and wealthy publisher Harry Dougan, whose interests seem divided between women and horse racing.
The murders continue, and the killer’s obsession appears connected to a bizarre mixture of religious imagery, sacrifice, witchcraft, and the magazine’s increasingly elaborate photo shoots.
After another model dies despite police surveillance, the detectives change tactics. WPC Lucy Sheridan is selected for an undercover assignment and sent into the world surrounding Playbirds. Her mission is to attract Dougan’s attention, become one of his models, and expose anything connecting him to the killings.
Lucy proves remarkably effective. Before long she has entered Dougan’s private circle and secured the most dangerous assignment possible: becoming the magazine’s next featured model.
But that success also places her directly in the killer’s path.
As the investigation closes around several false suspects, Lucy discovers that being watched by the police offers little protection from someone who has already learned how to approach victims unnoticed.
The Playbirds mixes a grim serial-killer story with the unabashed sexploitation that made Mary Millington a British cult figure. The result is an uneasy hybrid—part murder mystery, part Soho time capsule, and part late-1970s adult comedy.
Legacy Note:
Directed by Willy Roe, the film gives Mary Millington one of her most substantial screen roles as Lucy Sheridan. Her energetic performance provides the movie with a central character rather than simply another succession of glamour appearances.
Glynn Edwards and Gavin Campbell play the detectives, while Alan Lake, Suzy Mandel, Dudley Sutton, Derren Nesbitt, and Windsor Davies add familiar British faces to the increasingly strange investigation.
The film’s treatment of gender disguise and sexual violence is unmistakably a product of its era and relies on sensational stereotypes that have aged badly. More interesting today is its grimy view of late-1970s London: magazine offices, massage parlors, parks, street preachers, police stations, and Soho sleaze all occupying the same disreputable landscape.
Uneven but rarely dull, The Playbirds survives as one of the stranger Mary Millington vehicles—a collision of centerfold glamour, black magic imagery, police incompetence, horse-racing obsession, and a killer who turns the magazine’s fantasy world into something considerably darker.
Trailer:
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