Slayground

<i>Slayground</i>

Slayground

1983 British film by Terry Bedford


Slayground is a 1983 British crime thriller film directed by Terry Bedford and starring Peter Coyote, Mel Smith and Billie Whitelaw.[2] The screenplay was by Trevor Preston, adapted from Slayground, the 14th Parker novel (1971) by Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark).

Quick Facts Slayground, Directed by ...

Cast

Production

In early 1983 Barry Spikings left Thorn EMI and Verity Lambert was appointed head of production. Lambert's first slate of films was Slayground, Comfort and Joy, Illegal Aliens (which became Morons from Outer Space) and Dreamchild.[3] Filming had finished by November 1983. "I believe all these films have international appeal," said Lambert.[4]

Reception

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Flashdance meets film noir for this disappointingly lame front-runner from the new EMI stable. A directing début for Terry Bedford, formerly lighting cameraman for Adrian Lyne then for Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky, and now teamed with commercials cameraman Stephen Smith, Slayground is full of portentous camerawork that loads even a simple bus-stop arrival with heavily irrelevant suspense. ... Slayground offers a beginner's course in customary crimethriller images, culminating in the fairground shoot-out, all ho-ho masks and halls of mirrors, for those who may have forgotten how these things always used to be done. Littered with fashionably upright corpses, the film offers the ultimate affront in the concept of its gloating, faceless killer, fountaining bullets as from the hosepipe of a demented gardener (our team has scrupulously noted Assault on Precinct 13 along with Lady from Shanghai and Bugsy Malone), and almost as immune to retaliation as the bogeyman in Halloween. Rather as with the mystery girl at the start – and, for that matter, the film's title itself – his presence seems to mean something but nobody, it appears, could quite remember what."[5]


References

  1. "The Sunday press has reported on the UK film industry." 17 April 1983 Textline Multiple Source Collection (1980-1994)
  2. "Slayground". British Film Institute Collections Search. Retrieved 15 April 2024.
  3. Cinema Verity: Peter Fiddick talks to EMI-Thorn 's new film production chief Fiddick, Peter. The Guardian 24 Nov 1983: 13.
  4. EMI back with four feature films Fiddick, Peter. The Guardian 16 Nov 1983: 2.
  5. "Slayground". The Monthly Film Bulletin. 51 (600): 52. 1 January 1984 via ProQuest.



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