The upper crust family in this terrific British black comedy is so sunny and smiling, so storybook-like, so full of tea and marmalade and fairy tales, so busy singing songs and playing games and giggling all the time that OF COURSE they’re kidnapping and murdering people. They have a nice thing going on, too, until they get hold of a sexy mustachioed guy (Michael Bryant) who creates tension in the house and eventually gets them to turn on each other.
If you squint, this is sort of a British variation on Jack Hill’s 1968 cult classic Spider Baby, another warped comedy about a family of sickos. Also like Spider Baby, this film’s most memorable character is a fetching young girl who’s 100% psychotic. She’s 22 year old Vanessa Howard, a big-eyed blonde who spends the entire film in dangerously short schoolgirl outfits and baby doll dresses, whirling like a top and luring men into the house.
Nobody cared about this film when it came out. It bombed in theaters and got shuffled so far into the fringes that when a British film society planned a festival dedicated to director Freddie Francis in 2004, they couldn’t locate a copy of this on any format. No 35mm prints, nothing digital, not even videotape. It went virtually unseen for three decades. Copies did eventually surface and now we have it on DVD.
Loosely based on Maisie Mosco’s play, Happy Family. The title of the film was later changed to Girly, presumably to make it sound less British for international consumption