After a decade of directing such saucy shorts as For Men Only, Pete Walker finally cracked the hourlong barrier with the Carnaby Street crime caper The Big Switch.
One night, professional ad exec and unprofessional blue-eyed fuckboy John Carter (Sebastian Breaks, The Night Digger) leaves a London discotheque with a lovely bird (Erika Raffael, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). They head to her pad for a proper shagging. Whilst Carter first goes ’round the corner to grab some cigs for post-coital smoking, she’s shot dead by a hitman hiding in her shower. Talk about a case of the blue balls, mate — when Carter finds her body, no wonder touches the gun left behind and vamooses without phoning the authorities.
Which is exactly what local gangster/club owner Mendez (Derek Alyward, Walker’s School for Sex) counts on. He blackmails Carter into a secret assignment with a beautiful model named Karen (Virginia Wetherell, Walker’s Man of Violence). Neither Karen nor Carter have a clue what they’re in for — and I ain’t telling, either — but they hope it doesn’t involve their deaths.
This sleek, quick pic is a real fanny-slapper, like a men’s pulp paperback come to life. On cheap paper, those hard-charging, easy-bedding heroes could trot through formulaic exploits dozens upon dozens of times. The Carter character could have fronted an equal amount of adventures, yet went no further.
I enjoyed Walker’s first true feature from start to its photo finish, a marvelously fun sequence that places its climactic chase and shootout within a boardwalk arcade and ghost train attraction. After the baddies are dispatched or discombobulated, the po-po show up and invite Karen and Cater to the station for a cuppa tea.
“Sounds groovy,” Karen says earlier in the film, to which Carter coldly replies, “It is.” They may as well be talking up The Big Switch. —Rod Lott