Adventures of a Plumber's Mate (1978) Reviews

• British sauce 'n spice

  rps-22003-02-08

  This is a run of the mill British farce with lots of British sex. The Italians make sex look wholesome, the French make it erotic, the Americans make it dirty but the Brits laugh about it. Lots of nude ladies and I lost count of the bare boobs. But it's all quite harmless and fun, done in that "No Sex Please We're British" style. This movie won't win critical raves or film festival honours. But I happened to be alone all weekend and it was just the ticket Saturday night with a beer and a bag of chips (crisps?) after a hard day of laying wooden flooring. It's silly and saucy in the best British tradition.

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• Everyone's got to start somewhere

  malcolmgsw2016-02-29

  Elaine Paige made her film debut in this British sex film.At the time the British film industry was in a very poor state.Often sex films were the only opportunity for actors to appear on screen.So that is the reason that Richard Caldicott appears.This film is a smaller budgeted version of the Confession series,which in turn took over when the Carry Ons had their day.This film is actually amusing in parts unlike the Confessions which were unfunny and crass.There is one very funny shot of a amateurs wobbling breasts.However Arthur Millard in his last film does rather exhibit his acting limitations.Rather redolent of the period.

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• Bog standard, down in the dumps

  jaibo2008-07-08

  The only thing which distinguishes this final instalment of the Adventures film trilogy is that the budget has reached a new low and there's a pall of palpable depression, brutality and despair hanging over the whole proceedings. In this episode, the incompetent and rather nasty little misogynist protagonist Sid South (whose first pick-up here informs us has got a small dick) owes rent, bills and debts to a gangster bookie. The bookies are demanding payment with extreme menaces, so in between fixing people's plumbing (his unhappily pursued trade), Sid tries a variety of dodgy money-making schemes, none of which do him any good. What is fascinating is the sheer contempt that everyone shows everyone else in the film (with the exception of Sid's personality-less barmaid on-off girlfriend), and the dilapidated feel of Britain in the late 70s (the "winter of discontent" was just around the corner). With its petty gangsters roaming around throwing their weight about, and its central character desperately unable to better his financial position, Britain resembles one of those post-Communist Eastern block countries, a dreary dog eat dog landscape in which everyone is mean-spirited, quick to anger, aggressive and anxious. The only thing that brings anyone any respite is the odd bout of loveless sex, performed with all the finesse of fumbling adolescents. Adventures of a Plumber's Mate is billed as a comedy, but apart from a couple of very obvious comic moments provided by natural clowns like Stephen Lewis (as ever doing Blakey from On the Buses) and Claire Davenport (as a violent masseuse), there's not a laugh to be had in from the whole soul-destroying hour and a half of the film; it isn't even paced like a comedy, more like a particularly bleak Play for Today. This is the product of a defeated nation, with the odd bout of sad-sack snickering punctuating the sound of millions of days in the life gone sour.

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• Pretty good.

  BlackJack_B2002-03-29

  For once, a protagonist who doesn't smoke! I swear, they love their cigarettes in Great Britain, and it seemed in every sex comedy, someone is lighting up. One of the movies from the British-made "Adventures" series, this one is actually a good one. A likeable Lothario plumber named Sid is having trouble paying the bookies and must get 1000 pounds paid to them or "else". In between plumbing jobs, he works for a small-time crime boss who gives him "jobs" to do, and they all go wrong for him. As with all movies in this series, people go naked, but here, there aren't any sex scenes for once, but there are some funny scenes created from the situations the plumber gets into. Stephen Lewis, who played Inspector Blakey from "On The Buses", has a small role as Sid's boss, the aptly named B.A. Crapper. Yes, this is a very British film, with some people's accents being very difficult to decipher, but it's still worth seeing, although it's probably unavailable in the U.S. If you live in a British Commonwealth country, you'll find it.

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• Strictly third-rate British sex comedy

  lazarillo2010-04-19

  As you might guess from the title, this movie is about the adventures of a plumber's assistant. In real life it's not exactly a profession where you'd expect a lot of hot sex action, but, of course, it is in movies like this. Aside from the vaguely sexy, plumbing-related hijinks though, there's a genuine plot where our hero "Sid South" (Christopher Neil)owes serious gambling debts to a pair of hulking loan sharks, and gets mixed up with a recently-paroled convict (after he fixes the, um, plumbing of the man's wife)in trying to retrieve a golden toilet seat (or rather a toilet seat with stolen gold concealed in it). There's nothing wrong, of course, with a sex comedy having a plot per se, but this unfortunately is not a very funny one. These "Adventures of" films are naturally a cheap knock-off of the then-popular "Confessions of" series of sex comedies with Robin Askwith. The whole series is a couple steps down from the genuinely entertaining "Confessions of" series, but this film is also another step or two down from the first film in the series "Adventures of a Taxi Driver". It's a conceit in these films that blue-collar slobs somehow get more sex action than rock stars. The problem is that Neil often acts like a whiny, spoiled rock star and quickly loses the every-man sympathy of the audience. In the opening scene, for instance, he wakes up in his grungy, vermin-infested flat with a pretty nice-looking girl (evidently a one-night stand), who unaccountably considers him to be some kind of catch. But he kicks her to the curb like he's Rod Stewart (actually he leaves her bare-assed naked on the curb after his motorbike rips her dress off). Neil has zero charisma in his role, but most of the female characters don't really have roles at all. They're all pretty cute, but they put in little more than undraped cameos. Suzy Mandel, for instance, was such an appealing actress that she sometimes appeared on the posters of movies she wasn't even in (like the French film "Pussy Talk"). Later, she went to the US and ended up in a big-budget XXX film,but they actually let her use a body double for the XXX scenes. Anyway, she's pretty much wasted as one of a quartet of "tennis girls" who catch the protagonist after he decides to use the ladies' shower for no real reason while on a job (in real-life he'd probably be reported as a sex pervert, but of course that's not what happens here. . .). The only characters I liked were the male character actors like the two loan sharks and "Sid's" boss. Their lower-class Brit accents were often virtually unintelligible, but they were at least funny.

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