Les requins volent bas

Hammerhead is a strange mixture, blending a determination to be bang up-to-the-minute with the trends of 1967/68 with a routine espionage story. A series of bizarre 'Happenings' and weird performance art, together with Judy Geeson's groovy young thing, the latter the highlight of the movie for me, hardly fail to disguise the kind of plot that had been churned out ad infinitum on TV. Vince Edwards is perhaps best described as adequate in the lead; he's OK but not particularly memorable. Peter Vaughan was born to play a super-villain, but his Hammerhead must have been on the screen for all of ten minutes. He doesn't even get to fight the hero and his demise is pretty nondescript. Neither William Mervyn nor Patrick Cargill, excellent character players both, are seen at their best, though Diana Dors is in her element as the proprietor of a dubious nightclub. The finale with Michael Bates in a dual role tends to drag on.