Absolutely Fantastic

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Blistering performances.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Two nurses, Jane and Cathy, go on a cycling holiday through rural France. After they have been cycling for a while Cathy wants to stop and relax, but Jane wants to press on. Jane thinks that Cathy only wants to linger in the hope of meeting a man on a scooter who she had seen at various points along their journey so far. They argue, and Jane cycles on to the next village, leaving Cathy to sunbathe at a small clearing in some woods.Cathy wakes from a sleep, but becomes scared after she hears a sound in the bushes and discovers her bicycle has been vandalised. Meanwhile, Jane is disturbed by a squabbling couple at the café where she is resting, and cycles back to the woods to find her friend only to find she is no longer there. As time goes by we become convinced that Cathy is genuinely missing and we encounter various other individuals, all of whom seem suspicious to some degree: an ex-pat middle-aged Englishwoman, a gendarme, and the gendarme's deaf father.Although the pacing is fairly slow the tension is ratcheted up quite efficiently. Ultimately, however, I found the ending a bit disappointing. For much of the film the man on the scooter, who claims to be a member of the Surité, is supposedly helping Jane find Cathy, but he behaves so strangely that she becomes afraid of him and runs away. Towards the end of the film Jane finds Cathy's dead body, but the man on the scooter turns out not to be the killer and comes to her rescue at a crucial moment. However, we never get any explanation for his odd behaviour earlier on.

Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) are a couple of British nurses taking a bicycle vacation through rural France. When they have an argument, Jane storms off ahead leaving Cathy sunbathing on the grass. Later on Jane returns but can find no trace of Cathy, stuck in a foreign land and unable to speak the language, Jane soon finds herself in grave danger as she searches frantically for her lost friend.The title is about the protagonist trying to resolve a mystery/terror situation before the darkness falls. Film is completely set in daylight time, with a very limited amount of characters, and no extended bouts of dialogue. Looking at it from the outside, you would not be thought of as ignorant for expecting this to not be frightening or thrilling, yet it is both. The isolation of the countryside is a foreboding presence here, which coupled with Jane's isolation as a foreigner, makes for edgy atmospherics.Director Robert Fuest is in no hurry what so ever to start turning the screws, so the first half of pic is very slow, but patience is rewarded once the girls argue and split up. Then Fuest starts introducing peripheral characters, and writers Brian Clemens and Terry Nation dangle bits of dark information into the plot, about the area and its history. The mystery element is amped up high, the perpetrator could quite easily be anyone who Jane meets, and then we lurch into paranoia and peril when all will be revealed in a wave of daylight dreadfulness.Critics were (are) very much divided about the picture, complaints ranging from it being nasty and distasteful, to it being too laborious for its own good. But it has a very good fan base, and it certainly does what it sets out to do by putting those wiling to invest fully in it on to the edge of their seats. Recommended on proviso you are prepared to bare with it for the first 45 minutes. 7/10

2 girls go on a cycling holiday to France. When one of them goes missing, it's up to the other one to try to find out what is going on and try to save her friend.The set up of this was pretty slow but it built up the atmosphere and tension really well. It is set in the French countryside and the sunshine is relentless, which was a nice change from horror movies being shot in a lot of darkness. A lot of the time people are speaking French and the protagonist doesn't understand the language, as there are no subtitles the audience doesn't either, which I thought was clever. While the ending was not unexpected, the amount of suspects did keep me guessing for a while and the film kept the tension building the whole way through. Pamela Franklin did a good job carrying the film mostly on her shoulders, and overall I think it was a very good, tense little thriller. It wasn't particularly scary, so don't see it if you're wanting a good fright, but as a thriller it was pretty good.

This is a sort of thriller that reminds us much of "Charade". Charade came first, so it gets the bragging rights.And I don't think it is a spoiler to say that, except to those who saw "Charade", and like me, they will pretty well know what is going on all the time. A\ It starts very very slow. The first 20 minutes is absolutely nothing, but at least the scenery is good. We get to see leggy women and nice country side. Had this been made in a city, and the women wore slacks, you would have fallen asleep long before the twenty minute mark.We begin in an outdoor cafe, and one woman is taking a picture. We know the camera and film will be an important cog, but it could also be a red herring.From there, the suspense is very well done. In 1970, this was not as easy to predict as today. Being easy to predict doesn't make it bad, though, not when the story line follows logic. Any other sort of outcome would have been "illogical" considering the clues. I am already risking the spoiler here, so I won't elaborate. Suffice to say, it is well thought out, well written, well done all around. I would have liked to seen a bit more energy in the first twenty minutes. The country side wasn't that pretty. Good film, and actually very believable for this genre.