PANIC
DVD. Odeon.

Before going to work for Hammer on such classic titles as The Reptile, Plague of the Zombies, The Scarlet Blade and The Brigand of Kandahar, director John Gilling had spent fifteen years churning out efficient low budget programmers, of which this was the last. A tight little thriller, Panic might not be Earth-shattering stuff, but does its job effectively.

Janine Gray plays Janine Heining, a Swiss girl living in London who gets mixed up with shady trumpet player Johnnie (Dyson Lovell). Too slick for his own good, Johnnie dreams of the big time and, unknown to Janine, is involved with a gang who are planning a robbery of the diamond merchant where Janine works. But the robbery is badly bungled – Janine’s boss is killed and she is hit on the head, causing memory loss. As she wanders through London trying to piece together her past, helped by has-been boxer Glyn Houston, both the police (who treat her as the prime suspect) and the criminals are trying to track her down.

With a supporting cast of familiar faces (Marne Maitland from The Reptile; Milton Reid), Panic might not be as exciting as the opening theme and credits do their best to claim, but it’s nevertheless an effective, albeit insubstantial thriller. Gilling does a good job of portraying a London full of seedy characters – only Houston’s punchy boxer seems honest, and even then, you know he’s only helping Janine because he fancies her – and like so many other low budget exploitation films of the era, the film does an effective job of showing an underworld that more mainstream films barely hinted at. Revelling in the sordidness of the subject, it’s easy to imagine that a few years later, Panic would’ve been packed with gratuitous nudity and gritty violence.

The film is somewhat let down by its lead: Gray struggles to be sympathetic (instead often seeming simply pathetic) and as she has to carry much of the story, this is an issue. But the supporting cast are all impressively convincing, and the story itself downbeat enough to work anyway – at the end, we’re left with a couple of broken characters (physically and emotionally) whose lives are shattered – an admirably dark and ambiguous ending for the time, and a worthy finale to a film that is a must for fans of obscure Britsploitation.

DAVID FLINT

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