Call me a traditionalist, but I think when you make a film you should just make one, not three different ones of completely different tone, all pretending to be a single movie. Alyce starts off as an indie drama, turns into a trippy psychological thriller before becoming almost absurdist horror by the end.

Alyce and her best friend Carroll are out for a night of fun, where they drink, take drugs and flirt outrageously. However, it all goes wrong when Alyce accidentally knocks her friend off the roof of her apartment building. If that weren’t enough, she then lies to the police, saying it had nothing to do with her. The fib get more complicated when it turns out Carroll isn’t dead and will be able to say what really happened when she recovers enough.

Alyce was always slightly kooky, and now her guilt slowly makes her snap. She decides she needs to kill Carroll before moving on to murder various other people around her, in increasingly gory fashion.

It’s clear everyone involved in the film is doing their best and that writer/director Jay Lee had some sort of vision for what he was trying to achieve with Alyce, but I’ll be buggered if I know what that vision was. It’s a strange movie that veers between the eerie and stupid, the interesting and awful. As mentioned, it almost feels like three distinct film, but even within each section it never finds a sustained tone, and it’s often too dumb for words, both in the characters’ actions and the way it’s presented. Everything about Alyce’s interaction with a drug dealer, for example, seems nonsensical, to the point it’s almost like an after-school special made by someone who has no clue what drug dealers are like.

As the violence increases the film almost turns into farce and by that point I felt as if the film had thrown me from pillar to post so much that I’d pretty much disconnected from it and really didn’t care what happened at the end. It’s actually quite an achievement that by the point James Duval was trying to pick his intestines off the floor, my only reaction was boredom.

Overall Verdict: While the early stages are good, its ever changing tone and descent towards gore-filled farce quickly make Alyce a tedious experience.

Special Features:
None

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Gerald Thomas is definitely best known for directing the Carry On… movies, with a dedication to the series that took him from 1958’s Carry On Sergeant right through to 1992’s Carry On Columbus. However while most of his career was taken up with those films, he did sometimes find time for movies outside the series, such as Twice Round The Daffodils.

The comedy, which comes to DVD for the first time, is sometimes considered an unofficial Carry On film. On the surface you can understand why. After all, it features several of the Carry On actors (Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims etc.), has Thomas directing, Peter Rogers producing and Norman Hudis writing. However it has a rather different tone. For a start Hudis adapted it from a play by Jack Beale and Patrick Cargill. The comedy is gentler and less obvious, and there’s more of a bittersweet feel to the whole thing.

The slight problem though for a modern audience is quite how ignorant we are about tuberculosis. The film is set in the men’s ward of a sanatorium where people are being treated for TB. In 1962, everyone would have known why you’d need to go to a sanatorium and the issues the patients are dealing with, but in the modern day the need for rest and months in a countryside retreat seem a tad mysterious, so you just have to take it on trust that it’s necessary.

The film follows various men as they try to get better and also have love life troubles. Those with girlfriends worry that the lengthy separation will end up with their best gal finding someone else, while the married ones know their women may be lonely or face financial hardship – and shockingly, may have to get a job! Luckily though, in the early 60s nursing appears to have been a profession you got into in the hope you’d find a dishy guy who you could help to get healthy and then marry. I’m sure it wasn’t like that really, but Twice Around The Daffodils isn’t exactly a paragon of feminist thinking, so nurses tend to be sexy and mainly thinking about dating the patients (except the matron, of course, who I assume got her frump on the moment she got promoted into the role).

It’s sweet, gentle and oddly interesting from a sociological point of view, as it touches on many of the issues that bubbled under the surface of early 60s society, such as men’s fears over their changing position in society and also the fact that when the film was made, the NHS was still relatively new. Indeed within a few years, the development of district general hospitals, as well as better immunisation and TB treatment pretty much killed off the type of sanatorium seen in the film.

And in case you’re wondering what the title refers to, it’s a patch of daffodils in the hospital grounds, which if you can go round it twice without collapsing or getting ill, suggests you’re on the road to recovery.

The film undoubtedly retains a bit of a stagey feel and its gentle comedy might be a little dull to some, but Twice Round The Daffodils is a bit of a charmer. It’s also interesting to see Kenneth Williams in a relatively restrained role, where he proves his acting skill beyond the gurning comedy we tend to associate him with now, as well as offering very early roles for the likes of Shelia Hancock and Nanette Newman.

Overall Verdict: It’s not really a missing Carry On, as it’s very different in tone to those films, but it’s a sweet, gently funny and even sometimes moving slice of early 60s British cinema.

Special Features:
None

Reviewer: Tim Isaac