Who Killed The Cat? (1966)

A play adaptation featuring sweet old ladies, arsenic, and murder, this thriller is obviously written in the vein of Arsenic and Old Lace and The Ladykillers but is far less memorable than those comedy thriller classics, mostly because the mystery here, about a murdered cat, poisoned whisky, jewellery thefts and the murder of a wicked stepmother is crammed into the movie's last fifteen minutes after a long and convoluted hour of dreary drama.

★★☆☆☆

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The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

With a runtime of just 73-minutes, this 1933 whodunnit, the fifth of fifteen films adapted from the detective novels of S S Van Dine between 1929 and 1947, has a very high body count - four, including the first untimely death of a prize show dog - and it is up to super-sleuth Philo Vance, played by William Powell, to catch the culprit, which he does despite the solution to the mystery being quite preposterous, revealed in a laughable denouement.

★★★☆☆

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Carry On Screaming (1966)

We'd only recently watched the dreadfully unfunny The Fearless Vampire Killers, Roman Polanski's bawdy horror parody released in 1967, when this Carry On movie, the twelfth in the Carry On series, came on the tv and while we'd usually snap off the tv before the double entendres could start their assault on our ears, the movie's similarities to the Polanski comedy and its release date only one year earlier in 1966 kept us watching - could it possibly be a superior movie? - and we decided our first ever Carry On comedy, about a Sherlock Holmes type investigating disappearances (a sinister doctor is turning victims into wax works in an Addams Family-style haunted mansion) is quite entertaining in a ribald, debauched way, with the horror parody elements - inventive sets and costumes - helping to take the focus off the smut!

★★★☆☆

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Batman (1966)

It might be time for this camp, shiny stocking-ed Batman to make a comeback because after the deadly earnest of the Christopher Nolan trilogy, this movielength episode of the Adam West series of the 60s is a hoot - a largely plotless but good-time romp featuring hilarious lollybag costumes, deadpan delivery of some overwrought dialogue, and a pantomime finale in which all the characters (Batman, Robin, The Penguin, The Riddler, The Joker, Catwoman and some henchmen) appear in a prolonged unchoreographed and daggy-beyond-belief fist fight aboard a submarine.

★★☆☆☆

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