![‘Girly’: A 1970s Psychosexual Anticolonial Horror Comedy [Celluloid Purgatory]](https://zombiegaming.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Gitlu-810x400.jpg)
Welcome to Celluloid Purgatory, your friendly neighborhood video store (er, column), offering the finest in unseen, underseen, forgotten, and obscure films of yesterday and today. From the grindhouse to the drive-in to the movie your neighbor shot on VHS and beyond, store manager Preston Fassel hopes to offer you recommendations that will broaden your horizons even as they melt your mind.
Circa 2025, “colonialism” has loudly and proudly taken its position as the enemy of Zoomers, Gen Alpha, and those seeking a righteous cause. Much of what’s taken as hard-and-fast truth about the history and nature of colonialism is demonstrably false, to the point that “colonialism” as understood by many of its detractors is as real as the “secret Muslim Obama” who terrified ultra-right-wingers in the 2010s. To cite only a few examples: Neither Hitler nor Europe proper “learned” bigotry from America, while “colonialism” isn’t something exclusively practiced by Europeans. I can assure you, the demographics of the Imperial Japanese Army provided no special comfort to the people of Seoul or Nanking.
All this to say: if something’s a genuine threat, you don’t need to exaggerate or flat-out lie about the extent of its dangers. That’s a fact some of history’s OG Boogeymen—the British—have known for quite a while. As eager to cast a critical eye on themselves as they once were to practice global domination, the Brits churned out one of the most striking, thought-provoking, and quite frankly entertaining deconstructions of colonialism ever committed to the screen. This month’s rental is 1970’s Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly, known in North America simply as Girly.
Girly plays like a hornier, geopolitically aware version of The Beguiled if Clint Eastwood had been captured by The Addams Family. “The Happy Family” is a quartet of deranged poshes living in a decrepit manor home in the English countryside, where they remain enmeshed in a 24/7 lifestyle roleplaying fantasy called “The Game.”
Matriarch Mumsy (Ursula Howells) rules the home with a loving but firm hand, aided by obedient Nanny (Pat Heywood) in caring for Sonny (Howard Trevor) and Girly (What Became of Jack and Jill’s Vanesa Howard, in a BAFTA-worthy performance), a pair of 20-somethings who dress and act like grade school children, even sleeping in giant cribs.
Because no “happy family” is complete without friends to enrich their lives, Sonny and Girly make regular trips into London, luring a variety of “less thans” back to their home, where these hastily christened “friends” are given two choices. They can either PLAY THE GAME or GET SENT TO THE ANGELS, the latter of which involves ritual murder in a ceremony themed around children’s playground games. While we’re given little indication of how long this has been going on (all those graves in the fountain would imply “a while”), we’re going to have a front row seat to the end of it.
On their latest outing, Sonny and Girly bring back New Friend (Michael Bryant) and Girlfriend (Swinging 60s sex symbol Imogen Hassall), a gigolo and his socialite client whom they accost leaving a party. Realizing New Friend is very, very drunk, the ersatz siblings whack Girlfriend by throwing her from an oversized playground slide. Next morning, it’s easy convincing the egregiously hungover New Friend that he murdered his verbally abusive Jill in a fit of class-conscious rage and that his best course of action is to lay low with the Family for a while.
Though it initially seems New Friend will just be another victim, he quickly intuits that the clan’s collective acquisitiveness reflects each member’s personal selfishness. So, he sets about a dangerous game of manipulation and seduction, positing himself (and, at least according to Girly, his A+ head game) as the prize. There’re a few problems, though.
One is that New Friend genuinely falls for Girly. Maybe he’s telling the truth when he says he believes she can still be saved; maybe he just wants to think that. Either way, New Friend is in for a rude awakening when the second of those problems arises: Girly is batshit insane even without her family’s influence and she loves him back. Part Mia Goth in Pearl, part Sherri Moon Zombie in House of 1000 Corpses, Vanessa Howard’s Girly is a mad woman experiencing true love (and killer orgasms) for the first time, and she’ll stop at nothing to have New Friend for herself…
Girly was the long-simmering passion project of cinematographer/director Freddie Francis, who made a name for himself with The Innocents and Day of the Triffids before going on to serve as cinematographer for David Lynch. Francis’ career lensing post-war fright flicks made him acutely aware of Oakley Court, a manor home with a dubious history that fell into the hands of the British government post-World War II. Ever the pragmatists, the Brits converted it into dual-purpose public housing and film sets, allowing crews onto the grounds to shoot even when people were living there. Most film fans recognize Oakley as Frank N. Furter’s castle from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but, years prior, Francis was one of the first (and, along with Jim Sharman, only) directors to see value in shooting inside Oakley in addition to its picturesque, Thames-side gardens.
Francis tasked screenwriter Brian Comport with writing him a movie about the kind of people he thought would live at Oakley, exploiting such interior design features as a built-in pipe organ. Francis and Comport thought they’d struck gold when they scored tickets to a performance of a play by Anglo-Jewish novelist Maisie Mosco called Happy Family.
As it turned out, they were partially right: Mosco’s play (a copy of which I ran down in 2011) is an aggressively 1960s piece of counterculturalism concerned with the breakdown of the English family unit amidst the sexual revolution. In addition to featuring more characters, there’s also a fascinating but needless backstory for The Family, plus an out-of-left-field twist ending that cribs heavily from We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It’s not exactly stellar stuff, but it was enough to spark Comport and Francis’ imaginations.
After he and Francis secured the film rights to the play, they set about adapting the story to fit their purposes, including streamlining the narrative, largely eliminating the contents of a superfluous act, and introducing a new thesis. Happy Family is about the fear of change, the passage of time, and every generation’s belief that the next will destroy the world. Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly is one big raised middle finger to the British Empire, its colonial legacy, and even the dear old Queen.
One of Girly’s greatest achievements is in how it manages to at once be a scathing colonial satire and a genuinely funny/unsettling horror comedy. Much of this is owed to the subtlety of Comport’s script (which he also adapted into a novel of the same name), which can either be taken at face value or more thoroughly explored for its deeper sociopolitical meaning. The major failure of so many horror movies (especially those of a recent vintage) that attempt to convey a great message is that they degenerate into Pilgrim’s Progress-style polemics where narrative and character become secondary to discourse. The results are often movies that are difficult to enjoy on anything other than their merits in conveying a message versus telling a story or entertaining an audience.
Not so with Girly. A viewer with zero knowledge of or interest in colonialism can watch Girly and enjoy a truly unique experience. Comport has crafted his allegory in such a way that it can be taken at face value as “just” a story about a kooky homicidal family with a deeply unwholesome interest in nursery rhymes. Those are the merits on which many American and Canadian fans have traditionally enjoyed the film over the years.
The more one puts into Girly, though, the more one gets out of it, and putting in the history of colonialism creates a very rich viewing experience indeed. For “Happy Family” read “Royal Family,” for “New Friends” read “New Colonies.” For “Play the Game” read “fall in line with British social mores;” for “break the rules” read “anything that pisses off the colonial authorities” and “sent to the angels…” well, that’s the same no matter how you parse it.
At every step of Girly, Comport exposes and critiques the brutality and hypocrisy behind the friendly face of colonialism. One of the great failures of the contemporary imagination in attempting to reconcile with colonialism is in imagining that it always comes in the form of a conquering army or invading force. The colonists of the world are less commonly King Leopolds or Christopher Columbuses and more often Mumsies, Nannies, Sonnies and Girlies. They’re most likely—in the beginning, at least—to arrive with smiles and declaration of friendship, maybe even protection.
Girly and Sonny’s murder of Girlfriend is a fantastic exploration of this: Yes, Girlfriend was being sexually, financially, and emotionally exploitative of New Friend. Yes, New Friend needed out of a desperate situation. Yes, Girly and Sonny offer him some aid out of it. It’s just their solution (murder) is worse than the problem, and, once you’ve gotten into bed with them, you’re stuck, Mafia style. So goes a very familiar colonial narrative. Colonizers arrive; assess a situation; determine a way they can make it work for them with minimal resistance; and then the worming begins. Historically, we see much more colonialism on the model of John Carpenter’s The Thing than Starship Troopers.
Being a Brit, Comport was perhaps uniquely positioned to cast a critical eye on his own culture, at a time when the post-Suez British Empire was being forced to reckon with its declining position in the world. (Where things may fall apart for contemporary audiences is the script’s very 1960s idea that sexual liberation will inherently and necessarily lead to decolonization. What at the time seemed very radical is today, at best, charmingly retrograde, and at worst comes off as Vonnegut/Updike-esque “the dick shall set ye free” dudebro chauvinism).
In addition to subtlety, Comport and Francis have complexity on their side. Allegories can tend to fall apart the longer you look at them due to the difficulty of maintaining that one-to-one parallel. The closer you look at Girly, the more it reveals its depths and layers. It’s no coincidence that one of Sonny and Girly’s first victims is a homeless war veteran (Robert Swann, credited simply as “Soldier”). In a sequence that could function as a standalone short film, Girly befriends, taunts, sexually teases, humiliates, and murders Soldier, all while subtly evoking Churchillian propaganda. Power politics are often only good to those on top, and while they may offer the little guy—the worker, the soldier—a seat at the table, once his purpose has been served, you might as well bake their heads into gingerbread (the uniquely English fate that befalls a particular character).
From the vagueness of “The Game” (driving home the capricious nature of colonial rule) to costuming (it’s no coincidence that Sonny fetishizes Indigenous garb or that Girly is dressed in cowgirl attire for a pivotal scene) down to Oakley Court itself (whose deteriorating, antiquated interiors serve as a beautiful visual metaphor for the End of Empire), Girly is a master class in how to reconcile with colonial legacy in an intelligent, thoughtful, and emotionally honest way.
Speaking of which: No article on Girly is complete without a discussion of the film’s own complicated legacy. Confident that Girly was going to be a major crossover success, Freddie Francis filled out the ranks with some of the best stage and character actors then living in the UK. Vanessa Howard was cast with an eye towards making her the next bankable scream queen, with Girly serving as a breakout role. But that was not to be.
Girly debuted alongside the Judy Geeson/Michael Redgrave psychosexual thriller Goodbye, Gemini, which also featured a pair of murderous siblings, uncomfortable sexual dynamics, and a sublot involving trans sex workers for good measure. The two films sparked a moral panic in the UK, resulting in both being hastily pulled from circulation. While Gemini found second life on the VHS market as Twinsanity, Girly was more readily successful as a 42nd Street feature, cleaning up on the grindhouse and drive-in circuit and, inexplicably, touring domestic U.S. Air Force bases through the 70s and 80s.
Unfortunately, the powers that be weren’t exactly forthcoming about that success. Per friends and family, Howard didn’t even know Girly had come to the States—let alone been mildly successful—until well into the 1980s. Despite that sour taste, Girly remained one of the pieces of work Howard was most proud of, to the point she nearly boarded a plane while dying of COPD to try and record an audio commentary.
That’s a sad vignette which segues into our final bit of Girly lore—the breadth of information collected over the years by myself and other fans versus the tragically bare-bones DVD issued by Scorpion Releasing. Initially acquired by another, more boutique label circa 2005-‘06, a Girly DVD lingered in development hell for years, during which little apparent effort was made to beat a rapidly ticking clock. In 2005, Freddie Francis, Brian Comport, Vanessa Howard, Howard Trevor, and Pat Heywood were all still alive. Francis died in 2007, Howard in 2010. No apparent effort was made to reach Trevor or Heywood.
By the time Scorpion acquired the rights, Howard and Francis were dying. Apparently pressed for time, Scorpion’s eventual DVD contained a barely comprehensible radio spot and a perfunctory, slightly more intelligible interview with an aged Brian Comport. There’s no commentary, no featurettes, bupkes. As of 2025, efforts by myself and other afficionados of the film to get it picked up by another releasing house and given a proper reissue have fallen flat.
As of 2025, Girly is back out of print on physical media, though as of the writing of this article you can rent it for $2.99 on Prime Video. Especially given the current cultural conversation around colonialism, Girly is destination viewing, exploring what it is, what it means, and how we should reckon with it in a way few other pieces of media have been able to achieve. And, hey, if you’re not on board to explore anything deeper, that’s fine too. You’re in for a hell of a watch either way, metaphor be damned.
Categorized:Editorials
