You won't be disappointed!

Too much of everything

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The Carry On troupe takes on the medical profession in Carry On Again Doctor. Of course Carry On is exactly what at least one doctor is doing.In fact Jim Dale is the bane of the existence of Doctors Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey who run a clinic in London. The Dickensian named Dale as Dr. Nookey has little trouble getting plenty of that at the clinic and he keeps Williams and Hawtrey constantly agitated.But an accidental and I do mean accidental indiscretion with a female patient brings Dale an assignment to a south seas island clinic run by the cheerfully hedonistic Sid James. James has invented a weight loss remedy and the shapely shape of some of the south sea native female population is proof it works. Funny how everyone seems interested in only seeing how it works on women.Lots of typical Carry On bawdy humor in Carry On Again Doctor. I do so love seeing Hawtrey in drag on an industrial espionage mission so to speak.

Too often left struggling by the wily old "Carry On.." pros in previous outings,Mr Dale gets his revenge in "Carry on again doctor" where his performance glues the movie together. Even such giants as Mr Williams and Mr James are forced to take a back seat as he howls,pratfalls and gags his way into pre - eminence. It is all the more astonishing because in none of his previous appearances did he seem to me to possess any comic ability whatsoever. At the root of it all is the fairly serious tale of a wonder slimming drug that has the slightly inconvenient side - effect of changing its users' sex. Miss Barbara Windsor may make an unlikely male but Mr Hawtrey is almost "Tootsie" - like in ladies clothes. Mr Williams mostly maintains his posh accent and is all the better for it.He conveys the arrogance and the closed mind of the popinjay consultant to the rich,bored women who flock to his clinic in the hope of a miracle weight loss. Mr Dale and Mr James excel in the Conradian sub - plot about two exiled doctors who redeem themselves. Not one of the best - known of the canon,"Carry on again doctor" is nonetheless pleasingly silly and offers a possibly unique opportunity to see Mr Jim Dale at the top of his game.

I love a vast majority of the Carry On films such as Screaming, Cleo and Up the Khyber, and this entry is no exception. Sidney James is underused but still has fun as Gladstone Screwer, admittedly an odd name,and the film does feel a little short but Carry on Again Doctor is still very funny and entertaining. Jim Dale does an above decent job taking centre stage as Doctor Nookey, with excellent comic timing. Kenneth Williams is great as always, and Charles Hawtrey has one of his better outings as Dr Stoppidge, allowing to hiss vehemently and bitterly. The locations of the Bautific Islands are very nice, and the script is filled with one liners that are witty and hilarious. Plus the slapstick finale is genuinely funny, quite possibly one of the funnier finales in the franchise. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Carry on Again Doctor often gets neglected as an inferior re-run of Doctor, and this does the film an injustice. Gladstone Screwer is one of Sid James' best roles, as he plays a genuine oddity - a man who grew up in isolation on a tropical island and who pursues women not for their beauty or youth but whether they conform to the large tribal buxomness he is accustomed to. He is shocked when Jim Dale's Dr Nookey says he wants a slim girl. There is a wonderful moment where Screwer first sees Hattie Jaques' Matron and gives her a great big whack on the backside. "Do you mind?!" she demands, only to have him brazenly announce "As a matter of fact, I don't." Sid as a dirty old chubby-chaser is more satisfying casting than the usual Sid as pursuer of young women.The film is a satire on slimming crazes and the final 5 minutes are truly perverse. Nookey is making a fortune out of a slimming cure which Gladstone manufactures in and exports from the tropics. Gladstone demands a partnership (as does Kenneth Williams' Dr Carver, who knows something fishy is going on) and, when Gladstone is cheated, he substitutes another serum for the slimming one. It gives all of Nookey's patients a sex-change! Amongst the victims is Barabra Windsor, and the film ends with her marriage to Nookie, who complains as they go on their honeymoon that she hasn't shaved that morning. In the crowd, we spot Charles Hawtrey looking very knowing and pleased with himself as Dr Stoppage, and we realise that he has taken the serum himself and so is now a woman! The clinic is also revealed to be now owned by all of the interested parties.In a way, this ending shows us an extraordinary thing. Gladstone Screwer is a gone-native colonial who sends back to England a very un-Victorian transformative potential which the kind of medical colony he works in was presumably meant to eradicate abroad - the film claims that polymorphous perversity is an unexpected by-product of colonial Capitalism. The film sees, in a Visionary way, how Puritan Capitalism contained the seeds of its own undoing. Yes, products were imported from abroad which make the lucky few a lot of money, but in the meantime everyone wants their slice of the pie (aristocrats & parvenus, old money & new mix as both Gladstone and Carver end as partners in the clinic with Nookey and Joan Sims' Lady Moore). What is more, old ideals of masculinity and femininity have been forever eroded. That final shot, of a man and a woman who are now two men riding away and being waved at by men and women who themselves have no fixed gender is a prophecy we now see being fulfilled around us all of the while.In a couple of hundred years time, these strange, surreal and perverse films will tell people more about how our 20th Century society worked than many a so-called "serious" classic.