Since we’ve last seen Mick Travis (Mal­colm McDow­ell) in O Lucky Man! (read The Dork Report review), he’s moved to Amer­ica and redis­cov­ered his lust for power and prof­i­teer­ing. Now a mem­ber of the media (with no less than Luke Sky­walker — Mark Ham­mill — on his crew), he has returned to his home­land on a mis­sion to expose cor­rup­tion at Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal. On the eve of a visit from Her Royal High­ness the Queen, known to the effi­cient staff as the time-saving acronym H.R.H., the Hos­pi­tal board risks all to facil­i­tate Dr. Millar’s (Gra­ham Crow­der) insane med­ical exper­i­ments. His atroc­i­ties are on a par with Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, but with spe­cial effects and cam­er­a­work straight out of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead.

Mal­colm McDow­ell spritzes the Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal morgue with a lit­tle Febreeze

This vision of 1982 British soci­ety is crip­pled on all sides. The unions have pur­sued their noble aims of work­ers’ rights to an absurd degree to which vir­tu­ally all work has come to a halt in favor of per­pet­ual sand­wich breaks. The hip­pies and activists are too enraged and vio­lent to lend any cre­dence to their causes of peace and fair­ness. Offi­cious red-tape-obsessed suits are barely in con­trol, mak­ing insin­cere com­pro­mises just to get through the day. The media fails at their job because they’re too wasted on drugs to even oper­ate their equip­ment. And most frus­trat­ing to all, none of the phones work.

Mark Ham­mill gets the munchies

So the final entry in direc­tor Lind­say Anderson’s “Mick Travis” tril­ogy is obvi­ously yet another satire of British soci­ety, this time with a hos­pi­tal serv­ing as its metaphor­i­cal micro­cosm. It sails a bit too far over the top for my tastes, espe­cially in com­par­i­son with the excel­lent If… (read The Dork Report review), which is so much more effec­tive for spend­ing most of its run­ning time in strict real­ism before spi­ral­ing off into anar­chic fantasy.

Must read: every­thing you could pos­si­bly want to know about Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal, from MalcolmMcDowell.net

Offi­cial movie site: www.lindsayanderson.com/britannia_hospital.html

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.