Murder Among Friends review – Detective diva Joan Collins shines in trashy whodunnit | Video

Here is a mass-murdering mystery that aims to provide people with a narrow minded sense of Pride month’s trashy stories with cheap and cheerful, hilariously bad, diva-centric exercise. Let’s be clear: this is a little less well-crafted, with a script as shonky as a flatpack gatefold table, and the same direction by collaborators Trent Garrett and Jacob Young. (Apparently it takes two people to make something inappropriate.) But its flaws somehow make it endearing, mostly because it creates a star. Joan Collinsshe looks so good at any age she’s fit for a bus.

Collins plays Francesca Carlyle, a TV personality who wears rhinestones and is always softer than everyone else. He rents his house to a group of old friends who gather for a European vacation in an unknown country; The middle-aged gaggle, who should have known each other since university, is made up of Americans like the bullish Josh (Young), his fake wife, Kat (Nadia Bjorlin), and the modestly dressed Sonia (India Thai). There are Brits like Sonia’s husband Devin (Simon Cotton), and the new Sydney (Toby-Alexander Smith) who just married the group’s best friend, clearly speaking Louisa (Hana Vagnerová). One of the group is killed on the first night after a stunt, when two of the above people cross each other on the ladder, watched by a third, and hot tubs are installed.

Francesca is called to solve the murder, of course, although in the end her well-known skill of self-restraint did not meet the point because a member of the group planted hidden cameras that recorded everything. Similarly defying convention, motives are revealed at the last minute along with others, which undermines the whole point of a good murder mystery; clues must be present throughout so that the viewer can try to figure out whodunnit alongside the detective. One gets the feeling that no one involved here cares about this and just wants to make something bad happen and hang out with Collins – and who can blame them on that last point.