Alex da Silva Teenager John Moulder Brown (Mike) gets an attendant's job at a swimming pool and public baths. His co-worker is Jane Asher (Susan) who shows him the ropes which includes performing extra duties as sexual favours for customers. Brown isn't interested in this side of the job but has no choice when pornographic actress Diana Dors shows up! They have a memorable and funny scene together at the baths. Dors also pops up in a porno film at the cinema when Brown sneaks in after following Asher and her fiancé Christopher Sandford (Chris) who go to watch it. What Brown does next is pretty daring! Anyway, this teenager becomes obsessed with his co-worker and we all know that obsession never ends well… It's a film set in a peculiar world – that of the sleazy public bathrooms – that portrays a proportion of the sleaziness that must have actually taken place there. So, it's good for that and we do get some peculiar characters. Karl Michael Vogler's swimming teacher will creep you out as he takes his swimming class of young girls. Whilst I could relate to a teenage boy lusting after a woman older than himself, I couldn't relate to Brown's actions. The cinema scene – no way, buddie – he wouldn't have the confidence. It's completely unrealistic and seems more like the director's fantasy. However, it is at this point that you realize Jane Asher is a complete bitch. So, we have two flawed main characters which is OK but also annoying at times. And the ending – well, it's a downbeat film.

duerden60 Dear God this was/is dreadful! It's difficult to find a single positive thing to say about it, Okay, Jane Asher is lovely to look at, I agree with the chap called Ionizing, it needs more than that. John M.Brown behaves less like a fifteen year old youth and more like a simpering twelve year old girl. The 'acting' reminded me of a bunch of school children having been told to improvise the dialogue, it was that stilted. Take a look at the scene where the youth is being interviewed for the job by the manager of the baths. The chap looked like seedy escapee from the local lock up, and acted as though he had found himself in the office by accident. The schoolteacher character, he'd have been arrested for his behaviour in no time. The baths themselves appeared to be run as a second class brothel for all the local weirdos. I was persuaded to purchase this mess because of glowing write-ups from people who I assume had a share in the profits. I'd like my money back please! Avoid this like the plague!

BJJManchester For many years a somewhat obscure and unseen semi-avant garde melodrama,DEEP END has had a recent revival in digitally restored fashion in cinema,DVD and television,and has an undercurrent of strangeness running through it's entire oeuvre.Set in post-swinging 60's London,but an American/West German co-production directed by Polish-born Jerzy Skolimowski mostly filmed in Germany,with an eclectic cast and musical score,a dubious story and related characters.This overall oddness does not necessarily equate to greatness,but DEEP END still nevertheless manages to hold the attention throughout.A decidedly gauche,awkward 15 year old youth,Mike (John Moulder-Brown) starts his first job at a grimy,dilapidated London municipal bathhouse,and falls in love with a beautiful but uninhibited female co-worker,Susan (Jane Asher),a few years older than him.Susan is apparently engaged but uses and exploits other males for her own pleasure,including the hapless Mike himself.The attraction gradually seems to become more mutual,if dangerous.Coming at the end of the optimistic,happy-go-lucky 60's and populated with rather unlikable characters,DEEP END is packed with so much symbolism as to be in peril from drowning in it.The setting of the seedy,crumbling bathhouse is an obvious metaphor for being literally thrown into the deep rather than shallow end of life,with the related problems,frustrations and behaviour on show signifying this.For a while,DEEP END comes across as a familiar but wispily charming essay on the pains of growing up,with an amusing cameo from Diana Dors (who became a better actress as she got into early middle-age),holding Mike to her bosom while mumbling platitudes about football,though it's not long before it all becomes progressively darker,with dubious behaviour from a male swimming instructor (who Susan has a dalliance with) towards young female students,and an increasingly unhealthy relationship between Mike,so wet behind the ears as to be soaking,and the voluptuous Susan.Moulder-Brown is fine as the hopelessly naive adolescent,though as with many teens his character's behaviour and traits often becomes very irritating,while Ms Asher is convincing as his and other males object of desire,outrageously sexy and knowing it,teasing and cajoling as many males as she can muster,mostly for her own entertainment and amusement in the skimpiest clothing imaginable.With all this symbolism (such as Mike stealing a cardboard life size poster of Susan from London's underground) and semi-Freudian obsession,DEEP END has little in the way of plot,and much of the cast are not British but mainland European (mainly German).This sometimes gets in the way of authenticity for the more pessimistic mood of late 60's/early 70's London (not surprising as much of the film was apparently filmed in Munich),and Skolimowski often seems not to have an ear for the English language,with some scenes allowed to ramble with somewhat stilted dubbed and non-dubbed dialogue.There is much use of hand-held camera and other scenes which have an improvised feel,which is not necessarily a bad thing as said moments have a more spontaneous,humorous and natural feel to them.Such locations as the bathhouse and Soho (which features a funny cameo from Burt Kwouk) add to a sense of decline and seediness while observing the dubious behaviour of the main and secondary characters involved,which inevitably leads to the climax in the swimming pool,with the symbolism at it's height as it being empty and drained of water,but there is a twist in store.....With it's dreary,seedy setting and unsympathetic characters,DEEP END could have been utterly disposable,yet it's very style deem it oddly compulsive and curiously watchable,with it's best moments reserved for it's finale with haunting and extraordinary imagery that linger in the mind long afterwards,confirming it's reputation of being a bizarre,rediscovered cult classic.RATING:7 out of 10.

Kenneth Anderson I'm all for films with unique, personal perspectives of the seamier side of life, but I'm baffled at reviews that describe "Deep End" as a coming-of-age story. Only if the boy coming of age is Norman Bates. This look at the disturbingly creepy fascination a 15 year-old bathhouse worker (John Moulder-Brown) develops for his hardened but lovely co-worker (Jane Asher), "Deep End" struck me more like "Taxi Driver: The Teen Years." I haven't read much that details the film as a psycho-sexual drama that depicts the gradual unraveling of an already damaged teen's psyche. Sort of a non-sensationalistic / art house "Who Killed Teddy Bear." What I have read are baffling accounts as to how the film so accurately captures male teen sexual awakening. Yikes! I don't care how many hormones are raging, the young man at the center of the film is not just your average adolescent with an obsessive crush on an older co-worker. He's nothing short of batty from the first frame. He's exceedingly socially retarded and hasn't the coping skills of a four year old. What I think is supposed to be the awkward first steps of sexual attraction are so downright odd that he comes off every bit like a sexual predator in training.I simply found it impossible to relate to the played-for-laughs creepy antics of the lead. He's not love struck, he's dangerous.Adding further to the intentionally distasteful vibe of the film is the perhaps unintentionally pervasive air of misogyny that hangs over the entire film. I know we're supposed to be seeing the world through this boy's eyes, but the women in the film are portrayed unvaryingly as: whores, teases, users, terrifying, or grotesques. I think the skill of the director and the natural performances he has extracted from his cast has created an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation here. "Deep End" is decidedly accomplished in creating a seamy view of London akin to what Scorsese would do later in "Taxi Driver", but however well- observed, no one should take this look at a budding sexual psychotic as an image of puberty run wild. Not a love story and not a story about sex. It's a horror film.