“Millions loved him, could someone hate him enough to kill and kill again?”

It’s 1978, and across the UK, young people are busy sticking safety pins through their noses, cutting up bin bags to wear as dresses, and banging out tuneless three chord songs in their parents’ garages.

Unfortunately no-one bothered to tell Nick Cooper (Jack Jones), who is heading this way from the US with designs on re-starting his easy listening pop music career. Nick’s got some banging tunes to serenade the youth of 1978 with, and there’s no possible way he can fail. His agent Webster (David Doyle) has set him up in a sprawling haunted house being run by a clearly nuts-from-the-word-go married couple (Sheila Keith and Bill Owen), Harry, a strangely camp, beany hat-wearing sound technician with a nice line in threatening women, and a cheap-looking sub-James Bond 70s Lotus which Cooper will soon find is not the ideal vehicle in which to attempt topless sex with Pamela Stephenson.

Nick gets stuck in with the crooning, but every night his sleep is interrupted by peculiar sounds outside his bedroom door, mainly of the “disembodied children’s voices crying” type. He starts by shrugging this off – after all, he’s got Webster’s secretary Linda (Pamela Stephenson) to woo.

But we know that all is not as it may seem. For one thing, in the opening scenes of the film we saw Nick’s ex-wife Gail get brutally attacked by a shrieking assailant in a rubber mask, bits of poor Gail flying off in all directions as she’s pummelled with a nasty-looking curved blade.

The body is left to fester in Nick’s London apartment (for ‘twas there where the attack took place), quickly gathering interest from a variety of vermin.

After a few close calls where the body is almost discovered but then isn’t (cue lots of “that’s an odd smell” acting), it is discovered by Nick’s sound technician, who too gets brutally slain for his trouble. But not until actor Peter Turner has given us a masterclass in how to understatedly discover a rotting corpse.

The meandering tale continues with the occasional shock reveal of another festering body outside Nick’s bedroom door and much attempt at red herring-ery. Someone is clearly trying to drive Nick mad…

Is it Webster, who doesn’t seem to like his client much at all, is revealed to enjoy dressing up in women’s clothes and was Linda’s previous boyfriend?

Is it Harry, who is just a bit too infatuated with Nick? (No, he’s dead)

Is it Linda, who keeps disappearing just when Nick looks like he’ll get his end away?

Is it the ghost of Gail? (No, that doesn’t make any sense at all)

Is it the nurse in the hospital Nick ends up at, who has a fantastic line in bedside care? (“You went nuts”)

Is it House Of Whipcord star Penny Irving, who clearly just happened to be in the area on that day of filming, as her appearance is so utterly pointless as to render it the most likely for a surprise reveal at the end? (Spoiler alert – it doesn’t)

No, it’s Mr and Mrs B, the housekeepers, of course – who much like Jack Nicholson in the Shining are clearly batshit crazy from their first appearance.

Things finally get to Nick and he wakes up in hospital after five days asleep (“You went nuts”). Feeling pretty much cured, thank you very much, he returns home to Mr and Mrs B just in time for a rushed big reveal of just why he and the people around him have been the target of all these gory shenanigans (clue – it has something to do with his musical career).

Webster walks in after the denouement to find an incredulous Nick pointing at the tragic scene and quipping “got a pill for that?!” before wandering out to tell a traumatised Linda, who is being wheeled into an ambulance, that she’s still got a job.

He and Webster then share a joke and in an odd “twist”, Nick looks up at a bedroom window to see Gail smiling down on him. Given the previous 90 minutes has worked very hard to ensure we are all very aware this is an earth-bound psycho slasher, this is an odd ending – is Nick still “nuts”, or is Gail a ghost now?

Ah, who cares.

The Comeback works when it works – the deaths are gory and the shocks are well done. It has been noted that director Pete Walker may not have had his tongue far out of his cheek when he made it, although it looks like Jack Jones didn’t get the memo. The inclusion of the British-made Lotus car acts as an interesting reflection on the film itself. On the surface, it looks okay but on closer inspection it’s a bit odd, it’s not fit for purpose sex-wise, there are better versions available, and one of the pop-up lights doesn’t work properly.

I think that says it all.