In the eruptive, lurid Sitting Target, the inimitable Oliver Reed is an incretionary “animal in a cage” as Cockney convict Harry Lomart. He does push-ups from the pipes above his prison cell. Moreover, Harry is not an alpha male who will be cuckolded during his 15-year sentence. Edward Scaife’s ultrastylish cinematography partitions the reflections during an increasingly moribund conversation between Harry and his wife Pat (Jill St. John) like split-screen panels.

Reed finally unleashes his ire by coarsely punching through the glass when Pat capitulates that she is gravid with another man’s child and stipulates a divorce. It’s the ultimate disfigurement of the frangible male possessiveness. Pat won’t be on retainer until Harry’s parole and Reed’s penis envy is extremely jaundiced.

In solitary confinement, Harry is plagued by the echo chamber of Pat’s infidelity and Douglas Hickox doesn’t mollycoddle the turmoil within Reed. It is a shamefully relatable, neanderthal, quasi-misogynistic sentiment but Harry can only be sufficed through the erasure of the source of his pangs which, in this case, is Pat.

The escape sequence is posthaste, uncompromising and grungy with Harry and Birdy Williams (Ian McShane) deluging guards with urine buckets, climbing over barbwire with bare hands and pulverizing a dog with a brick. Animal cruelty to this degree would be frowned upon in a mainstream movie yet it is apropos for how unflappable Birdy and Harry are.

Plus, how can anyone lambaste a film in which Edward Woodward is the rigid inspector on the trail of the two criminals? McShane is refulgent as Reed’s sidekick. Reed isn’t a nonsensically virile automaton though. He balks at taking advantage of a female hostage when she is drawing a bath for him but he is genuinely sulking from heartache. I’m a sucker for scorching British gangster films and Sitting Target is an unsung gem in the blokes-with-pistols subgenre.

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Checkered production histories occasionally yield far more engrossing narratives than the films that surround them, Such is the case with 1981’s Venom which was originally a Tobe Hooper picture until “creative differences” splintered his directorial participation. Likewise, the on-set friction between Oliver Reed and Klaus Kinski was an example of art-imitating-life as the two madmen squabble frequently much to the dismay of director Piers Haggard.

As the chauffeur for the ransomed boy, Reed is already an ursine, sinister gawker before the youngster is absconded with. Reed, much like Kinski, exudes a caged furor that can only be ensilated for so long. Contrarily though, the typically fulminating Reed’s Dave is a demure, chattering vessel of angst before the kidnapping plot. Black mamba snakes might be the hook for the gorehounds but the union of Reed and Kinski is the prime nucleus.

With his angular lips clenched, Kinski is a svelte, debonair ringleader. The film is quite dawdling until Philip Hopkins (Lance Holcomb) mistakenly receives an erroneous package. Due to an astonishingly lumpen contrivance by screenwriter Robert Carrington, a toxicologist accidentally fluctuates a harmless reptile for a dangerously puissant predator at the municipal pet store.

From there, the picture is besieged by the unrelentingly bumbling of the criminals as they overreact to a warning phone call from the police. For asymmetrical inconsistency, Reed is suddenly a shotgun-wielding sociopath within minutes. The snake itself is almost ancillary to the mayhem from the abductors.

This isn’t Snakes in a U.K. Rowhouse. The scenario doesn’t escalate so much as fizzle out despite the peripheral involvement of a SWAT team, the maid’s virulent death and tarps to enshroud the kidnappers’ vantage point. Before their comeuppance, Haggard drowns the film in excursive boredom about antivenom and zoological facts.