“I call upon the powers of darkness. This is the voice of your servant. Cast your mantle of silence. Your curtain of darkness. Make this mortal disappear!”

A back-street jazz club. A gang of young(ish) men get kicked out (“You and the birds!” one is admonished by another. Probably best not to think about what they’ve been up to). “We’re running out of clubs!” notes another member, as they throw a bottle at the club’s sign and leg it. Their juvenile activities have been watched by another young man called Kip (Christopher Robbie). Kip seems like quite a mature young(ish) man with his side parting, duffel coat and scarf combo. But perhaps surprisingly, he decides to join them.

And doesn’t even seem put off when they waylay what at the time would have been called a “courting couple”. Dismissed by the couple as a “noisy mob” of “overgrown kids”, the gang find a brick, come back and show them how mature they actually are by delivering a potentially fatal beating to the male.

Running away (again) they spot an old(ish) man through a warehouse window. He’s counting money, so they decide to come back later when he’s gone, and take it.

The gang is run by a wide-eyed nutter called Mickey (John Malcolm). Eagle-eyed viewers of a certain age will spot a young John Challis (Boycie from Only Fools And Horses) in the group.

Back later they come, to the warehouse of Emilio Dinelli and Co, where they find a store of odd fairground novelties, creepy painted faces staring at them from the shadows.

“Blimey,” notes Mickey. “The chamber of ‘orrors!”

As luck wouldn’t have it, their not-particularly-thought-through plan immediately goes awry - and Dinelli (Warren Mitchell) returns early to his place of work, catching the intruders grey-handed (this being a black-and-white film, ithankyew). Mitchell is in-a the full Italian immigrant mode here, I tells-a you.

Rather than apologise and leave sheepishly, Mickey decides to up the ante and take Dinelli prisoner (“Whatsa-tha matta, boys… got nothing better to do than beat up an old man?”).

The gang, led by a clearly psychotic Mickey, proceed to trash the joint until they find a peculiar table football / pinball game hybrid called a Bowlerama.

“Better you not touch that!” Warns a seemingly spooked Dinelli, to no avail. “I warn you, I warn you… Leave it alone!”

But boys(?) will be boys, and they fire up the Bowlerama - which consists of a bunch of painted cartoon footballers moving backwards and forwards on rotating rods. Things get rough and one by one, the figures are destroyed.

As the last one breaks, they hear a disjointed scream.

“What have you done?” Cries a now beside-himself Dinelli.

But the gang haven’t stopped their shenanigans. They now find a cache of magicians tricks and force Dinelli to give them a performance. And he promises to give them something they “will never forget”, bringing out his “casket of invisibility”… resulting in payback for the gang and a remarkably odd final twist.

These spooky little support features were blink-and-you’ll-miss-it additions to the cinema screenings back in the day. People must have seen them utterly unprepared for their content, and in cases like this, probably came out of a showing of I Married A Werewolf or The Incredible Shrinking Man thinking “WTF was that peculiar thing before it?” Never to come across it, or hear any more about it again. So Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? really is a look back into a different world (I haven’t even mentioned the start of the film, which has Ottillie Patterson bizarrely sing the theme tune direct to camera).

It’s a spooky little monochrome gem, worth tracking down now we don’t have to turn up at our local cinema hoping it’ll be run again before the main feature.

And that final shot is a cracker.