Reviews & Articles
Presented here are some of the reviews, features, interviews and other articles I've penned on British horror over the years, reprinted from various fanzines, magazines and other sources.
CONTENTS:
'EALING ZOMEDY' - 1994 report from the set of I ZOMBIE: THE CHRONICLES OF PAIN (originally published in 'Samhain' #44)
'HOUSE OF WHIPCORD/FRIGHTMARE' - 1996 video review (originally published in 'Samhain' #57)
'GARDENER'S QUESTION TIME' - 1999 interview with GREEN FINGERS director Paul Cotgrove (originally published in 'Shivers' #71)
'THE LORELEI' - 1990 review of BBC2 t.v. broadcast (originally published in 'Samhain' #21)
'THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN/DRACULA/THE MUMMY' - 1997 video review (originally published in 'Samhain' #62)
'THE PAIN MAKER' - 1998 interview with Andrew Parkinson, director of I ZOMBIE: THE CHRONICLES OF PAIN (originally published in 'Samhain' #67)
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER - 2003 film review (originally published at www.thespinningimage.co.uk)
THE FALL OF THE LOUSE OF USHER - 2003 film review (originally published at www.thespinningimage.co.uk)
SCARRED - 2005 interview with the director Steve Looker (originally published at www.thespinningimage.co.uk)
REPULSION - spoken introduction to a screening of Roman Polanski's film, for Metro Cinema, Derby, 2004
HOW TO BUY...BRITISH HORROR SOUNDTRACKS - previously unpublished. Originally written for 'Revealed' magazine, 2005
COVER GIRL KILLER - 2002 film review (originally published at www.hysteria-lives.co.uk)
THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN: THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN - prepared notes for a presentation staged at Metro Cinema, Derby, July 2005
SEX EXPRESS - 2002 film review (originally published at www.hysteria-lives.co.uk)THE COMEBACK - 2003 film review (originally published at www.hysteria-lives.co.uk)
Samhain's Darrell Buxton spends a lost weekend with the cast and crew of the new British horror movie CHRONICLES OF PAIN
While enduring the latest in a long line of hefty make-up sessions, the leading player of CHRONICLES OF PAIN, Giles Aspen, ruefully comments "they told me it would take about six months. That was in February last year…" CHRONICLES OF PAIN (formerly known as I ZOMBIE) is a low-budget British production, high on gore, but, the makers stress, with equal time given over to a more challenging, sombre study of isolation and enforced loneliness. The production company, Lost Films, has been formed by a group of TV and theatre industry friends, some local, others from various locations in the North, now all congregated in and around the Ealing area of London. Director Andrew Parkinson and sound technician Tudor Davies both work for the BBC, as do other members of the team, but away from the studios at TV Centre they have previously collaborated on a number of short films infused with a bleak, melancholy quality; CHRONICLES OF PAIN, their first feature length production, is an attempt to carry that same sense of alienation and longing over into a recognisable genre item. I was invited by unit publicist Christopher Ball (Chris also counting lighting and stills-taking amongst his duties) to spend a weekend with the cast and crew, during which period several of the film's major special effects shots were planned.
The story traces the gradual descent/decay of its lead character Mark (Giles Aspen), a research biologist who is infected by a flesh-mutating virus following a woodland attack by a hideous walking corpse; the scenes I was to witness are placed late in the script and detail a) Mark's makeshift efforts to repair his snapped right leg by bolting a metal rod to the damaged limb, and b) a fantasy excerpt where the rotting scientist glimpses his reflection in a mirror, his face covered with riveted metal plates. Before the shooting of these particularly intense sequences, we had trekked out to Hillcrest Park, a nearby children's playground, to film a brief dialogue interlude between Mark's girlfriend Sarah (Ellen Softley) and David (Dean Sipling). Local mums were persuaded to temporarily remove their offspring from the swings and climbing frames, and fortunately the crew's endeavours passed off undisturbed - I gathered that previous efforts to film on various London locations had been hampered by interference from petty officialdom, and the curse of the 'jobsworths' was uppermost on everybody's mind. Though authoritative and in control, director Parkinson is able to share in the on-set banter, and my first indication of the relaxed, jokey atmosphere on the shoot came when he suggested altering Dean's nostalgic line about the child's swing "I haven't been on one of these for ages" to "fuck knows, I haven't been on one of these since I was arrested for child molestation"!
Before returning to the indoor set, based at the townhouse shared by Tudor, actress girlfriend Mia, and Andrew, I was called upon to make my 'acting debut' as an extra departing the tube station at North Ealing during an establishing shot. While we had been toiling outdoors, Giles was undergoing an arduous make-up application for the big effects scene which took an entire evening to complete. His third-stage make-up, comprising facial and neck wounds and bruising, was the work of 19-year-old Paul Hyett, a likeable and talented young artist who has been involved in the prosthetics field since his mid-teens. Paul explained that he had been inspired to take up FX by viewing such classics as DAWN OF THE DEAD and THE THING, and he rates Rob Bottin as the finest exponent of make-up in modern cinema. Between camera set-ups I was able to view rough-cuts of several key scenes filmed during preceding months. Among the highlights were the opening zombie attack described earlier, a living dead arm emerging from the sea, and a startling moment in which Mark, attempting to feast on a semi-conscious victim, smashes a bottle over the slowly-rousing figure's head. Another sequence, where Mark snacks on the corpse of a Japanese girl, had been completed in late autumn, and the material shot during my visit was to immediately follow on from this; Giles' leg having splintered through decay, he crawls agonizingly from the room, hauling himself across a corridor in search of a temporary crutch with which to fix his unusable limb. Onlooking crew members dubbed the character 'Wormboy' as Giles rehearsed, slithering slug-like across the carpeting. "We filmed a normal scene this afternoon" announced Dean, adopting a cod-Lugosi accent to continue "now, we're shooting an abnormal scene…"
Giles took the waiting between takes in his stride; sitting beneath the glaring studio lights in full zombie make-up, he inquired "am I brown yet?", later musing on this arcane use of his spare time, "what did you do this weekend? I sat in a corner covered in food colouring and syrup!". The remainder of the evening was taken up by the filming of a particularly elaborate SPFX sequence, consisting of Giles tearing open his jeans with a Stanley knife to expose his damaged shin, into which he then brutally power drills bolt holes before riveting a metal bar to the limb to effect a repair job. The near-tangible air of tension hanging over the set was deftly punctured by the crew competing with one another to deliver the best impersonation of boxer Chris Eubank (whose title fight played on t.v. in the background), but gravity and seriousness returned as the big scene, planned in a single, nerve-wracking take, approached. Fortunately, it all worked out wonderfully - we all resisted the temptation to gasp with astonishment as an unexpected bonus chunk of latex flesh flew from the rotating drill-bit in horrifically realistic fashion - and the completed scene should provide one of CHRONICLES' major gore highpoints.
Proposed location shooting at Shepherd's Bush, on what was tantalizingly described to me as the 'King Of Pain' episode, unfortunately had to be abandoned during the following day's schedule due to a series of logistical problems extending the time Andrew had allotted to an earlier scene's completion. Eventually, the full day had to be devoted to the preparation and filming of what the director called "our TETSUO-influenced scene"; Giles, in grotesque fourth-stage state of decomposition, clambering out of bed and catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror to find steel castings bolted to his face (as Tudor commented, "when he says 'ooh me plates', he isn't talking in Cockney rhyming slang!"). The hallucinatory events continue with our hero grasping in desperation for photographs of his lover from an adjacent bedside cabinet, only for the pictures to erupt into flames whilst in his grip. Cinematographer Rob suggested that a one-take shot might be the most effective, providing that some means of igniting the photos during the scene could be implemented; despite several experiments, including dousing the pictures in aftershave, the single-take idea proved unworkable and the scene will now be pieced together using cutaways. This segment of the movie climaxes with a high, wide-angle shot of Mark, standing alone in the middle of the room, looking desolate and totally lost, emphasizing the feeling of isolation which the makers regard as central to the film's theme.
Andrew hopes to go into post-production on CHRONICLES OF PAIN by the summer, and aims to market the completed film via video, as well as preparing prints for occasional theatrical screenings. From the evidence I've witnessed, this thoroughly independent production will be well worth keeping an eye on. The makers are confident, gifted, and ambitious enough to produce something special here, though they are certainly level-headed and capable of playing down their achievements; leafing through an issue of Samhain lying around on the set, Tudor, perhaps anticipating a future headline, calls out "I can see it now - The English Horror Industry Returns!". "Why?" responds Giles, "are Hammer making a new film?…"
HOUSE OF WHIPCORD (1974)/ FRIGHTMARE (1974)
(this review originally appeared in 'Samhain' #57, July 1996)
Let's talk about icons. The history of Brit-shock has produced precious few - there's Christopher Lee's gaunt, imposing Dracula, of course, and that cultured masochist Pinhead, I suppose. Representing the distaff side, and peculiarly having surfaced during an age of Chelsea girls and dollybird starlets, one can only call to mind Sheila Keith, the domineering, heartless, matriarchal rock at the core of Pete Walker's malevolent, spiteful vision of suburban England. Undeservedly buried since their initial escape on to a fading, disinterested cinema circuit over twenty years ago, FRIGHTMARE and HOUSE OF WHIPCORD have been granted a welcome reprieve under the Redemption banner. Anyone expecting a home-grown equivalent to Redemption's staple glamorous Euro-vamp fare, however, is in for a very grim surprise - this brace of 1974 releases achieve the ultimate realisation of Walker's image of Britain as a dismal, dingy corner of the world, ruled by the senile and out-of-touch, a place where youth and free expression is to be stamped on. Sheila Keith's grasp of, and contribution to, this acutely accurate perspective is central to the success of the films, and there's little irony present in that the strident, insane, grey-haired harridans she seared into the celluloid bear considerable resemblance to our then-impending Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
Scripter on both WHIPCORD and FRIGHTMARE was Mr.'Doing Rude Things' himself, David McGillivray - McGillivray always takes great delight in quoting a contemporary review which described the former as a "feeble fladge fantasy"; he also claims that the sole positive notice the picture scored in the U.K. can be attributed to a well-known movie critic whose own behind-closed-doors peccadilloes were reflected in the subject matter! Since I'm about to rave over HOUSE OF WHIPCORD too, make what you will of that… Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of WHIPCORD is simply that it is British, considering its straightforward, matter-of-fact brutality and scandalous confrontational candour. It's a psychotic variant on the women-in-prison theme, a favourite with exploitation producers for decades, but Walker avoids the usual formula preamble whereby innocent girls become embroiled in some minor crime and wind up being hosed down behind bars - he side-steps the justice system altogether and sets the action in a privately-run institution, overseen by a barking mad prison governess and a doddery old magistrate, who have a series of pretty young 'offenders' kidnapped in order to put them on trial for such heinous misdemeanours as applying lipstick and being seen in public wearing mini-skirts. Keith here plays their loyal employee, a cruel warder amusingly named 'Walker', and the victims (including cute 'Are You Being Served?' regular Penny Irving) are frequently tortured and flogged before eventually encountering the hangman's noose. Basic, uncompromising, damn near unwatchable at times, and guaranteed to provoke a response from any viewer regardless of their philosophy or beliefs, WHIPCORD is an unforgettably bleak, bitter outrage.
Sheila commands centre-stage for FRIGHTMARE, an equally distressing and discomforting item. If WHIPCORD accidentally anticipated Thatcherism, this follow-up inadvertently predicts the shambles of our current 'care in the community' programme, and is a tad more subtle in its authority-bashing. Oops, I've just used the word 'subtle' in a piece about a deranged cannibal who opens human skulls using a Black & Decker power tool. Keith is magnificent as Dorothy Yates, the farm-dwelling tarot reader who lures potential lunch out to her remote smallholding via discreetly-placed ads in 'Time Out', and McGillivray's narrative appropriates a tabloid-worthy sensationalism, with Mrs. Yates' devoted husband and concerned daughter keeping her in fresh flesh following her premature discharge from the rubber room. A sub-plot relating the delinquent activities of a second, younger child ties in with all the meat-munching by the gruesome climax, and Walker and McGillivray take enormous glee in messily bumping off Hampstead sophisticates and liberal psychiatrists by the score. Two absolutely essential purchases. Just don't expect to enjoy them.
Forthcoming horror film short, GREEN FINGERS, marks the return of Hammer legend Ingrid Pitt to British cinema screens after too long an absence. 'Shivers' spoke to the film's director, Paul Cotgrove
Shivers: You based GREEN FINGERS, I believe, on a short story which you encountered as a boy.
Paul Cotgrove: When I was a lad, early 1970s, I was always reading the Fontana books of horror stories, I suppose like everyone at the time, and there was a particular story, "Green Fingers" by R.C.Cook, which stuck with me over the years. I've never been able to forget it, it's always stayed vividly in my mind, and I always thought it would make a good short film - though I never dreamed I would film it! Originally, I decided to write a script, just as an exercise, last year, and thought I'd try to adapt "Green Fingers", so I hunted down the Fontana book, re-read it, and everything developed from there.
S: On re-acquainting yourself with the story, still it still have the same spark for you?
PC: Yeah - it hadn't changed at all, it was still wonderful, and there were even a few elements I'd forgotten.
S: How faithful do you feel you've been in adapting it?
PC: I learnt one very important lesson, that it's almost impossible to totally faithfully adapt a short story - when you break it down, this one's set over a period of months, so I had to take parts out, which I didn't want to! I feel I did a reasonably faithful version - problem was, I wanted Ingrid Pitt to play the main role, Mrs.Bowen, and when Ingrid read the script she wasn't happy with certain elements. For instance, a main part of the story concerns a dead rabbit which has been buried, and something weird which grows out of the ground…Ingrid was adamant that we should use a black cat instead. I would've liked to have kept the rabbit…but eventually changed it for Ingrid's idea, the cat, which admittedly does work very well.
S: It's encouraging to see that you've gone for 'star' names when casting, or at least people whom genre fans will recognise - Ingrid, Janina Faye - whereas most filmmakers working on your kind of budget might have favoured merely utilising friends and relatives.
PC: Being a film fanatic, while writing the script I couldn't help but visualize actors I'd seen in films playing the parts. After that, I couldn't even think about using unknowns, and I began to think "well, there's no harm in asking"…I was already a good friend of Ingrid's, and as soon as she knew I was working on a script, she said "I'll be in your film, darling!", which was great! When I pitched the idea for the story to my producer, I said Ingrid would play the main lead, and once she was in place it was just a matter of casting the other two players. I always thought of using Janina Faye, who I met initially at the Festival Of Fantastic Films in Manchester - I'd corresponded with her a little, sent her some of her films on video which she hadn't seen before - I thought she'd be ideal for my 'nurse' character, I wrote to her, and within days she rang to say she'd love to do the film. Originally, for the part of the gardener I wanted to use Freddie Jones; looking back on it now, I really don't know how I had the front to approach him! Freddie was very kind about the whole thing, he said he would have loved to have done it but he was going to be working elsewhere while we were filming. He told me that his son is in the same position as I am, Freddie Jones' son is making short films or something, so he did sympathise with me. While talking to Ingrid, however, she mentioned Robin Parkinson, who's known mainly from television - probably the last thing he did was 'Allo Allo' - and as I'm a bit of a classic t.v. buff too, Robin is one of those faces I've grown up with. Again, I contacted him, and within a day he phoned me to say he couldn't wait to start!
S: Can you tell us something about your background, and your work with the British Film Council?
PC: Well, for one, it's actually The British Council - I don't think 'The British Film Council' exists any longer. I work for the Films And Television department, a wing of the Arts division - the Arts division basically promotes British artists, and their work, around the world, especially artists who may be very talented but are struggling to get their work seen. I run a film library of about 6000 16mm prints, which go out to mini film festivals around the world. I also run a preview theatre, for first-time filmmakers who can't afford to go to the big West End preview facilities - they can come here, I'll screen their films, they can invite members of their crew, producers, whatever, along to see their work in comfortable surroundings. My background is mainly working in film laboratories, editing and negative cutting - many first-time filmmakers ring me asking for advice, "where can I get this done, who do I go to?", so through my own contacts from other jobs I'm able to point them in the right direction.
S: Has it been advantageous, being in your particular line of work, while making GREEN FINGERS? Or have the two things, your job and your own movie, not really interlocked?
PC: Of course they've interlocked slightly - it's been helpful working for the British Council, I've got a preview theatre at my disposal and obviously there are contacts through work that I've been able to use. But basically I've made the film entirely off my own back, it's all my own personal contacts that I've used - it's ironic that despite working at the British Council, they've not really been able to help me directly so far.
S: You've had some good news relating to the film's score in recent weeks, involving another old Hammer favourite.
PC: I'm hoping it will be good news! Originally, Nina Humphreys, who has just done the music for the BBC series 'The Lakes', got to hear about GREEN FINGERS through my producer Harry Rushton, and was very keen to get involved - we were in the process of meeting up to discuss it, but in the meantime she got another big assignment from the BBC. So I suggested to Harry that we try Hammer composer James Bernard - I'd met James before, and was sure he'd at least listen to me if I approached him - who dares wins! Don Fearney, the Hammer archivist who coincidentally was also the costume designer on GREEN FINGERS, put me in touch with Bernard - James came to the British Council and I screened him the cutting copy of the film, which he absolutely adored, and he's since accepted the offer to do the music.
S: You must be delighted about that!
PC: God, yeah - first time James phoned me up to talk about the film, I was almost lost for words. I might have considered suggesting his name to Harry right from the word go, but because I hold him in such high esteem, and connect him with a lot of my favourite films, major films, I didn't want to bother him with a little project like mine. But, as with the actors, I figured "well, I can only ask, he can always say no" - and when he started to take an interest, I just couldn't believe it. You can't put into words how exciting it is when one of your heroes, someone whose work you've grown up with, starts becoming supportive of something you're putting together yourself.
S: The location you've used for GREEN FINGERS really fits the bill for this type of film. Where is it, and how did you find it?
PC: Making my film has been virtually a one-man show. I knew that the location had to be pretty special; for one, I wanted a very odd-looking rural house, and it also needed to have a fairly massive garden as most of the action would take place around this. Initially, I didn't know where to start; I'd decided to film somewhere in Essex, where I live, and so I began to phone around these odd little historical societies, asking if they knew anyone who wouldn't mind a low-budget film being shot around their house. I didn't get anywhere at all, until someone told me that Essex County Hall had an 'Historical Buildings' department - I rang them, explained everything, and they were really excited! They have to travel round visiting listed buildings, ensuring they're kept in a certain condition, and they were able to put me in touch with several people around the county - so for about a month, every weekend, I'd take my wife and my little girl for days out, and we'd visit these houses, meeting the owners, drinking gallons of cups of tea, and looking at the gardens. Eventually I came across Dorwards Hall in Bocking, near Braintree, and met Sue Lord, a lovely person; she was so thrilled at the prospect of a film being made at her house, and when I saw the place, it just fitted, it matched exactly what we needed. Sue was more than happy for us to dig her garden around, and in fact she even helped us find the rest of the locations for the film, so in theory she was also the locations manager! I'd say "Sue, I need this" and she'd immediately get on the phone to her friends - once I was in as part of that little circle, I had no problems finding places.
S: Are you happy with the way the house and gardens look on film?
PC: Oh, I think that even if people don't like the film, they'll love the settings - they're so full of character.
S: Which movies have you grown up on yourself? What are your own favourites?
PC: Going back as far as I remember, I've always loved films - all films - but from about the age of 6 I found out about Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Universal films, and for years they were my main stable of movies. Then, of course, the Hammer films played a big part in my life. Ironically, I don't think I've got a favourite horror film - I just love all the Hammer films, and old horror films, I think they're the most fun, but my desert island choice has got to be THE THIRD MAN or CITIZEN KANE.
S: were you conscious of Hammer, or the classic anthology films, for instance, when preparing the GREEN FINGERS script?
PC: When I read the "Green Fingers" story, I saw it straight away as an ideal segment for one of the old TALES FROM THE CRYPT anthology-type films. So in writing it, I definitely aimed for that style, I suppose subconsciously…as I've seen so many films over the years, it's all in there somewhere and it all starts coming out on paper. Definitely Hammer's influence and the Milton Subotsky/Amicus films filtered through.
S: Do you feel there's been a resurgence in the U.K. of people getting out there, picking up cameras and making films?
PC: Yes, especially with short filmmaking. There are more shorts being made today than ever, there's so many film schools pumping them out. In fact, I'd say there are too many film schools.
S: What sort of outlets are there for this stuff? Why are so many shorts being produced?
PC: A short, basically, will allow big film producers and the industry to see that you're capable of making a film - it's literally an exercise, a calling card. There are festivals around the world that want short films - it's growing all the time, it's become a mini sub-culture, if you like. It really is the only way to make it into the industry, you must have something to show people and ideally it has to be a short film. Making GREEN FINGERS, I've gone the old-fashioned way. I've worked in the film industry for a number of years, and so now felt that I had enough contacts out there to give me advice, to give me help, to give me good deals. I knew the right people to approach, and what's nice is that they were all quite keen to see what Paul Cotgrove could make. In a way, I do feel slightly isolated, in that most other stuff of this kind is being done at film school, by students half my age! But where they've got film school connections, I've got big industry connections. I wouldn't have had the confidence to shoot GREEN FINGERS without having good friends in the industry to turn to. I'm not the only one out there - my friend Grant Littlechild is doing exactly the same, with his film COSMIC BRAINSUCKERS - he's just put together a promo reel, to raise the rest of the money to turn it into a feature film. Again, he's an industry chap like myself, he hasn't gone through the film school route.
S: When I spoke to you earlier this year, you mentioned that Grant and yourself might be working together on something in the near future.
PC: At the moment, we're both up to our eyeballs in our own projects. I've got so much to do with GREEN FINGERS once its finished, get it on the festival circuit, whatever. Grant's hoping to shoot COSMIC BRAINSUCKERS at the end of the year. Once we've both got some time to sit down together, though, we're seriously talking about producing a ghost story anthology, a bit like the old Ealing DEAD OF NIGHT, with 4 stories by 4 different directors - obviously myself, Grant, our friend Jim Groom (REVENGE OF BILLY THE KID) and we're not quite sure whether to bring in a fourth director yet, this is just early days. But we're all very excited about the idea of doing ghost stories, especially myself. I've always wanted to adapt an M.R.James story.
S: Any particular one?
PC: "Lost Hearts", I think, is begging to be put on the big screen.
S: Do you have any other forthcoming projects?
PC: I've just agreed, with Ingrid Pitt's husband Tony, to shoot some short video films. Ingrid's organising a week-long holiday camp in Somerset at the end of September - part of the holiday will give people the chance of appearing in a little video film, 10-15 minutes, which will have some of the guest stars (Ingrid, Doug Bradley, Caroline Munro) appearing, playing little cameos - we're hoping to shoot three or four of these films while we're down there, to shoot and edit them within the week and hand them out to the holidaymakers! It's going to be real Ed Wood stuff, pretty intensive - I must be mad doing it!
S: Finally, Paul, what advice would you give to anyone considering writing or directing their own film?
PC: Apart from the fact that you've got to be raving mad to try and make one - filmmaking is pure lunacy - as most books and manuals will tell you, just do it. There's only one way to find out about filmmaking - and that's the hard way. (Laughs) Don't do it, really!
(originally published in 'Samhain' #21, June/July 1990)
"A satisfying, spooky supernatural story" claimed Derek Winnert in his regular 'Radio Times' column - well he would, wouldn't he, since THE LORELEI is one of those curious is-it-a-movie-or-isn't-it cheapo dramas commissioned by the Beeb for their 'Screen Two' series, basically an untaxing means of filling up 70 minutes during that yawning chasm between Clive James' show and the splendid, 100%-Numan-free* 'Snub T.V.' on a Sunday evening. Anyway, I'm not employed by the BBC, so I'm going to give this one a right pasting. For starters, the title's a real cheat - scholars of Teutonic legend, or Amando de Ossorio fans perhaps anticipating scaly, mythological virgin-chomping beasts slithering across their screens will have been as disappointed as I was to find out that scripter Nick Dunning's 'Lorelei' is nothing more than a horrible old bed and breakfast joint in darkest Wales, run by a bespectacled weirdo (John Nettleton) who keeps forcing his home-made bread on the guests and generally behaves in the disturbed manner of all those drooling red-herring school janitors you'll fondly recall from the heyday of the stalk-and-slash opus. Sole guest at the Lorelei is "an attractive but lonely teacher" (more Winnert-speak) played by Amanda Redman - upon discovering that nightlife in the Valleys offers a choice between Nettleton's egg-and-cress sandwiches and a spot of sheep-shagging, Teech wisely elects to remain in her room leafing through a copy of 'The French Lieutenant's Woman'. Suddenly, her riveting evening is torn apart by an "inexplicable event" which "shatters her solitude" (those 'Radio Times' copywriters going a bit O.T.T. again) - another drooling-janitor type, all broken specs, five-o-clock shadow, and dishevelled appearance, bursts through the door, exclaims "Oh my God!", and beats a hasty retreat, presumably in search of a decent barber, tailor, or optician. Immediately forgetting all about the French Lieutenant's woman, Miss Redman rushes out on to the landing, to find - surprise! - that the mystery man has vanished. She also manages to bump blindly into her creepy landlord; cue meaningful shots of egg-and-cress sandwiches tumbling down the stairs. By now, any viewer with the proverbial ounce of intelligence will realise that Redman has experienced a premonition; and sure enough, Mr. Designer Stubble turns up as the new drama teacher at her school. They begin an affair, he whisks her off for a dirty weekend and they end up back in good old Cymru. But wait, folks, here's the exciting twist! (Yawn…). They're not staying at The Lorelei! So, can Redman manipulate fate and actually pre-empt whatever inevitable unknown disaster it is that awaits her, by having her companion play out her psychic experience? So off they drive, back to Nettleton's boarding-house-cum-bakery, to act out the whole scenario. Of course, things go "horribly wrong" (bet you wished you'd used that one, eh Winnert?) and Amanda winds up alone again, naturally (anyone else out there remember Gilbert O'Sullivan?) for a distraught-heroine-communes-with-nature finale straight out of Argento's PHENOMENA/OPERA. This stuff doesn't work in Dario's movies, never mind poverty-stricken BBC crap. After THE LORELEI and the equally abysmal Alan Ayckbourn adaptation WAY UPSTREAM, I'm seriously considering asking for a refund on my licence fee should the Beeb ever employ director Terry Johnson again. It's significant that the most telling sequence in this whole fiasco is a completely arbitrary and unnecessary RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK spoof with a bunch of juvenile drama students rolling a huge ball of shit down a school corridor - rather symbolic, really, when you think about it. What ever happened to 'Play For Today'?
* (the reference to Gary Numan was something of an in-joke between myself and 'Samhain' editor John Gullidge, a fully-paid-up Numan nut. I've since seen the light and have become something of a fan of old Gazza myself…)
THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN/DRACULA/THE MUMMY
(review of Warner Home Video releases - first published in 'Samhain' #62, June/July 1997)
It’s funny how you never read impassioned attacks on the drabness of Gordon Hessler’s movies, or hear critics bombarding Montgomery Tully with brickbats for his artistry-lacking, point-the-camera-and-pray approach to fantasy film fiction. Why, then, do so many genre analysts feel the urge to broadcast their hostility towards the career output of Terence Fisher?
David Pirie’s head-above-the-parapet championing of Fisher, as a genuine auteur emerging from the commercial battlefield of the post-war British screen shocker circuit, was one of the most daring - and astute - critical flourishes ever published in this country, and one can only assume that the wave of anti-Fisher hysteria has been fuelled simply out of envy that Pirie got there first. Fortunately, David’s case has been seized upon, adopted and developed by hordes of rabid fans (your present writer included) who became hooked on Hammer’s florid fright-fests due to their frequent 1970s television exposure. To deny Fisher an important place in the annals of home-grown horror displays crass ignorance of his abilities as a craftsman and, yes, as an artist. Those who negatively refer to him as ‘workmanlike’ neglect to mention the relaxed, productive environment he instilled on set, and would certainly have to admit to Fisher’s labours being those of a skilled hand, devoted to and proud of his task. As for the debate over auteurism and input, Fisher is recognised worldwide as the major exponent in depicting ‘good versus evil’, the fundamental equation at the heart of dark drama; themes of obsession, doomed romance, and the attractions of diabolism surface with regularity; and his key achievement, the magnificent mounting of the Frankenstein saga across a quintet of complex, increasingly tragic episodes, blossomed into an epic series centred around Peter Cushing’s driven, committed and ultimately exhausted and drained Baron. I’d be interested to hear how Fisher’s detractors shoe-horn the simplistic EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN and the ‘Carry On Stitching’ capers of HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN into the chronicles.
‘Samhain’ readers surely require no introduction to the trio of titles presently under consideration. THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and THE MUMMY are landmarks in British cinema history, finally available on video from Warners after an inexplicably lengthy delay. Fisher’s guiding hand, coupled with Jimmy Sangster’s event-packed screenplays, and the creative endeavours of Hammer’s familiar crew and stock company combine and harmonise to produce a collection of high quality horrors. Most welcome is the central presence in each of these films of Peter Cushing - as John Wayne was to John Ford, or like De Niro forging inextricable links with Martin Scorsese, Fisher too formed an almost symbiotic understanding with Hammer’s most instantly recognisable star. A pillar of the house of Bray, Cushing appeared in a dozen films for Fisher, applying the shading to his director’s trademark confrontations between light and dark. His Frankenstein, a womaniser, callous murderer and rapist, yet sincere in his goal of aiding mankind, also displays an intense loyalty towards those permitted to penetrate his world; his Van Helsing, athletic, swashbuckling, honourable, is however so utterly immersed in his quest to destroy what he perceives as ‘evil’ that he is almost consumed by his calling. Fisher externalised this chilling subtext with deftness in 1960’s THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, to the point of temporarily tainting his hero with the vampire’s curse in one unforgettable scene.
Fisher always downplayed his participation in the success of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1956), the ground-breaking smash hit which irreversibly changed the course of the horror film - he claimed that this was merely the next title on the Hammer production roster at a time when the company needed to assign him a new project. Whatever the truth, much care and attention appears to have been lavished on CURSE, and the result is a film over-loaded with highlights. There’s a young Melvyn Hayes for starters, surprisingly near-perfect as a Cushing-in-miniature, as the teenage Baron; Hazel Court, all porcelain complexion and cheekbones as Frankenstein’s English rose fiancée; Robert Urquhart as Frankenstein’s tutor and mentor, increasingly appalled and repulsed by each successive experiment - his early, matter-of-fact line “half the head’s eaten away!” must have rocked contemporary audiences!; and Cushing himself, professionalism and dedication personified, carefully unwrapping a sculptor’s severed hands or handling a pair of fresh eyeballs with finesse. Christopher Lee’s stint as the creature is rarely singled out as one of his great roles, but he brings appropriately jerky, hesitant life to the reluctantly re-animated being, and our first sight of his famous ‘road-accident’ visage, as Fisher hurtles a trembling camera into the monster’s face, remains a heart-stopper 40 years on. Cushing’s manic clarion call, “if I can’t cure it by brain surgery, then I’ll get another brain…and another…and another!” set the agenda for the next two decades.
DRACULA (1958) is perhaps a film of marvellous moments, rather than a fully-fledged classic, though James Bernard’s stirring score adequately papers over any cracks. At its very best, Fisher’s first foray into vampirism manages to present these creatures as some undiscovered, feral species; the early scene where Valerie Gaunt’s voluptuous Vampire Woman lunges at Harker, only for Dracula, hissing through bloodstained lips, to intervene, eats at the aristocratic façade previously established, revealing the castle’s inhabitants as snarling, animalistic predators.
As scripted by Jimmy Sangster, Cushing’s Van Helsing here is shown to be a man of science rather than spirituality - performing blood transfusions to combat the effect of the vampire’s bite, using a sort of primitive Victorian Dictaphone, and casually dismissing the suggestion that Christopher Lee’s Count can metamorphosize into animal forms (“a common fallacy”). Cushing allows traces of humanity to shine through his otherwise focused and motivated persona - there’s one lovely little vignette where he comforts a child (Janina Faye) following a frightening encounter with the undead Lucy Holmwood, wrapping the girl up in his thick fur coat, placing a protective crucifix around her neck (“there - will you wear this pretty thing?”) and calmly pointing out the distant sunrise, the full relevance of which is revealed later!
A notch down from the preceding two milestones in British horror, THE MUMMY (1959) is nonetheless heaps of fun, showcasing another effective mime performance from Christopher Lee as the revived Kharis, tightly bandaged and with gangling limbs akimbo as he visits murderous revenge upon the desecrators of his Queen Ananka’s tomb. It’s crammed with cod-Egyptology, a be-fezzed George Pastell solemnly intoning “he who robs the graves of Egypt…dies!” and Fisher offering a lengthy flashback to Ananka’s burial which comes dangerously close to parodying the then-current trend for spectacular biblical/historical epics. Back in home counties England, ale-quaffing local colour is provided by Harold Goodwin and Dennis Shaw as a couple of inept delivery-men, plus the ubiquitous Michael Ripper in fine form as a drunken poacher. Cushing secures a great ‘into the lion’s den’ scene as he pays a visit to Pastell’s home, insulting the god Karnak in order to expose his own neighbour’s beliefs; and the long-suffering Lee really goes through the mill, having his tongue ceremoniously chopped out and being interred alive in ancient Egypt before being shot at and speared in modern times, and winding up at the bottom of a muddy marsh - twice!
What more can I add? If you’re interested in the roots of today’s terror films, if you want to experience real British costume drama, if you wish Peter Cushing was still delighting us with his presence, or even if you’ve been completely mystified by everything you’ve just read, these movies are out there demanding your attention. A vital part of any tape archive.
Darrell Buxton interviews I ZOMBIE director Andrew Parkinson
(originally published in ‘Samhain’ #67, April/May 1998)
Remember our on-set coverage of shoestring-budgeted U.K. shocker I ZOMBIE, THE CHRONICLES OF PAIN, way back in ‘Sam’ #44? If you do, you’ll be pleased to hear that after a tortuous four years, the movie is finally complete! I ZOMBIE relates the tragic tale of research scientist Mark (Giles Aspen), infected by a zombie bite and subsequently doomed to a life of enforced isolation, as he deserts his partner and friends to await the effects of the unknown virus which threatens to consume him. I met with the film’s director, Andrew Parkinson, for more of the gory details…
Sam: Your background is with the BBC, I understand?
AP: Yeah, I work in the post-production side of things on films and programmes - initially, I got to learn about the technical side of filmmaking, they had a really good training scheme at the time which was like doing a compressed film-school course in a couple of months. Very intensive, very hard work - I don’t think they do it any more but I was so lucky to go through that course. Before that, I’d only really worked on Super-8 and video, but moved on to my first 16mm shorts, which grew into the film that became I ZOMBIE.
Sam: What made you decide to attempt your own feature film?
AP: The shorts had become progressively more ambitious, and so I thought "let’s do a nice Super-8 feature" - there were a couple of very low-budget ones around at the time and I thought it looked fun, but by the time I’d worked on the script and looked at the logistics and the number of people who were going to have to be involved, I thought "what the hell, I’ve got a little money saved, let’s throw it in the pot and try to work on 16mm".
When I started the film, I was incredibly broke, so the first bit of shooting we did was pretty intense because we were very low on film stock. When we started, I thought it would probably take 18 months-2 years to get it made.
Sam: Giles Aspen told me he was assured it would take about 6 months!
AP: Well, I thought roughly 6 months to shoot, 2 or 3 more for editing, then maybe a year to get it wrapped up but it didn’t go that way - it turned into a long-term nightmare!
Some of the people working on the film contributed, budget-wise, but I put most of it in myself - my expendable income over the period of 4 years went into it. I had something saved from selling a house when I moved to London, so that became the initial seed money to buy a couple of dozen rolls of film, to get the camera, and off we went. So at the outset I didn’t have enough money to finish the film properly, but I felt that the money would come on as each month went by.
Sam: Why did you decide upon a horror theme? Why a zombie film?
AP: A horror movie is a pretty natural thing for me - I’d always been a big fan, with early memories of staying up late to watch ‘Appointment With Fear’; then discovering Cronenberg and Romero and all those great movies, so it’s always been a genre that I loved. Plus, it seemed that a lot of the horror films that I liked were very cheaply made, a lot of them were shot on 16mm, so I thought "here’s a genre made for the low-budget filmmaker if ever there was one".
Sam: What would you say are the major influences on I ZOMBIE?
AP: Influences just accumulated from watching so many films in the past. I knew I wanted to use a horror ‘character’ - mainly since the early films that I really liked were the Frankensteins, the mummies, the zombies, the wolfmen. I didn’t want to do a serial killer-type film and so I wanted that figure in there, even though he isn’t a conventional sort of monster. Other influences might include MARTIN, and the Cronenberg films which grew away from historic, romantic horror into contemporary gritty drama; and then to slightly quirkier ‘art’, ERASERHEAD, TETSUO, MAN BITES DOG - not necessarily ‘horror films’, but with a contemporary feel to them, an edge, which I wanted to capture myself.
Sam: I find Cronenberg’s THE FLY almost a template for I ZOMBIE. Would you admit to it as an inspiration?
AP: Well it wasn’t a conscious one, but I’ve always liked Cronenberg - I like body-horror, certainly, the thought of your body changing. I mean, we’re all getting older daily, it’s something we all have to deal with, the disease and aging of ourselves and our loved ones - that seemed like a potent theme to me, someone mutating, not being in charge of themselves any more but still trying to deal with it, trying to live a dignified life the best they can.
Sam: The film’s title changed a few times during the shoot, from I ZOMBIE to CHRONICLES OF PAIN, and eventually you settled on using the whole thing.
AP: Well it originally started off as I ZOMBIE: THE CHRONICLES OF PAIN - the full thing - but there were a lot of arguments amongst ourselves as to whether it was "a real zombie film"! It sounded like a Lucio Fulci Euro-splatter movie, the I ZOMBIE bit, but I quite liked it because it had an element of trash to it, while CHRONICLES OF PAIN gives it a "huh, what’s he talking about here?" factor - it’s that sort of counterpoint between something trashy and something thoughtful. There’s also that Ray Dennis Steckler gag that if you can’t afford to make expensive films, at least have a big title!
Sam: Your cast come from a largely theatrical background. How did they adapt to working on a movie?
AP: I’m very happy with them, they worked extremely hard and remained faithful to a project that dragged on for many years. I’d worked with Giles in a short film before, featuring a blow-up rubber doll! He was the doll delivery man in that one, and I thought "this guy’s pretty good". I’d worked as a lighting man at their theatre company, so I knew they were reliable, they’d turn up on a regular basis. Performance-wise, they all worked hard - there are some things it would have been nice to re-shoot, but early on, we had so little film stock that unless someone blew a line of the camera fell over, it had to go in the film! We all did a lot of learning in those early stages, me most of all. The only real pro actor in there is Mia Fothergill - she played the little girl in A ROOM WITH A VIEW! Had I used professional actors, or anyone not committed to the project, after 3 weeks of shooting they’d have been off on to something else, so I purposely cast people that I knew socially.
Sam: Did you worry that long-standing friendships might fall apart as the shoot progressed?
AP: I worried about everything! It’s funny because you come to realise that you own these people, they’re working hard for you and you’re standing there telling them what to do, a very different footing from your normal relationship. Fortunately, we found we could quite easily switch into the mindset of "o.k., once the camera stops we’ll all have a cup of tea and get back to normality". Next time round, I’ll be a lot more confident when it comes to dealing with people.
Sam: The make-up FX were done by a guy called Paul Hyett - are you happy with his contribution?
AP: Yeah - Paul was 18 when we started, this was the first big project he’d worked on and he was really enthusiastic when I met him. Like the rest of us, he was on a pretty steep learning curve, I was asking him to do things he hadn’t done before. He’s doing adverts and pop videos now, so where for me I ZOMBIE is a film I’ve just made, for him it’s stuff that he did four years ago, and I know he isn’t all that happy with some of his work, but maybe I’ll be the same and I ZOMBIE will become my LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT - in ten years’ time I’ll be saying "oh no, I never made that - I make teenage horror films now, very nice!".
Sam: Your original rough-cut ran about 100 minutes. What didn’t you like about that first version, and what changes were deemed necessary?
AP: I didn’t like the fact that it was boring! For me, the whole film is about isolation, about this guy who can’t interact with society and so keeps himself separate from it, so to tell that story I thought "fine, we just film him on his own a lot". I’d never dealt with character and structure over such a long period, and so really it didn’t have the proper dynamic that a film should have - it worked for perhaps 20 minutes, but then however hard I tried to spice it up it just got more and more…you can only take so much madness and weirdness in a film. So I shot quite a few scenes involving the other actors, to develop the girlfriend’s story far more, of how she deals with a person suddenly missing from her life.
Sam: I love the ‘interview’ structure of the film, which almost gives it a flavour of Warren Beatty’s REDS.
AP: Well, Woody Allen does that quite a lot as well, and when I see his films I often wonder if he puts these inserts in right at the end when he sees the film isn’t working! The interview stuff was the very last that we shot, and right at the end when we cut those in, I thought "thank God! It works!".
Sam: You co-composed the film’s excellent, very professional score with Tudor Davies.
AP: the one thing that normally lets low-budget horror down is the sound, and I was really fortunate to have Tudor on the shoot - he’s a sound recordist at the BBC and at the time he and I shared a flat together, so he was in whether he liked it or not! He’d been heavily involved with every aspect of the film, and had a strong idea of how I wanted the music to be, I wanted it quite stately and slow. Although a couple of times after we’d been to the pub we’d put it on late at night for some friends, and Tudor sat at the keyboard doing comedy horror-film ‘stabs’ and bass-notes and things, taking the piss, and everybody would start laughing - I hated this, but eventually thought "he’s got a point, actually" so then we started thinking let’s put some bass-notes in, a pulsing backbeat, all the old horror clichés that work purely because they are usable clichés! In the end the overall soundtrack is a mixture of those slower pieces on piano or acoustic guitar, and more conventional horror music all thrown in together. The final sound-mix was done at a proper dubbing suite - I was fortunate enough to have a friend, Andy Hewitt, who was building his dubbing theatre while we were making the film, and we had a friendly rivalry as to who would finish first! So we got a top-class, professional dub.
Sam: I understand you’ve already had some contact with the BBFC?
AP: Well I’ve not really talked specifically about this project, I’ve just sent off for their details and had a quick chat with them. It’s quite funny because I got a guy at the other end and said I’d made this 16mm horror film, thinking he would react disapprovingly, but he was really enthusiastic about it! He probably doesn’t like working there!
The biggest worry I’ve got is that it’ll cost me £1000 just to get the BBFC to look at the film; and assuming they want edits, and let’s face it, they probably will, it then costs another £1000 to get them to re-view it after the cuts. On a film that’s cost £8000 so far, to have to spend another £2000 just to get it censored is ludicrous.
Sam: Which scenes do you anticipate may be contentious?
AP: There are a couple that they won’t like - the first is when Mark is eating the hitch-hiker who turns out not to be dead, and he has to hit him over the head…
Sam: Using an empty wine bottle - as this is an everyday household item, might that count against you?
AP: Yes, I often hit people with bottles! It’s problematic, isn’t it - it’s not a traditional weapon, is it, so it could well do. It depends what sort of mood they’re in.
The leg-drill sequence, where he breaks his leg and then drills the metal plate on to the side of it, might be another casualty…it’s annoying, when you’ve made something and tried to get the balance right. If a horror film is to work, any gory, violent sequences have to be part of the story, have to be driven along by the narrative. I tried to make each violent act tell you a little more about Mark, about how far he’s deteriorated, so to actually take those out - well, I couldn’t.
Sam: Are you hoping to get I ZOMBIE shown theatrically, or are there plans for a video release?
AP: I sent tapes off just before Christmas to a couple of sales agents for large companies - they buy films and then take it on their back to sell them on for a percentage. When they look at a film, though, the first thing they want to know is "who’s in it?", so with a low-budget production with nobody of any stature in it, they don’t see it as a money-spinner. Also, one distributor told me "horror films don’t do anything theatrically in this country", even if you’ve made a fairly big 35mm film with name characters the chances of selling it and getting a theatrical release are so minimal. So I think the home for this film is on video - I’ve sent it to a couple of companies to see what they think, if it fits in with their current catalogue. Obviously, you go for the best deal you can get - it’s no good to me sat on my shelf at home, one of the criteria of doing the movie on 16mm was that we wanted to try and push it, to make a proper film that would be a saleable item.
Sam: What are your plans for the future? Do you intend to continue in the genre?
AP: I probably will, yes. When I finished shooting the zombie film, I felt "that’s enough blood and guts for now", but that was a few months ago and now I’m starting to think "yeah, let’s do another horror film", so I’m working on a couple of scripts at present. They’re similar themes, dark fantasies - and it would be nice to do something with a female lead next time.
Sam: Any final comments for our readers?
AP: Hope you enjoy the film! And thanks to ‘Samhain’ for your support. If there’s anyone out there involved in any festivals or aware of any other outlets - get in touch!
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1948)
(film review, first published at 'The Spinning Image' website, January 2003)
Edgar Allan Poe’s most representative tale, crammed with
madness, disease, incest, and characters grimly clinging to memories of a faded
past, always had a European sensibility, and has spawned several movie versions
from this side of the Atlantic. Jean Epstein’s avant-garde 1928 La Chute De La
Maison Usher, animator Jan Svankmajer’s 1981 Zanik Domu Usheru, and dear old
Jess Franco’s El Hundimiento De La Casa Usher from 1983 may all be eclipsed by
the rarely-seen British take on the story, made in 1948 by Ivan Barnett for his
G.I.B. production company.
Book-ended by hilarious scenes set in a gentlemen’s club,
where the upper-class members while away their idle afternoons sipping scotch
and swapping ghost stories (one dour-faced fellow unbelievably claims to prefer
a bit of a laugh, but his sour demeanour and excruciatingly slow delivery make
this an unintentional comic highpoint!), Barnett’s film rattles along at a
frantic pace, and whilst not entirely faithful to its source, emerges as a
genuinely unsettling exercise in fright. All the elements which Poe brought to
the party are present, with Gwen Watford as a suitably doom-laden Madeline
making a striking impression, but it’s the previous generation of the family
which give this film its true impact -
at the ‘temple’, a folly in the grounds of the mansion, we find a
creepy-looking severed head which is shown in frequent close-up and which is
suggested to be manipulating the events presented before us. The Usher family
realise they must burn the head in order to lift the curse threatening to
destroy their line, but Roderick and Madeline’s ancient mother dwells within
the temple - though frail and
elderly, her gradual descent into insanity has left her with the strength to
tear a man to pieces, and she’s pretty handy with a carving knife too. This
demented figure, with her straggly black hair, blank staring face, and murderous
intent, is an utterly terrifying presence, and if the movie were better known,
I’d swear her to be a major influence on the nightmarish Sadako from the Ring
series fifty years later.
So, the Usher curse remains in place, Madeline is
prematurely nailed into her coffin (the scene in which she grapples her way out
is supremely executed, images of a loud ticking pendulum and hefty bolts being
pounded into the coffin lid dominating the mortified thoughts of her sickly
brother), everyone dies and the house collapses after being spectacularly struck
by a flash of lightning. And off we return to the club for a final round of
whiskies and an absurd discussion between the hooray Henries as they debate what
it all meant!
1940s British horror has been a grossly neglected topic among film historians - everyone should be familiar with Ealing’s classic Dead Of Night, but plenty of other disturbing Brit chillers emerged during the immediate post-war era. The Dylan Thomas-scripted Three Weird Sisters, poltergeist-ridden comedy Things Happen At Night, and Norman Lee’s edge-of-your-seat adaptation of The Monkey’s Paw are all well worth seeking out, though Fall Of The House Of Usher might just top the lot in terms of sheer dread. An undeservedly obscure gem.
THE FALL OF THE LOUSE OF USHER (2001)
(film review, first published at 'The Spinning Image' website, August 2003)
The ultimate ‘home movie’? Shot in the director’s
back garden over a six-month period on an infinitesimal budget, The Fall Of The
Louse Of Usher ought to have disciples of one-time ‘enfant terrible’ Ken
Russell salivating, producers flinging open their chequebooks and showering the
great man with millions, and the arts world in general besieging parliament and
demanding that Ken be given a life peerage. What will really happen is that this
camcorder masterpiece will be ignored by most, and dismissed as trash by 90 per
cent of those who do manage to see it. If you’ve got the slightest interest in
movie mavericks, outrageous visual style, Edgar Allan Poe, or fighting against
adversity, I urge you to seek out Salvation’s DVD release of Usher wherever
you can.
Russell’s approach to Poe
mirrors that of Dario Argento’s ‘Black Cat’ segment from Two Evil Eyes
- colloquially renaming a central figure (here, ‘Roddy Usher’),
positioning the character at the heart of the creative world (Russell’s Usher
being a successful rock star), and tenuously alluding to various Poe tales
throughout. James Johnston, of ace swamp-noise merchants Gallon Drunk, makes a
creditable acting debut, following in the footsteps of Russell’s previous
music industry collaborator Roger Daltrey, and finds himself caught up in a
demented nightmare world, suspected of murdering his wife and trapped within the
asylum of the crazed Dr. Calahari (Russell, enjoying himself immensely in the
role!).
That’s the set up, but it
doesn’t really matter, as Ken randomly flings in bits and pieces from Poe’s
‘Ligeia’, ‘Facts In The Case Of Monsieur Valdemar’, ‘Murders In The
Rue Morgue’, ‘The Premature Burial’, and ‘Annabel Lee’; whipped into
the heady brew are naughty nuns, a sexy nurse, copulating spirits, possessed
children, and a remote-controlled gorilla known affectionately as ‘Gori’!
There’s a ‘Pit And The Pendulum’ set-piece which somehow involves a
whitewall tyre and a massive dose of Viagra; Valdemar dissolves into the usual
pile of goop, but not before Calahari has attempted revival via the use of an
economy defibrillator consisting of two domestic irons; one of the film’s most
effective scares has a post-coital Usher discovering the nurse’s fake body
parts strewn about the adjacent bathroom, leaving him to ponder precisely what
he’s been romping beneath the covers with; sex toys, party hats, and Halloween
masks contribute enormously to the sense of fun and general don’t-give-a-damn
spirit of the production; you’ll discover why Snow White’s little-known 8th
dwarf was called ‘Choppy’; and as for the House Of Usher itself, the doomed
property here happens to be represented by Ken’s garden shed! Indeed, the
titular ‘fall’ is a colourful, ridiculous, wild and utterly delightful
sequence which stands comparison with anything Russell has previously presented
on screen, proof positive that although his financiers may have deserted him,
his talent certainly has not.
All this, and I’ve not even mentioned the rubber room orgy sequence in which a couple of dozen blow-up sex dolls are defiled by inflatable Godzillas!
'SCARRED': STEVE LOOKER INTERVIEW
Steve Looker, director of the low-budget British horror thriller SCARRED, was interviewed for The Spinning Image by Darrell Buxton at Cornerhouse cinema, Manchester, over the Hallowe'en weekend in October 2005.
DB: We've all enjoyed SCARRED at The Spinning Image. What sort of reactions have you had to the film from elsewhere?
SL: The preview was held here at Cornerhouse, and obviously friends and family loved it. But then I thought "let's get it out there, let other people watch it". People either seem to love it or hate it. Other amateur filmmakers have loved it - it's got a real explosion at the end, it's got semi-decent actors - some of whom we had to draft in at the last minute - so we get a good reaction. Some people have said it looks a bit amateur since it was shot on video, but as we couldn't afford HD or film, we had to go for DV - which I hate, but there's nothing you can do when you haven't got any money.
DB: It's good to hear that fellow amateur filmmakers have expressed their admiration
SL: I've got a lot of friends who make amateur films. One guy, Simon Cox, made a movie originally called DRIVEN, now known as WRITTEN IN BLOOD - he went on to produce corporate films, but he made his first feature ten years ago and now he's working on another. There's not really a network of amateur filmmakers as such, but through making my stuff, I've met a lot of people, amateur and professional, who ring each other up, offer advice, etc. I sell the film via my website, and didn't mask the fact that it's a low-budget piece. One of my friends always looks along the shelf at the video store for Bruce Willis titles, etc., and if he watched SCARRED he'd just say it was crap; but another friend, into the amateur stuff, might pick out the good points and look through the fact that I didn't have any resources. As long as it's entertaining, and doesn't bore anyone. If they go in thinking 'Hollywood', they're not going to be happy, but if they appreciate that it's someone putting a little bit of money and a lot of effort into making a film, they're going to like it.
DB: Before SCARRED, you made THE DEVIL'S BACKYARD. How did you first get into this area of low-budget production?
SL: I thought you would ask me that question! A lot of people would answer by saying "well, I saw STAR WARS, I watched JAWS…" - and I did too, I really liked them. But my first recollection of something that inspired me to go into this was seeing a picture storyboard done by my friend Gaz. This was a serial killer thing, done by taking photographs and sticking them down on a piece of card - like a cartoon strip, but with pictures. I thought it looked amazing, and so the next step was for us to take a camera into the woods, running round, throwing blood about - that's how it all began! We started off with loads of friends helping, but most of them soon got bored with giving up their weekends, so you soon realise you have to go further afield, do a bit of networking, getting people in to help. We went to an Altrincham cine & video club and met a guy called Alan Coulter, ex-BBC - the club seemed to be the sort of place where people just turned up for a coffee and a biscuit, but Alan could see something in us, that we really wanted to make films, and he taught us the ropes - we did a lot of things wrong, really reckless, and so he started to show us the rules of filmmaking. We learned a lot from Alan, but we weren't actually getting to make films, so after a while we walked away from that; and we made DEVIL'S BACKYARD with no money at all. I tried to get Scott, later the fx man on SCARRED, to do a car explosion on DEVIL'S BACKYARD - we got the car, and the means of blowing it up, but we couldn't get the car from my house out to the field where it was going to explode, so we couldn't do the effect. He blew up a cardboard box instead and we put it in digitally - it looked really bad, but we had no choice. That film was shot on weekends, over about 6 months - we screened it at Cornerhouse, it went down well with mum, dad, and friends! It's about 89 minutes long.
DB: Longer than SCARRED, then?
SL: Yeah - we wanted to keep the running time of SCARRED down. There's still stuff in SCARRED I'd like to cut out, but if you start cutting and cutting like that you fall below feature length.
DB: I believe the budget for SCARRED was about £4000? Having said that, I found the film tremendously ambitious in places.
SL: As far as the money aspect goes… we wanted to blow up the van and the shed, and obviously couldn't just go to a farm, ask them if we could borrow a hut, and crash a van into it! So we had to build it. One of the guys working with us, Steve Holland, is a set-builder for theatre, and he helped build what we called the 'Butlins Camp' hut - as it looked too new for my liking, but we couldn't do anything about that! I gave him £250 to build the hut, but the problem was that Scott then said we couldn't construct it using any nails, for safety reasons since it was going to be blown to pieces. So we had to glue it together, in sections. We shot the film in 8 days and did all the effects on the 9th day. None of the 'Blood Shed' set was built, so within the 9-day period everything had to be constructed. For instance, I'd do a full day's shooting on the Tuesday, then head over to the field to oversee the set construction - it would be pitch-black by the time I got there! In the morning I'd be off to Victoria Hall in Bolton for 7 a.m., to help build the interior set. It was absolutely manic. If we'd thought ahead, we could have started the sets a week earlier, but the farmer didn't want his field used a week early, and we could only get Victoria Hall for a week, so we couldn't really do that. We couldn't have done it any other way without it costing us more. Luckily, the farmer, Andrew Norcott, said we could have the field for nothing - and we were told that we could use Victoria Hall for £500 a week. But you can imagine how low the budget was - I would have loved to have gone in a week earlier and prepared everything, so the actors could have walked in to a great set, instead of arriving to see bits of wood being put up! You can guess what they must have been thinking at the time! On the DVD, we also talk about the hospital set - we did build that up at work a week beforehand.
DB: I think that is the best set in the film, although the 'Blood Shed' obviously has a more iconic status. In practical terms the hospital set looks really authentic, almost like something out of 'Casualty'.
SL: We thought about how we could make that set look really good, and I decided that wallpapering and painting it would be best, so that's what we did. The 'hospital bed' was simply a child's bed. If you notice, we used the same set for the 'Blood Shed', but just painted it brown!
DB: Many people might see the set-building as a mundane part of the process, but you're clearly well into it! But let's move on to something more traditionally 'exciting' - explosions!
SL: As we were making a low-budget film, we thought "what's never been done in a film at this level?" - a real explosion! You always see digital explosions nowadays, and as me and my friends are all avid low-budget film viewers, whenever we see someone setting up and explosion we all shout "go on, go for it!", but they never do and we feel really let down. So I said to Scott, the fx guy, that I needed a van to drive into a hut and the whole thing to blow up. I asked "how big is 'big'?", and he replied "as big as you want it", so I said "go for it!". On the 9th day, we shot all the effects - burning a body, which you don't see in the finished film as it didn't quite work; then we had to set up the van, cut the hut up and drive the van into it to stage the shot, before blowing it all up. We let the van tyres down, broke all the windows, and then drilled holes in the hut walls so it would collapse in the right way. Scott put a heck of a lot of petrol inside the hut and the van, and then I asked him where we would all need to stand, as we didn't know how big it was going to be. We set up 6 cameras - we dug a hole and put one in the floor, I manned one off to the side, there were another couple in front. What I didn't tell anyone was how big it was going to be! My friend Mark was on a camera facing the hut, kind of a close-up on it, and we had another one even closer. I knew - when you see the film, you'll see we have a wide shot of it all - I brought the camera right back, zoomed right out, but everyone else seemed to be close-up. Scott told me to shout "speed" and get the cameras rolling, that he would then count 3-2-1, and then it goes! The main actor, Neville, had his camera filming it, and you can hear him when the first explosion goes off, shouting "bloomin' 'eck!"; the second one which blows the doors off, "bloody 'ell!"; and then the third which obliterates everything, by which point he was running… "Jesus Christ!!". The power from it was unbelievable, just to be there was a real experience. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in an amateur film. It was amazing - it was a good day!
DB: Had you seen SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE before shooting SCARRED? It occurs to me that the films end in a very similar manner.
SL: No, I hadn't seen it then. I like SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE, but in SCARRED we've got someone telling the story, that was our angle. The problem we found while scripting was that every time we came up with an idea, it seemed ridiculous, but we fell back on the fact that our main character was telling a story - once you start doing that, the audience might think "hang on, some of this isn't quite right", but obviously in the end it all falls into place, it shouldn't really matter what he's said in the past.
DB: As our review points out, any flaws or inconsistencies in the film itself can almost be explained away by the fact that the main character might be lying throughout.
SL: We didn't set out to do that, but it just happened that way. We did want a twist at the end though.
DB: Tell us about Stiv H - he seems a bit of a character, and your producers can't stop talking about him on the DVD!
SL: (laughs) - well, Stiv is the guy that built the set; basically, he was a copper in THE DEVIL'S BACKYARD, and I asked him what name he wanted to use in the credits - Steve Holland is his real name, but he lived in Sweden for a bit, and 'Stiv H' was his nickname over there, so he asked us to call him that! I don't know why the producers keep laughing about him in the commentary - when we recorded it, it was a disaster as we got about ten minutes in and they just kept laughing. One of them happened to mention that Neville was a great actor, just as Stiv appeared on screen, and they said "oh, and there's Stiv H!" - it was kind of a comical moment. Gaz had said he wouldn't do the commentary unless he had a drink, so he had a bottle of wine, and he just kept saying "and there's Stiv" as a running gag, and collapsed laughing! I thought "why not keep it in?" - it's a good laugh!
DB: Did you enjoy putting the DVD together, and did you want a lot of extras included on the disc?
SL: Well, I really love films with extras, I enjoy watching a film and then finding out how they did it. On ours, I wanted to fit as much as I could on the DVD - the plan was to learn from the experience, the whole process, even down to trying to get a sale. You go into distribution companies and find out how it all works, and I'd rather do that now on a film that only cost £4000, rather than one that is going to cost £20,000-£30,000. I thought I'd do it on this one, learn a little bit… I'm a corporate filmmaker anyway, so I know a lot about how to set up DVDs, and I thought let's really pack this disc - it's brimming over the edge. On this one, we tried to do a documentary on 'how to make a low-budget film', to give all our secrets away, but we couldn't fit it all on because of space.
DB: So, what advice would you give to anyone who fancied making a film on a tiny budget?
SL: I'd say to them, just go out and film, don't worry about the budget, because if it is their first film, it's probably gonna be a big learning curve, so I'd rather someone went out and made a film with next to no money, and learn as they go. A lot of people I speak to in this position complain that they've got no money - but you don't need it. Obviously, if you want explosions, if you want good actors, you are going to need money, but if you're making an early start, just go out and shoot your first feature. If you've spent no money on it and you think it's crap, you can just throw it away! Just shoot, and learn from it. And read a lot of books about filmmaking - I do. Commentaries are always good as well, listening to different directors and cinematographers - you've got to do your homework.
DB: What about your own filmmaking influences, then?
SL: I love David Fincher - he's such a great filmmaker. The fact that he controls the whole set, he's got a vision and he gets it down on film, that's what I like about him. I like films with a dark feel to them, and he does that, with films like SE7EN, a great film for me. I'm still learning how to bring that type of darkness to a film, that reality. I like Hitchcock as well, but I don't think I'll ever… well, I don't think most people will ever be as good as Hitchcock! He was a master - I can't really talk about him!
DB: What did you think of Fincher's FIGHT CLUB, which one poll recently voted the fourth best film ever made?
SL: Well, like Hitchcock did, he uses a lot of techniques in his work, technology, going through objects… but he adapts the technology to fit the film, you watch the film, not the effect, he makes it fit the story. Hitchcock used to do that, he'd have all his toys but he would never detach the viewer from the story - he does that in most of his films. I think FIGHT CLUB does this well too, zipping down the side of the building to where the bomb was, zipping all over the place, and the title sequence as well, he's known for his really amazing title sequences.
DB: Yeah, look at how the titles for SE7EN are so influential even to this day.
SL: That was an amazing title sequence. When I went to see SE7EN at the cinema, I didn't really know what I was in for, but as soon as you see those titles you think "oh my God, what's going to happen now?". I remember watching it with a friend who had precisely that reaction to it, and that's what filmmaking is to me, getting that sort of reaction from an audience - to entertain, but to do something more.
DB: I definitely found that during SCARRED at a couple of points, notably the striking shot of the double-hammer-wielding killer, and the scene where Shiv's character gets unexpectedly kidnapped… I forgot all about it being a shot-on-video, amateur film and just got caught up in the action.
SL: Hopefully that's something I can carry on doing in my next film.
DB: On that subject, will you be working with the same team again?
SL: Yeah, pretty much the same crew, same fx guy, etc. We're currently in talks with Doug Bradley's agent, he's asked to see the script, we're sending that off to him.
DB: Good news! Doug's definitely one of those actors who really likes to encourage young filmmakers and get involved in the lower end of the market.
SL: We wanted to approach someone famous for the next film, from a sales standpoint more than anything. Every time I phone a distribution company about something I've done, they want to know "who's in it?", meaning they want to hear that a star name is attached. That's the kind of thing you encounter when you contact these people. If you haven't got a star, they don't really want to know, so I thought, let's go and get a star. Funny thing is, I told people at work that I was thinking of approaching Doug, and they said "who?" - but as soon as you mention HELLRAISER, they know straight away who the guy is! He's really interested, he just wants to see the script - we've sent him some of the early artwork for the new film. The premise of the film is that someone has an affair, the husband finds out about it and sends a hit-man to beat up the main character, and everything starts going really wrong. I'm trying to do this as a more action-based thriller than a film that relies on dialogue - we're not quite ready to write really good dialogue yet, so I want to concentrate on the action, there's going to be a lot of where's-the-killer-hiding-in-a-dark-room type of stuff, more visual than dialogue-driven, but with a good little twist at the end - nothing major, just something that the audience will hopefully think is clever. We're trying to put a few surprise elements in, of the kind you mentioned from SCARRED - sending the audience down one road and then going the other way, so they don't know what the hell's going on or what's coming next! The next film will be shot on HD, it's going to basically be bigger and better - if I'd done another DV film I think a lot of the people who worked on the last one might not have come back on board. They will do it again if they can see the bar being raised, you've got to do that each time. The working title for the film is THE SUFFERING - but I think there's a computer game with that title, and they might be bringing a film version out, so we're going to have to change it, I think. The script is written and has already gone off to Doug Bradley, and we're hoping to film it over two weeks early in 2006. We don't have any locations yet, but we're currently looking for a house in the middle of the woods, that's always a good place to start.
DB: Any final comments you'd like to make?
SL: Just to say that we're always looking for people to help out, especially producers, so if there are any producers out there… writers, actors, etc., feel free to contact me at reelvision@ntlworld.com
THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN - 'the circus comes to town' - (prepared notes for an illustrated talk on the League Of Gentlemen and their influences, preceding a screening of THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN'S APOCALYPSE, staged at Derby Metro Cinema, July 2005)
Hello Daves! And welcome to tonight's presentation of THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN'S APOCALYPSE, the big-screen version of BBC2's hit comedy series set in the weird world of Royston Vasey.
I'm sure many of you here will be big fans of the League, and you'll certainly appreciate their movie all the more if you are familiar with the guys and their previous work. Before we see the film, I'll be setting the scene a little, talking briefly about the League Of Gentlemen, and playing excerpts from some of their early radio shows. We'll also be taking a look at a couple of their favourite movies, tying these in with their own cinematic excursion; and, as a nod to the fact that they chose Hadfield in the north of Derbyshire as the real-life site for Royston Vasey, we'll be paying tribute to our home county and its use as a setting for past productions in the realm of the macabre or sinister.
Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and the non-performing member of the quartet, Jeremy Dyson, comprise the League Of Gentlemen, and they formed their comedy troupe after meeting at Bretton Hall College in Wakefield and discovering certain shared visual interests - classic cult t.v., an appreciation of a good sitcom, and perhaps most prominently, a love of British horror films, in particular those made by the Amicus and Tigon studios, Hammer's great rivals in the late 60s and early 70s. Amicus were best known for their 'portmanteau' horrors, i.e. the films that featured four or five short episodes such as DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, ASYLUM and THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, while Tony Tenser's Tigon company were responsible for the Vincent Price classic WITCHFINDER GENERAL and a number of striking and unusual chillers such as the coastal zombie romance NEITHER THE SEA NOR THE SAND, written by ITV newsreader Gordon Honeycombe, or THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR whose prestigious cast included renowned stage stars Beryl Reid and Dame Flora Robson. All of these films and many other influences filtered into the League's own writing, and after establishing a reputation for their early live sketch shows, the lads won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 1997, a stepping stone for much of the comedy talent this country has produced in the past ten years or so. Radio 4 snapped them up and offered the League a 6-part series, which eventually led to television and their rise to fame. The radio show, 'On the Town With The League Of Gentlemen', features early versions of many of the familiar telly characters, although the place in which they all reside was originally called Spent as opposed to the more celebrated 'Royston Vasey'. I'll play you a couple of clips now, one featuring Shearsmith's 'Bernice' character, the other a sketch involving a less well-known figure, 'Mr. Ingleby' - a small shopkeeper in more than one sense of the phrase.
(ON THE TOWN excerpts)
Between 1971 and 1978, BBC television produced an annual 'Ghost Story For Christmas', often adapted from the work of M.R. James or Charles Dickens. These atmospheric, beautifully crafted, and very, very scary shows, including versions of James' A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS and LOST HEARTS as well as Dickens' THE SIGNALMAN, have had an enormous impact on the League Of Gentlemen, leading Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss to attempt their own tribute to the form. The League duo dramatized Robert Aikman's short story 'Ringing The Changes' for a Radio 4 Halloween broadcast in the late 1990s, creating one of the most terrifying audio experiences you'll ever get to hear. The Aikman story tells of a recently married couple with a noticeable age difference, who honeymoon in an off-season seaside town, but unwittingly pick the wrong day on which to turn up there, as the townsfolk involve themselves in a bizarre annual celebration of the dead. Here's a clip:
(RINGING THE CHANGES excerpt)
As mentioned earlier, the League have based many of the situations, gags, set-ups, locations and scares featured in their work upon their favourite films. Those of you who have seen the League Of Gentlemen's Christmas Special may have recognised the three-part format as paying tribute to the aforementioned Amicus compendium horror films. One of the Amicus movies, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, featured a tale in which Joan Collins is terrorised by an escaped psychopath dressed in a Santa Claus suit, something echoed in the special's finale as Bernice is dragged away to an uncertain fate by the show's bogeyman figure Papa Lazarou, similarly attired in Christmas garb. Nicolas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW and Robin Hardy's THE WICKER MAN have also inspired many great moments in the show, but the team are often at pains to point out that several slightly more obscure movies have been just as big an influence as these critics' favourites. This is particularly apparent in the film version. I'm about to run clips from the 1970 Tigon classic BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW and the 1974 Amicus movie FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE - the Tigon film has been declared by the League as the major inspiration for the 'King's Evil' scenes in LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN'S APOCALYPSE, and indeed the League even did a very amusing commentary on the DVD version of BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW, available only as part of a 6-film Tigon Pictures box-set, well worth hunting down if you're a League completist. As for FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, the excerpt we'll be screening tonight features David Warner, being coerced by a spirit trapped within a mirror to commit gruesome murders. Warner of course went on to be spectacularly decapitated in THE OMEN, and to memorably essay the role of Evil in TIME BANDITS, a character echoed in his performance in tonight's feature. Finally, a British actor in an American film - in 1983, Disney adapted Ray Bradbury's marvellous fantasy novel SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES for the cinema, casting our own Jonathan Pryce as the villainous Mr. Dark, sporting a top hat, a silver-topped cane and a general air of menace as he brings his Pandemonium Carnival to the small community of Greentown. All of which should sound rather familiar to fans of a certain Papa Lazarou.
(BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW, FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES excerpts)
As 'local people', we in Derbyshire may be slightly disappointed by one aspect of the League Of Gentlemen's movie - the fact that it was largely shot in Ireland. Presumably the chaps felt that Derbyshire just didn't possess that big screen look? Their loss, I'd say - for our humble county has played host to many a dark and disturbing production in it's time.
Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel 'Dracula' may have been set in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, but when the book was dramatized for the stage in 1924, it was our own Grand Theatre, still standing just yards from this cinema, that presented the play's world premiere. The legendary British horror star Tod Slaughter, barrel-chested and with a twinkle in his eye, died here in Derby in 1956 after a lengthy career portraying evil squires, rogue landlords, and great ghoulish figures like Spring-Heel Jack or Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. And the beautiful Derbyshire countryside was used with increasing frequency by t.v. producers and movie directors - in keeping with the goings-on in Royston Vasey, Derbyshire's greenery has often been used as a picturesque contrasting backdrop for evil events. We're going to end with a selection of clips either set in, or filmed in, territory everyone here tonight will recognise; Nigel Kneale's ATV play MURRAIN, about ancient superstitions and witchery at large in mid-70s Derbyshire; Ken Russell's LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, a typically outrageous Russell version of another Bram Stoker novel, set and partially filmed in our county; and the spectacularly-titled Spanish zombie film THE LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE, in which walking corpses are brought to life amid the awe-inspiring scenery of the Peak District. Bringing us right up to date, one of the Metro's big successes in the past few months has been Shane Meadows' stunning 70s-style revenge thriller DEAD MAN'S SHOES, filmed on the mean streets of Matlock and at the desolate Riber Castle, and capturing that peculiar Derbyshire mindset as well as any movie ever has.
(MURRAIN, LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE, DEAD MAN'S SHOES excerpts)
DEAD MAN'S SHOES there, a terrific piece of work. If you've not yet seen the whole thing, try and make it the next film you watch. For those of you who may not know - and I didn't - 'cheyne stoking' is apparently a medical term, referring to the breathing pattern of a dying patient. Most apt, in light of the terrifying activity that occurs later on in the movie.
O.k., time to take a break from all of this Derbyshire depravity. Thank you very much for listening, and after a short interval, we'll be back for tonight's feature attraction, THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN'S APOCALYPSE. So, goodnight, jobseekers! And in the words of Herr Lipp - don't let the buggers bite you.
SEX EXPRESS (1975)
Choice dialogue: (this is a five-part movie with one horror episode - the episode under review contains no dialogue whatsoever, unless you count a bit of orgasmic moaning!)
The British sex movie, eh? Good old end-of-the-pier fun, usually with some Flash Harry climbing out of a window with his trousers around his ankles. Delve deeper, however, and you'll find a considerable sex/slash crossover. Undisputed king of the genre, Robin Askwith, had already served time in horror items such as TOWER OF EVIL and THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW before he first essayed the role of 'Timmy Lea' in the 'Confessions' series, and many aspiring stars flitted across the screens of Odeons and ABCs up and down the land, in a cheap shocker one week and an even more poverty-stricken shag-fest the next. Linda Hayden, David Warbeck, scripter David McGillivray, directors Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren, all were dab hands at both fright and fuck flicks in their time. In the latter days of this era of great British tat, Willy Roe even managed to grind out a rather sorry English giallo, THE PLAYBIRDS ("a murder thriller…with thrilling bodies"), designed as a vehicle for the legendary Mary Millington, which featured a spectacular 'star' cast including Windsor Davies, Kenny Lynch, Alan Lake, Glynn Edwards, and Gavin Campbell from 'That's Life', plus Dudley Sutton as the chief suspect in a series of cover girl strangulations where the victims are each found with a number daubed on to their corpse.
One of the leading lights on the U.K. sexploitation scene was director Derek Ford, best known for titles such as GROUPIE GIRL and WHAT'S UP NURSE. In 1975, Ford devised the ambitious SEX EXPRESS, a five-part sex anthology with 20-year-old starlet Heather Deeley appearing in each of the quintet. It's the second of the film's episodes which enters into 'Hysteria!' territory - within 20 minutes or so, Ford and his beautiful young protégé managed to craft what ought to have become one of the most controversial moments in British exploitation film history! However, the 88-minute movie was submitted to our censor in a cut-down 50-minute version only (presumably ideal for programming as part of a sex triple-bill), being released for export only in its full version, under the title DIVERSIONS. As a result, this edited title escaped the attention it has undoubtedly deserved all these years.
The basic outline of the movie is that Deeley appears to be playing a female prisoner, being escorted by police from St. Pancras to an unspecified Northern location by rail (a climactic surprise reveals her to actually be the escorting police officer). As the journey proceeds, Deeley's mind begins to wander, and she begins to create sexual fantasies involving her travelling companions. A tall, dark, handsome chap sitting diagonally opposite is leafing through a copy of the old 70s horror comic 'Vampirella', and inspires the bloody events of the movie's second such vignette.
This tale opens with Deeley and British sex film superstud Tim Blackstone bonking away on a black couch in her apartment. After several minutes of frenzied shagging, Deeley goes into flashback, recalling her experiences as a military nurse, transporting a wounded patient across hostile terrain before being set upon by a group of enemy troops. The soldiers shoot the invalid, before turning their attentions to Heather, raping her across the bonnet of an army jeep. The scene fades and we rejoin Deeley and Blackstone on the couch, where their X-rated activities are reaching a peak - suddenly, the mood shifts, and Heather fumbles beneath the cushions, produces a glinting dagger, and savagely plunges the weapon into her lover's naked torso! He falls to the floor in agony, and as he enters his death throes, the film takes a turn into uncharted waters - first of all, Heather begins to writhe and wriggle on the sofa, covered in her victim's blood, which she smears all over her breasts and body, before frantically rubbing the gore-streaked blade all over her exposed crotch. If that were not shocking enough, she then rolls off the couch, kneels by Blackstone's corpse, and in detailed, graphic close-up, bloodily castrates him in full view of the camera, before fellating his severed member and re-commencing her state of orgasmic ecstacy! All this several months before Oshima's AI NO CORRIDA, and years before Sharon Stone grabbed for an ice-pick in BASIC INSTINCT.
Next, we see Heather in an open-top sports car, cruising through the bright lights of London in search of her next victim. If you've not already put two and two together, the suggestion appears to be that the flashback rape has affected Deeley, to the point where she decides to use her tantalising body to lure men back to her flat before dispatching them at the height of passion, as some kind of twisted revenge on the soldiers and/or mankind in general. Anyhow, she encounters her latest pick-up - and yes, it's the saturnine figure from the train. Before we know it, they're having it away on the old leather couch, Heather's reaching for the knife, and we're anticipating murder number 2. However, in a twist ending, as Deeley slashes at her latest conquest, nothing happens - no puncture mark or stab wound, no gush of the red stuff - all of which is explained as her paramour reveals himself to be, yes, a vampire, sinking his fangs into her luscious neck.
The other episodes, although non-slasher, are not without their points of interest - the opener could almost be an out-take from THE WICKER MAN, featuring a student waxing lyrical about the erotic qualities of the humble apple, as a means of getting into Heather's knickers; the third story is a 'mistaken identity' comedy resulting in more raunchiness; the fourth (completely missing from the U.K. cinema version, not surprisingly!) is a grim and sadistic military fantasy, worthy of a Sergio Garrone S.S. exploiter; and we wind up with a further played-for-laughs segment, with Heather and another girl being screwed by the moustachioed ghost of a lascivious Victorian photographer.
Director Ford continued his stalk and slash/horror association, turning up as 'associate producer' on the 1985 Swedish shocker BLOOD TRACKS and directing 1988 obscurity URGE TO KILL (a.k.a. ATTACK OF THE KILLER COMPUTER), starring Peter Gordeno as a man residing in a high-tech apartment block controlled by an intelligent electronic security system which kills off any female callers in a variety of gruesome ways - this one was apparently unreleasable and doesn't appear to have made it to cinema screens or video anywhere in the world. What a shame, though, that SEX EXPRESS remained ignored for so long - at least 20 minutes of this remarkable movie cries out for the attention of those jaded genre fans who think they've seen everything.
Body Count 3
Female 1 /Male 2
1. Wounded soldier shot by enemy troops
2. Naked man stabbed to death and castrated by female psycho
3. Female psycho killed by vampire's bite
THE COMEBACK (1978)
Choice dialogue: "Have you ever seen a child die of strychnine poisoning? You scum! Kill the bastard!!" - Sheila Keith's 'little old lady' mask slips just a tad…
Imagine if FREDDY VS. JASON had included country superstar Shania Twain as its feisty female lead. Or how about Bing Crosby being asked to appear in GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN or some other 1940s Universal monster fest? Weird, unlikely suggestions, huh? Well in the late 70s, director Pete Walker managed to pull off such a casting coup. The man who had single-handedly re-defined the nature of the British horror film, hauling it roughshod out of Castle Karnstein and into your high street, suddenly found himself working with the world's major middle-of-the-road singing star, at the centre of his latest cheap and cheerful gore extravaganza!
Virtually forgotten today, Jack Jones was enormous at the time he was hired to topline THE COMEBACK. In the U.K., his popularity with the Radio Two audience was second-to-none, and rarely a morning would pass without Terry Wogan or Jimmy Young spinning a Jones disc or two. Sell-out gigs were attended by a fanatical fanbase, too old for the Bay City Rollers, too staid for punk rock, but looking instead for the housewives' choice, a clean-cut, well-presented fellow with a decent voice and songs where you could hear all of the words. How Jones came to accept THE COMEBACK as a vehicle for his thespian talents remains one of the great mysteries of the movies - indeed, fans at the time were utterly baffled, and the pages of Film Review were filled with letters from Jack's admirers, delighted for the chance to see his celluloid likeness at their local Odeon but appalled at the gruesome content of the movie itself!
Walker's cast was unusually stellar - either his production spiel had been particularly convincing, or he caught everyone's agents on an off-day, as he was able to assemble perhaps the most striking gathering ever seen in a British exploitation thriller. Having passed up the opportunity to use a young American model named Kim Basinger, he instead selected up-and-coming Aussie blonde Pamela Stephenson (who within 12 months would be one of the biggest names on British television as a member of the 'Not The 9 O'Clock News' team); the Jones character's music publisher was to be portrayed by David Doyle, red hot at the time and recognised worldwide as 'Bosley' from t.v. smash 'Charlie's Angels'; and as the elderly couple ultimately revealed as the murderous villains of the piece, Walker regular Sheila Keith was paired with none other than 'Compo' from long-running BBC comedy 'Last Of The Summer Wine', Bill Owen. Indeed, Jones' role had nearly been offered to Ringo Starr (still smarting from his own failed rock-horror outing, the 1974 vanity project SON OF DRACULA) and Cat Stevens (who indicated his feelings towards the genre a couple of years later by refusing permission for his song 'Moonshadow' to feature on the AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON soundtrack!).
Walker had dragged the orthodox, cosy concepts of British terror up by the bootstraps with the unforgettable David McGillivray-scripted trilogy HOUSE OF WHIPCORD, FRIGHTMARE and HOUSE OF MORTAL SIN - McGillivray's establishment-baiting screenplays had seen authority figures and bedrock institutions ridiculed amid a welter of bloody violence the like of which our industry had never witnessed, and Walker revelled in cranking out these tales of urban depravity at the rate of roughly one per year. However, the duo's latest offering SCHIZO had been something of a critical and commercial flop, so Walker turned back to a former writing partner, Murray Smith, to attempt a revival in his fortunes. Smith had authored Walker's sexploitation epics COOL IT CAROL! and FOUR DIMENSIONS OF GRETA, but he had a way with a thriller too - one of his other Walker credits was the Susan George woman-in-peril saga DIE SCREAMING MARIANNE, and he was just beginning to make a name for himself as one of our top t.v. scribes, having created the Don Henderson series 'Strangers'.
Singing star Nick Cooper (Jones) is billeted at a country mansion ("the kind of place where you'd find Lon Chaney playing the organ") during the recording sessions for his new album, his first for six years since his semi-retirement after marrying his wife Gail. However, recent marital problems resulting in separation have led Nick to seek his muse once again. Unbeknown to Nick, Gail has arrived in Britain before him, intending to empty his expensive penthouse flat of its more desirable items - but while at the fashionable warehouse conversion, she is brutally attacked and slain by a frightening hag-like figure wearing a crocheted shawl and wielding a lethal scythe. The corpse is left to rot (Walker frequently cuts back to remind us of its progressional state of decomposition, ultimately revealing Gail's face being gnawed away by a huge rat!) while we concentrate on activities at the rural retreat. Nick's recording sessions are seemingly a success (we hear one track entitled 'Traces Of A Long Forgotten Tune' which, to these ears at least, ought to have been forgotten!), and he's struck up a healthy relationship with his publisher's secretary (Stephenson), but his nights are tormented by the sound of anguished female cries, hideous cackling laughter, and the odd months-old mouldering body materialising before his disbelieving gaze during the small hours. Smith's script throws in more red herrings than you'd find in a Russian trawler, with suspicion falling initially on Nick's U.K. contact Harry, obviously a rum 'un judging by his salacious comments on the shape and size of Pamela's breasts, before shifting to Webster (Doyle) following a decidedly nutty interlude in which we see him posing in a kimono and applying eye shadow and lipstick!
Nick is eventually driven right over the brink when one of his nocturnal excursions to the bowels of the house bring him into contact with that old genre staple, the head in the hat box (a particularly grim specimen, this - it's his ex-wife, complete with a bunch of pre-Fulci maggots crawling around her eye sockets). After a brief stay in hospital (nurse: "it says that if you should waken while I'm on duty, I should tell you tactfully what happened"; Jones: "Well, what happened?"; nurse: "You went nuts!"), Nick returns to the mansion, only for the truth to finally be revealed - the elderly couple have been plotting revenge against him for causing their daughter, an obsessed fan, to commit suicide on hearing the news of his wedding. Sheila Keith goes into overdrive here, delivering perhaps her dottiest, most demented rant, accusing Jones of lewdness and 'foul contortions' before Owen bursts in, clad in the killer's shawl and wrinkled mask, only to mistakenly hack his wife to pieces in what Forrest J. Ackerman would surely refer to as 'an axe-ident'. And that's the lot, apart from an atypical supernatural coda where Nick seems to catch a glimpse of his wife at an upstairs window before departing the scene for good.
THE COMEBACK may fail to live up to its title in terms of Walker's directorial career, never quite reaching the heights of his incendiary mid-70s work; the bland Jones hardly cuts the predatory 'Hammer Of The Gods'-like figure the script suggests (indeed, it's most disconcerting to hear him use the word 'fucking' a couple of times and referring to a friend's fatal overdose), and one wonders why the psychotic pensioners put him through such an elaborate charade rather than taking their longed-for revenge as soon as he arrived at their home. Stephenson looks bored and lifeless, the music business angle barely intrudes in the way it should, and there's a very silly moment involving dead flies diving lemming-like through the keyhole of Jones' apartment! However, the murders are gory and well directed (especially the opener - our first sight of the killer's 'mad old lady' get-up is seriously pants-wetting), Stanley Myers' score mixes the conventional and the experimental to clever effect, and above all, Sheila Keith provides her trademark brand of total malevolence, even investing a nothing line like "perhaps I could spread the butter for you?" with bone-freezing undercurrents.
Body count 4
female 3 / male 1
1. female hacked up with scythe
2. female corpse revealed
3. male stabbed with knife
4. female killed with axe