Original subtitles

As pressure mounted with articles appearing in the press, particularly the

Mail running the campaign, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided that the

only feasible way to deal with the video analysis was using the Obscene

Publications Act.

And with that in mind, the Director of Public Prosecutions looked at titles

the police were referring to him.

Initially, of course, this was... as a result of the press scare story and he

divided them up into a list of titles that he felt were so obscene that they

would be the kind of titles the jury might find obscene in a court section

titles but also he had another secondary list of titles

where he was perhaps not confident that a jury would find against them, but

where there was material in the works that went beyond the normal accepted

standards. And for those titles, he added to a second list of so -called

3 videos.

Section 3 could be heard at the Magistrates' Court, but not Section 1

Section 2 if they've seen publications of that. In the case of Section 3

works... What would happen in practice is the police would see that a shot was

stocking, for example, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was one of the titles on

the supplementary list of less obscene titles. They'd apply to a magistrate's

court, and the magistrate would give permission for the police to go and

the videos.

The positive side of that, from the point of view of the dealer, was there

wouldn't actually be a conviction or a criminal record against them.

In many cases, the dealer wouldn't even turn up. You would have a case where the

police apply for a warrant to see X number of videos.

Then the person who was distributing them would get a summons to come to the

court. May not turn up, may turn up safe.

it's a fair cop and then the videos would simply be destroyed so there were

these two um levels of obscenity the strongest section two titles and and the

titles that were considered section three so that would mean that that film

always had the tarnished image and the sort of aura around it of being

unacceptable

Right, well, we have Abducted, which was released on video in this country by

Astra Video, who gave us I Spit In Your Grave. And they chose to use one of its

less controversial titles and consequently, I believe, stayed off the

Nastas list.

I think they might have attracted the attention of the police if they'd

it under its alternative title of School Girls In Chains.

It's one of those movies, of which there were very many in the 70s, that tries

to drum into people that hitchhiking.

It's a big, big mistake.

Please let me out.

Why? We're almost there.

Where?

Where I'm taking you.

It's the sort of film that's been pulled from the headlines about serial

killing, people being abducted and taken away and kept in cellars by maniacs, of

which there were several cases in the 1970s, both before and after. So it is

ripped from the headlines of the time. It's very much kind of a contemporary

sort of story in that respect.

It's made by a guy called Don Jones.

He was a director born in Pennsylvania but ended up working in California.

Started out in his team, trained and became a professional boxer, then went

the Army Signal Corps for a while.

When he came out of the Army, wanted a change of career and got drawn into the

film industry, initially working as a stuntman, met a guy called Gary Kent.

Now, Gary Kent was a stuntman who'd been working with the Corman people and done

quite a few movies as stunt coordinator and actor.

He got Don some work.

in the industry, and within a couple of years Don was directing, because this is

around the time when the porn industry was kind of kicking in, and it was the

shift over between the nudie films, which were fairly lightweight, not very

explicit, and the roughies, and then into hardcore.

Now, Don didn't get into the hardcore side of it, so his films were just

that changeover, but he made a film called Excited.

Excited.

beyond human sexual responsibility.

And another one called The Kiss Off and Who Did Cock Robin, which are three sort

of, I suppose, roughy dramas with kind of nudie elements to them. And then in

1973, when the whole porn explosion happened, he decided he didn't really

part of that, didn't want to go that far, and decided to make a horror film,

which is where...

this movie came from. Now, it started out life as Play Dead was the original

title. That was Don's preferred title.

And then when it was made, it went through several title changes, depending

who particularly owned the rights at the time, which is when Schoolgirls in

Chains became one of the alternative titles.

It belies that very, very exploitative title, I think, by being pretty well

acted and actually works as a piece of drama. It's not the most complex story

ever told, but the actors, particularly the actors playing the killers.

uh very believable and quite unnerving what did you do that for she's my friend

you want her you've got to take care of her gary kent is playing this very big

sort of guy very soft -spoken but with a lot of deep rooted problems to do with

his mother and uh his brother is this uh kind of arrested development retarded

child in a man's body who has got sexual drives but they've got very twisted and

warped in the process and so you get these really quite squirm -inducing

where he's examining abducted young women as if he's playing doctors and

with them, but it's all getting a bit out of hand.

Okay, you're all better now.

The film was shot by Ron Garcia, who went on to become better known as a DP

among other people, David Lynch. So the film was shot by the same guy that shot

Twin Peaks Firewall with me.

which, you know, accounts for some of the skill of the filming as well because

he was a very talented technician.

Garcia was also a director and this film was made back -to -back with a film

that Garcia directed and Don was the DP on, so they kind of swapped roles.

As for why this one ended up on the Section 3 list, I think it's fairly

that the reason is that it contains a lot of violence against women and the

menacing...

sexual menacing of women, rape, and a general air of sleaziness in the

of the female characters. It's not super explicit, it's not really putting that

boat out all the way, as certain movies did, but it does have an uncomfortable

feel to it, and anyone whose sensibilities have been cranked up by

things like I Spit In Your Grave were probably looking for other films in that

same vein, and perhaps they only watched the first ten minutes and thought, oh

yeah, here's another one.

It doesn't go as far as a movie like I Spit In Your Grave, but it does.

have a very skillfully evoked grimy, downbeat and sleazy atmosphere.

Only the sweet ones, only the young ones will do.

Silence is the sound of madness kidnapped from

reality.

Schoolgirl in chains.

Prisoned in a cellar of terror.

We're being used as toys or playmates.

Subjected to the twisted and tormented needs of two insane brothers.

Die to the door, John.

There is no...

You take off all your clothes and I'll examine you.

John, listen, why don't we play a couple of hours, okay? No, I want to operate.

No, John!

Sexual fantasies become the nightmares of reality.

They feed their insatiable appetite.

How long are you going to keep us here?

I don't know!

What are they going to do with us? You'll see.

Why do you meet Mama?

A madhouse.

Yet in these rooms, still another lives and waits.

Let me go.

Don't make me go back to the cellar, Frank, I promise. No! Don't make me go

back! Don't you think it's about time I met your mother?

Abducted, violated, and the worst...

was yet to come.

Schoolgirls in Chains.

This is Aftermath. It came out in 1982 and it's one of the sweetest nuclear war

films you're ever going to see. It's written, directed, starring, edited by,

just about everything else, Steve Bucket.

The idea is that Steve is playing a guy called Newman, who's an astronaut.

He comes back down from space to find out that the planet seems to be

Going around in some rather pretty shots for a while, he eventually realises,

along with a friend of his, that the planet has become basically a wasteland.

It had finally happened.

The last great war in which mankind had all but obliterated.

He discovers that there are very few people left on Earth.

Most who survive the initial blast are mindless, battered monsters.

They run in packs like wolves and feed themselves on anything they can find.

There are instead mutant humanoid things that basically roam around and are

basically looking to munch on people and commit very nasty acts on them.

The other group of people remaining on Earth are a pirate gang, essentially,

by Sid Haig in an absolute blunder of a role.

Put the women in the truck.

The guys, the usual.

He's got fantastic menace, and it's something that we've become very much to

associate with him. The guy has so much presence, it's quite unbelievable.

And what the film is essentially about is dear old Newman, i .e. Barquette,

deciding that either he's going to clean up, you know, the pirates, the mutants,

all the rest of it, or he'll damn well die trying.

Do you really think just the three of us can bring this off?

Well, there isn't going to be any picnic.

Once this laser starts firing, Cutter's going to think Patton's army's crawling

up its backside.

But it'll have to be a surprise attack.

And it actually, for what you might assume to be quite a schlocky film,

actually, it's got a lot of heart.

For example, there are some bits where he finds a young boy by the name of

Chris, who is actually his own son.

And he kind of quasi -adopts this boy.

And so we see this relationship, this familiar relationship developing between

them. And there are actually some scenes that are actually quite peer -inducing.

It's actually lovely because you get a sense of character behind these kind of

stock types.

If you decide that you're willing to find or die in this experience...

However, this is also kind of counterpointed against some what can be

as real full -on exploitation.

There are some scenes, for example, some quite nasty rapey type scenes, but also

some scenes whereby we see some people's heads being blown off and we get full

-on kind of, you know, close -up.

It's actually quite squirm -inducing because we do constantly get this shift

between... Very touchy -feely, particularly when the lovely Newman

fall in love with a character called Sarah, who is kind of reasonably kick

actually.

It's very interesting, actually, to see the way that the Newman character kind

of develops, because he's not in some ways what, particularly now, we would

think of as an action hero. He's, you know, obviously a middle -aged guy, and

yet the idea is he's going out to... do the stuff he does and gain retribution

for a sense of justice.

He believes in this.

I don't want to continue to live in a world where baby killers walk around

unpunished. You can tell this film is so much a labour of love for Barquette.

Somebody's got to try.

One of the interesting things about The Aftermath is that there are quite a few

famous faces involved in it, one of whom is Forrest J. Ackerman, aka Forry

Ackerman, who obviously is known for Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Now, he is in it as the curator.

Well, man developed his technology and technology became a monster and

him. Also, what people with eagle ears, shall we say, may notice is you've got

Dick Miller, who you might know from the Gremlins films, who is also obviously

the Coleman regular and who pops up as the voice on the radio.

Well, I know there may not be anyone left out there to hear what I'm about to

record.

It's quite a nice little genre inclusion there.

In a matter of only a few days, I watched as the world was ripped apart

people destroyed.

One of the main things that I think mean that this film should be seen by

general audiences is Chris Barkett.

The kid is a really good little actor.

What happens when you die?

He's got heart, and he's got a nice green presence.

And it's one of these things that makes Aftermath something that, over and above

its subject matter, so...

Very watchable.

Tell me more about this cutter. It's a monster.

You just want to indulge in... No.

OK, now we have The Black Room here, which came out on Intervision and is

directed by a guy called Norman Thaddeus Vane.

And, yes, that is his real name.

He was born in Long Island and he's had a very, very interesting career. He

lived in Britain for most of the 60s and into the early 70s and his first two

films were made in this country. He made two very, very obscure, impossible -to

-see, low -budget films in 1960 and I think it was 63.

One's called Conscience Bay, the other one's called Fledglings. They're both

quite arty, slightly experimental dramas.

One of them made through the auspices of the Rank Organisation.

But they've fallen out of circulation. No -one can see them now. I've seen a

script for them, but I've never seen the films themselves.

He was around in the 60s, around the time of the craze and that whole world.

got into the nightclub business and was running clubs and gambling

establishments. So he knew some of the...

more colourful characters on the London entertainment scene as well. In the late

60s, he became a scriptwriter and wrote the script for a movie called Twinkie,

starring Charles Bronson and Susan George.

Adeline, she's just turned 16.

That was on the posters down in the Tube. I don't know if he could really

away with that kind of thing anymore.

So he didn't direct again until quite a while later, in 1981, when he made The

Black Room, which he co -directed with a guy called Ellie Kenner.

an Israeli director who has sadly disappeared entirely off the scene.

he went back to live in Israel and has not been traceable. But Norman wrote

the film and directed the actors, and Ellie Kenner apparently was the

director of the film.

Jason's been sick all his life.

Ever since he was a child.

What does he have?

Oh, it's a very rare blood disease.

Collias.

It has to be said that they both did very, very good work. I think it's a

well -acted film. It's a very well -conceived story, and it looks great.

on the film is Robert Harmon, who went on to become the director himself and

directed The Hitcher, a great film from the 80s. Robert Harmon, who shot it,

uses Steadicam very early on for a low -budget film.

This is 81.

I mean, Steadicam was around in things like The Changeling. That was 79, wasn't

it? The Shining, 1980 or 79.

But still, it was a fairly new toy at the time.

So for a very low -budget movie like Black Room to have lots of gliding

steadicam shots was really quite impressive. Now, story -wise, it's doing

something which would turn out to be quite popular and it would turn up in

many films later, which is to take a kind of a vampire story and update it

the modern day.

So he has to constantly replenish his blood every 60 days.

Take away the fangs and the trappings of the gothic melodrama and find a way of

telling it as a modern story involving kind of jaded...

urban sophisticates. In this case, it's a brother and sister who hire out a room

in their house to people who want a place to take women or men so that their

wives don't find out. So it's sort of a passion pit in the Hollywood Hills.

The whole arrangement is that the brother and sister will light some

put on some classical music, put some champagne on ice, so that when you take

your pickup to this den, it all looks... High style, high fashion, and very

impressive. I do have this nice little place we can go to.

How's that sound?

Sounds great.

It turns out that behind this apparently modern erotic setup, the brother and

sister are draining the blood from the people that they encourage to come into

this situation.

So it's kind of a modern vampire story. They're not vampires in the classic

sense. It's explained that the brother has some strange blood condition that

requires him to have his blood replaced constantly by other people's blood.

And so you get these great, rather grisly scenes of young women being

their blood through syringes and things and then buried out in the garden.

It's kind of like a yuppie version of Invasion of the Blood Farmers,

essentially. That's kind of the same story, but whereas Invasion of the Blood

Farmers was Hicksville, this is upscale Beverly Hills.

But it's the same sort of general plot idea.

Norman told me that he wrote the story based on a personal experience where he

and his wife at the time had both been sneaking off to have extramarital

affairs.

without telling the other. And then they found out that they'd both been sort of

doing the same thing, and then the plot of The Black Room involves the same

situation, a couple who end up exploring extramarital sex.

And it's actually quite an interesting treatment of that theme.

It touches on the idea that, you know, family life can suppress eroticism

between couples, you know, that having kids around all the time just diminishes

the arousal levels and makes it hard to kind of have a full...

along the sex life really when

the

story inverts because it's the husband at first who's having all the sexual

freedoms and the affairs and the black room is his tell me about your black

what what about it is it for real But then the

wife gets in on the act and she starts to enjoy the same freedoms and suddenly

he freaks out because it's all right for him.

But the moment she starts to enjoy sex with another guy, then suddenly he wants

to come crashing down on her with full moral force and threatening to leave

So it's very good on the subject of male vanity and hypocrisy as well.

So it's a fairly sophisticated screenplay, really. I feel like a

woman.

Will you give me a break, Ron?

Oh, yeah.

You can go on.

You can go on out the door and out of my life and take the kids with you. As far

as why this ended up on the Section 3 list, it's a little hard to say. We are

down to just the vagaries of the various British police forces and there was no

coordination, no one police force. There was no kind of overall kind of guidance

about what constituted a video nasty or not.

And every police officer would have his own.

your mileage would vary, as they say. And I'm sure some of these people have

never seen a modern horror movie, and just a gout of blood would be enough to

make them think, yes, there's another one.

But it's not a nasty film in the sense that some of the more infamous titles

are. It's just a very, very good film that happens to have a couple of

gory scenes.

But I wouldn't call it a shocker in that way.

Wow.

This place is really something else.

So many candles.

It's like something out of a dream.

I'll take it.

Are there any restrictions?

Restrictions?

No. Do to me what you do to the other women.

I couldn't do that to you. It wouldn't be right.

You're my wife. You're coming on like it's for real. I keep telling you, it's

fantasy.

How far are you going?

How far do you want to go?

Is it?

Yes. I'll go as far as you want. I do have this nice little place we can go

I thought he told you.

What? We're brother and sister.

Jason's been sick all his life.

Oh, it's a very rare blood disease.

He had to constantly replenish his blood every 60 days.

What about your background?

What? What about it? For real.

Son of a bitch.

Would you like to go with me to the room?

Yeah, I'm game.

Right, so Bloodlust, aka Mosquito de Chanda, aka The Vampire of Nuremberg,

whole bunch of other things.

This is one of those movies from the 70s that all these years on, I still am not

sure if I've got a handle on what it is.

It's a Swiss picture.

It's the first...

movie by a director called Marion David Vida, who went on to have what you might

think of as a bland international TV career.

You remember the Saints TV movies with Simon Dutton? Directed one of those.

Otherwise, it falls into a weird category. I can think it's halfway

between Uli Lommel's Tenderness of the Wolves and George Romero's Martin, and

nowhere near as good.

as either of those. But it's more like an artistic portrait of an alienated

psychopath than it is a fleeting exploitation movie.

However, our friends at Duran Video, who released this in the UK, in a version

with most of the sleazy stuff cut out, obviously they wanted an exploitation

picture. You can tell from the cover, they're going for the... There's a naked

bird on the back and there's a psychopath fondling eyeballs on the

it's dubbed so it doesn't have that distancing art film effect.

But looking at the movie, you can sort of see the remains of this arty movie

about a traumatized guy who becomes a necrophile, a corpse

fondler, and then becomes a sort of vampire with this strange artificial

straw fang thing, which is the film's strongest image.

And there's a little bit of weird, porky office humour in there as well, which

may have played better in the original language than it does in the dub.

It is one of those pictures you wonder what somebody who was trying to rent out

a gory, sexy horror film thought of. Because like a lot of European psycho

sleaze movies, it's fundamentally depressing more than anything else.

There are little flickers of artiness in it.

Werner Pockath, who's your lead guy, he's in...

Argento's cat are nine tails and pops up in lots of other European things. But

this is his chance for greatness, his chance for Peter Lorre -dom, as it were.

And he goes for it full out.

I mean, there's a lot of Popeye stuff.

And evoking Lorre makes you realise that the urtext of all these films is M.

This is the movie that they all wanted to be. Fritz Lang's M cast a huge shadow

over the whole serial killer.

genre or alienated lunatic inside the mind of a psycho genre and in the

70s that was still a cool thing for

ambitious filmmakers to latch onto to make your own first feature. Maybe all

way down to Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, yeah, also is in that tradition.

This is a minor addition to that tradition. It's actually quite an

picture if you can see it in a longer cut than the one that came out on video

here. You can tell from the associational materials that they were

push it as something it was not.

I doubt if it's...

fulfilled the fantasies of people who rented it out, hoping for sleazy

exploitation in the 80s, but it's now something that's of minor interest as a

footnote. I suspect it's the eye abuse is the hot ticket nasty thing about it.

Yeah, eyeball gouging was one of those things that crops up over and over again

as the gruesome, gory stuff in the videos that got passed around.

I think it's rather more sensitive about...

necrophilia than you might expect I mean it's a corpse mutilation movie rather

than a corpse sex movie yeah small sub -genre but there it is I I would

imagine that it got hauled in as a Category 3 offensive movie because of

title more than anything else, Bloodlust. I'm not even sure they meant

film. There were no other films on the market with that title. But it's so

generic. It's so...

on the nose as to what people were upset about by the video nasties, the

conjunction of sex and gore, that you sort of feel that Bloodlust could just

any one of a dozen other pictures.

Beaten.

Death and dumb for life.

Incurable.

Beaten by his own father.

Never thought I'd wind up playing nursemaid to the handicapped.

It's not his fault if he's deaf and dumb.

I only managed to peek into his room once.

Very peculiar.

The walls are all black.

You know him.

He's got the whole room full of dots.

He is kind, pleasant, polite.

Funny.

Maybe it's because he can't talk or hear anything.

I think he's in love with you.

In love?

I'm in love with the clouds.

One of these days I'm going to dance over the rooftops.

Get up and get out of here. Go on home to your mommy if you don't know how to

play with the big girls.

How come I always get all the ding -dongs? Too much.

A little playmate for you.

You like, though.

A corpse is butchered up.

I don't know.

A regular 20th century vampire.

Wait till I get my hands on that guy.

I'll show him a thing or two.

They ought to bring back capital punishment. The only way to deal with

tell you. He calls himself mosquito. He's certainly got an active

You've got to give him that.

Well, at least he isn't killing anybody.

Blood Song. This is probably the strangest slasher movie I've ever seen.

from 1982.

It stars Frankie Avalon, who was a 50s heartthrob and he graduated from Greece

couple of years before that, or four years before that, serenading teens to

attacking them with hatchets.

Also starring Donna Wilkes, who went on to Jaws 2.

Why is that the strangest? One of the strangest slasher movies I've ever seen.

haven't seen any other slasher movie where the killer plays a flute.

And also has a psychic connection with a teenage girl.

She got some blood from him, and so they've developed

a psychic link.

So, basically, Frankie Avalon chases Donna Wilkes around the countryside and

film ends with this climactic chase where he chases her with a forklift

It's just the most bizarre film possible.

Frankie Avalon, not strange to slasher movies, funnily enough. He was in

House of Horror in 1969 where he got a scimitar to the genitals.

So he had quite an illustrious career.

Bloodthong was also released in the UK under the title Dream Slayer on a GP

label a few years later.

It's probably one of the more obscure films in the Section 3, but it's quite a

fun one.

It does play a little bit like a TV movie with added blood.

It's not a great surprise, because Alan J. Levy directed things like, I think,

Charlie's Angels and a lot of TV work. So, again, he was a bit of a journeyman,

and this film probably could play on TV with a few edits, and I'm sure it did

back in the early 80s on American TV.

Yeah, well, Frankie Avalon is not the only 50s teen heart fraud. There was

Tab Hunter in the arousal of Killing Co -Heads.

So there's, you know, it's a rich heritage here. But yeah, Blood Song is

I'd say, one of the strangest slasher movies you'll ever see.

Well, it's on the same label, the IFS label, as Night of the Bloody Apes and

Night of the Demons. Graduation Day was on this label as well. So possibly they

got confused with that. One of the least inspiring video covers you can imagine.

I can't imagine anyone getting too worked up over it. It's bizarre to

mean, it's a little bit gory. There's a little bit of gore in here, but not very

much at all. So it's a bit of a strange, you know, you wonder why it would be on

the Section 3 list. I can't really understand why, unless somebody really

flutes, which possibly, or hated Frankie Avalon, possibly.

But, yeah, I can't really see why this is the mystery why it ended up in

3.

I told you this place was giving me nightmares.

I keep seeing some lunatic killing people.

I'm scared.

You're crazy. Don't say that. A fractured left leg, severe concussion,

type O positive.

That's rough to come by.

Do we have a sufficient supply?

Yes, Doctor.

Do you think I did it on purpose?

If you hadn't been so drunk and run into that car, I wouldn't be a cripple now,

would I? The donor is a patient at the state mental hospital.

Some guy killed one of the orders. You mean the loony bin?

That's in Corvallis County, right?

Out of our jurisdiction, right? Hey, where are you headed?

San Francisco.

Jesus Christ.

You've been playing that same thing for over an hour.

Don't you know anything else?

I told you my daddy made this for me just before he died.

You're just like all the rest.

They tried to take it away from me, too.

But I got it back.

Hi. Hi.

Where are you headed?

Stamford Bay. You going that far?

Well, I guess I can get you there. Hop in.

Is this the way to Amarillo?

Look, I'm sorry about singing, but Amarillo, as any Spanish scholar would

means yellow.

And in Italian, that means giallo. And here's Paul Nash's giallo film, Blue

of the Broken Doll, on Canon Video.

The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll.

It was a first for Paul Nashie at the time because it's his non -supernatural

role. He wasn't really known for those. He was more famous for Waldemar

Doninsky, The Werewolf. This comes from Profilmes, which was the hammer of

Spain. They made a lot of films around this time, Paul Nashie being there,

Christopher Lee, in fact, although I see Paul Nashie more as being in the Brian

Blessed school of actors.

Jacinto Molina Alvarez was Pornashi's real name. He directed under that name

too. Here, Pornashi plays a drifter picked up by the usual Spanish

and used by her and her sisters as a handyman around the house. In fact, the

title, House of Psychotic Women, sort of gives away the end of the film.

Not so much as a real faux pas at the ending, in fact, where you can see the

camera crew clearly reflect... in the window of the nursery where it's

set. This pre -certificated Canon video was constantly seized by the police.

That was solely mainly to do with the fact that the cover features, you know,

the key gore scenes, really, even though the special effects, even at the time,

1973, were pretty rubbish.

I mean, when they're wandering around with the eyeballs in the jar, I mean, it

couldn't be faker. I think why this got a lot of attention was the fact that

halfway through the film, a pig is slaughtered for real, and, of course,

slaughter. Yeah, it's not a great thing to watch.

Carla Fowler had directed this movie, as he did a lot of films with Paul Mashey

in them, Curse of the Devil, Horror Rises from the Tomb being two others.

But the most shocking moment of all for me in this is actually watching Paul

Nashie have sex.

His rotund girth heaving away is actually the most off -putting sight in

Nothing to do with anything nasty and nothing to do with any of the tacky

special effects.

Are you jealous?

I'm not the same as my sister.

He wasn't satisfied with just killing her. He gouged out her eyes.

The blue eyes of the broken doll.

Good

morning,

Pierre. Good morning, Doctor.

We need you down at the morgue.

He's committed another killing.

The blue eyes, the broken dog.

Was she stabbed as well?

No, she was strangled.

The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll with Paul Naschy,

Diana Loris, and Maria Percy.

The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll.

This is Brutes and Savages, 1978, directed by Arthur Davies.

It's a Mondo film.

It's a mixture of actual footage that he'd seen when he'd been out into

places like Indonesia looking at tribes spliced with basically reenactments.

Three of the young men agreed to enact for us their manhood initiation

The idea of the film...

as reflected in the title Brutes and Savages, is to try and find out whether

as in humans, are actually genteel, or whether there is any distinction between

us and the animals in terms of what we consider savage behaviour.

And afterwards, when you too have experienced life and death in the raw,

decide who are the brutes and who are the savages now.

To see some of the behaviours that we are shown from across the world and also

how this is compared to behaviour within the animal kingdom.

For example, you will see bits where various animals hack it out and, you

chew each other to bits and so forth.

We invite you to witness the savagery, the haunting rituals, the fight to

survive. There's one lovely piece, for example, whereby we're told about mating

rituals in which particular instance the women are smeared in what they consider

a perfume in theory.

which is a mixture of dung and honey.

Their oil is a strained mixture of honey and goat dung.

Their perfume, an overpowering mixture of the sweet and the sour.

It's interesting because the way that they are kind of interacting, you can

this idea of this notion of womanhood, that even though it's a completely

different culture, we'd kind of recognise and relate to at the same

thinking, Jesus God, I don't want to imagine that.

For them, to be seen unoiled carries the shame attached to nudity in Victorian

England. Alternatively, some of the bits are also incredibly funny.

We will see, for example, things such as a manhood ritual.

The one who succeeds is now a man, and as a reward, that knight can sleep with

any woman of his choice, married or not.

Now, at this point, it gets very, very silly because the guy ends up fighting

with what is very obviously a plastic rock.

And it kind of undermines the seriousness of the film. It does have

points as well.

For example, the music is done by Risotto Lani, of course, from Cannibal

Holocaust. The music is actually really fab.

We invite you to share with Arthur Davis and his hidden cameras the blood and

the beauty of places where life is always a struggle and killing as natural

the rising day.

One thing that is actually quite hard to watch in it that may have involved its

inclusion in Section 3...

is the event of animal torture and things that are going wrong with

Now, the interesting thing is about this, it makes you realise how

specific horror is.

We can see things like, say, the murder of a goat, where at one point we

actually see the goat's head picked up and it's kind of whittled around. It's

very, very hard to watch for a Western audience.

And it's actually quite sad because we're so unused to connecting in our

what we may eat.

with what was once alive and yet at the same time it does kind of remind you

that as you know with how these people live it's a very different way of

thinking it's a very different connection to nature and that does not

necessarily mean you know to them it's not bad it's a rite of passage and it

suddenly makes you realize how much we're conditioned to think of certain

with horror

Thank you.

Several years before he brought us Cannibal Holocaust, Ruggiero Diodato

Ultimo Monte Cannibale, which translates as Cannibal on this Duran video copy

here. An atrocious transfer, by the way, is the BBFC print, cut by five minutes,

so why the police kept seizing on it, no -one could really understand.

It had a lot to do with the fact that it featured the usual cannibal staple,

which was...

animals being slaughtered in nasty ways although the main scene in the italian

version where a woman sort of like gives birth to her newborn baby bites the

umbilical cord and then tosses the baby into the jaws of an alligator does not

survive in this particular print umberto lenzi should have directed this it was

conceived as the sequel to deep river savages the film that started off the

cannibal genre in the first place that's why it stars ivan rasmus and mimi lay

again In fact, Mimi Leigh has a great scene in it where her stomach's torn

and coals are put in and she's sort of cooked on the inside to be more tender.

In fact, Umberto Lenzi used exactly the same scene in his later cannibal movie,

Heaten Alive. Why I think this film is so successful is because...

Dave Jackson, Matthew Mofosky, really delivers an amazing performance here. I

mean, whether he's ripping a heart out of a cannibal to prove that he's one of

the Stone Age crew, or wandering around totally naked, completely sort of like

not even noticing it, I think he's absolutely brilliant in it.

It's a shame that it does get such an atrocious transfer, and it's a shame

the director is sort of misspelt on the cover. It's Ruggero Diodati on this,

which just goes to show...

Back in those days, nobody really cared what they were doing. It was all about

the video cover.

But Cannibal is a particularly good movie, even though you do see the

being slaughtered, the alligators being gutted, the snakes being stripped.

Ruggiero told me that all the animals that were killed on camera were then

by the cannibals themselves to be eaten, which they would have normally done

anyway. Go on, George, go in closer to Deodato.

For more than three months now, we've been living in the jungle.

Although the gore scenes are quite surprisingly strong, what's quite strong

me are the sex scenes between Mimi Leigh and Massimo Foschi, and they're very

strong. I mean, even though Mimi Leigh's got her sort of Selfridges makeup

counter eyeliner on, they look pretty authentic, and they really must have

for it, but...

You know, it shouldn't be on the video nasties at all. It's a beautiful looking

movie.

Go on, George, go in closer to Deodato.

For more than three months now, we've been living in the jungle. Our only

of communication with the outside world has been this small plane, which at the

moment is under repair, and the helicopter has been bringing out our

We came here in the first place to make a film taken from a true story, and

while filming, we've lived a real adventure ourselves in a world where

cannibalism still exists.

It seems impossible that today there are still primitive tribes who have never

seen a white man.

Tribes still living in the Stone Age. It's very dangerous here. In fact, we

to be continually protected by armed men.

It's dangerous, all right, but it fascinates me. It has no pity for man.

strikes when you least expect it.

Three months of fear, of danger.

One of the local technicians disappeared a few days ago.

Of course, we sent out search parties, but there's little chance of finding him

in this infernal jungle.

The Tajahdots are cannibals.

This is their environment, their world.

At great risk, we have filmed the rituals and everyday life of a unique

A rare document of the last cannibal world.

And here we have Jeff Franco's Cannibals or The Cannibals from 1980, which was

made as an obvious attempt to cash in on the then popular cannibal genre which

was spreading throughout Italy.

But it failed it rather miserably, but it does provide some really

laughs along the way. And the next day we found a scientific expedition that

been attacked and eaten by a tribe of cannibals.

Cannibals? Perhaps they were wild beasts.

We follow the plight of a professor, Jeremy Taylor, who was played by Al

of Zombie Flesh Eaters. We get this professor and his family on an

the Amazon jungle when a small group of cannibals actually jump on the boat and

eat his wife alive in slow motion. Well, he eventually loses his left forearm to

the cannibals as well.

And the young daughter, meanwhile, is sort of shipwrecked and washed up.

and is later found by the cannibals, and for some reason, the doctor has their

white cannibal queen.

Anyway, we cut to many years later, and with the help of his doctor, who he's

having an affair with, who's played by Franco's wife, Lina Rome, he's recovered

enough from the trauma to set up a new expedition to find his missing daughter.

I want to set up an expedition to go back to Malawi and find my daughter.

she's still alive.

He approaches a shady businessman, a Portuguese businessman called Martin,

is incidentally played by Jess Franco himself.

to lead an expedition.

Are you Mr. Martin?

That's me.

But when cannibals are mentioned, he goes, oh, I'm not doing this, and then

just sort of backs out of it.

Franco, as usual, is hilarious in the scene, but his awful English dub voice

really is something else. It's just ridiculous.

So what about it? Even the Americans deal with the Russians without people

making a big thing out of it.

So they decide it would be a good bit of fun to trek back to the jungle in

search of his now older daughter, who this time around is played by the blonde

Sabrina Siani.

who, incidentally, Franco claims was one of the most stupid actresses he ever

directed. Some really memorable things, notably the cannibals themselves, who

apparently, according to Franco, again, played by local gypsies. And the gore as

well, really terrible.

Loads of hacked -up mannequins, pretty much like you also saw in Cannibal

Terror. The making of the film, though, is really confusing as well. Apparently,

when Franco was busy shooting The Devil Hunter in Portugal, the financing came

through for cannibals.

which was going to be an Italian -French co -production with Franco Prosperi set

to direct.

It probably explains the presence of Al Kleiser and Sabrina Siani, the two

Italian leads which would obviously have been intended for the Italian market.

I'm unsure why, but Eurocine decided to draft Uncle Jezin to direct the film in

other counties, after which he went back and continued to shoot Devil Hunter.

It sort of explains the prosperity credit at the start of the film, I

No one really knows why it's there, but it's there.

I should also mention this was all going on at exactly the same time Eurocine

was shooting the atrocity Cannibal Terror, hence the use of a lot of

interchangeable footage and actors, all done to cut even more costs.

Franco has actually stated that he hates the cannibal genre, but because

Eurocine were now set to produce the whole slate of his movies, he thought

just carry on and get on with the job and get it done.

It seems admitted, however, that it's probably the worst cannibal movie ever

made.

Anyway, Cannibals was apparently pretty popular in the UK, so I suppose it had

three releases.

There's a new sort of silly Hollywood one.

There's also a release from the EVC, and another company later put it out called

Serpent.

Although it's desirable amongst collectors, though, it seems to be

the cannibal things, and everything is just missing. It's just completely

butchered, so I'd avoid that one personally.

White Goddess.

White Goddess.

White Goddess.

Jeremy Taylor.

I'm a specialist in tropical diseases. I'm married with a daughter and I was

born in Columbus, Ohio in 1940.

I was sent by the Shilton Foundation to my lobby and my daughter disappeared.

Eating her eyes.

Our

enemy

is the white men.

I'm coming back to our territory.

Death to the white invaders.

I heard some French fries a while back coming from the bank.

And the next day, we found a scientific expedition had been attacked and eaten

by a tribe of cannibals.

Elizabeth. Elizabeth.

Bye. Thank you.

Maria!

Can you hear us? Not even... Fenton!

Fenton, where are you?

Fenton!

So this film is The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, which is directed by Fred

Shapisi, and it was written by Thomas Keneally, who wrote Schindler's Ark. Of

course, Schindler's List was based on his novel. And this film has a really

interesting place in both Australian cinema history and also in the history

the development of Australia as a colony. It's set on the eve, it's set in

on the eve of Australian Federation, which is basically when Australia became

unified country.

And Australia has long lied to itself and the world by saying we were a

that were unified without a civil war.

We were a country that was not founded on war and bloodshed, but was founded on

unity. And actually, this film is a perfect example of the fact that this is

complete rubbish.

The chant of Jimmy Blacksmith is the chant of the underdog.

It's the story of Jimmy Blacksmith who...

In modern parlance would be considered one of the stolen generation, which was

Aboriginal children that were taken away from their tribes and their Aboriginal

parents and put into white homes.

Master Blacksmith?

Where have you been, Master Blacksmith? And it was hoped that the Aboriginality

would be bred out of them.

So I can get married to a nice girl.

Respectable. A nice girl from a farm.

Of good stock.

then your children would be only quarter -calfed and your grandchildren only one

-eighth -calfed.

Yes, they're black at all.

And so the eugenic argument would be, you know, if we integrate them, then we

will redeem them or save them from their own Aboriginality. And what happens

with this is that, aside from the fact that currently in Australia there are 67

definitions of Aboriginality, it isn't in itself a thing. It's not a race. It's

not...

kind of cultural identity but in terms of the tribal specificity of an

Indigenous Australian taking the child away from the tribe retained

that child's sense of blackness but not that child's sense of cultural belonging

or identity and so in this film we are reminded and Jimmy is reminded over and

over of his blackness yet we never get a referent to what that could mean so

there's no

possibility of an occupation of a cultural identity in the same way that,

African Americans have been able to reclaim their cultural identity.

And so it's a very tragic kind of tale because it is a tale that situates a

racial other and says, well, we've integrated you. So Jimmy has a white

But at the same time, his brother is hunted like a dog. And on the back of

video, we see his brother Mott is actually displayed as you would display

hunted animal that you've caught.

And so Jimmy is forced between, are you going to be a civilised white person or

are you going to be this animal that we need to hunt down because you're tribal

and you need to be tamed? There are a lot of other issues that you see that...

remain really prevalent in Australian history.

For example, there's a scene where you see a black young man hung in custody.

And still in Australia now, we have a huge issue with suicide in custody among

young Aboriginal men.

There is an argument that these men are being murdered by the police. There is

another argument that the suicide rate is so high because Aboriginal men simply

cannot integrate into what we consider

sort of Western white legal systems. Because remember, we're talking about

tribal people. We're not talking about a unified, ubiquitous kind of cultural

identity.

And so Shapisi, I think, does a brilliant job because in the scene, the

framed by the window and it shows this kind of framing. How do we frame racial

alterity? How do we talk about racial otherness without imposing a Western eye

upon that racial otherness?

Put very simply, the film is a revenge tale because at the end Jimmy goes crazy

and kills people with an axe. And it's seen as a kind of treachery because he

kills the very white people that have tried to take him in and adopt him. But

what it shows is that...

There is no integration.

The integration was a fantasy of the white people, not a fantasy of the black

people. And also, the forced integration is no integration at all. It's a

colonisation.

Whole generations of black children were taken in, they were used, they were

meant to be part of the family, but they weren't. They were sexually abused,

they were physically abused, they were used as servants, they essentially

slaves. That's what I've done.

Declared war!

It's a very radical film. It's a film that I find very surprising in that

don't talk about it more often.

And I think that potentially, while it has quite a high level of violence, it

is set in a lawless time. It's on that cusp where Australia was becoming a

federation, but it's still essentially a Wild West film in a lot of ways. But

also there's a higher political argument that...

This kind of exposure of both the stolen generation and the claim that Australia

was founded without a civil war, when Australia was actually founded on mass

genocide, is something that...

would unsurprisingly be considered completely unpalatable to the British

and to the BBFC.

And so depending on how conspiratorial one is feeling at any given time, you

could argue it could be because it is a very violent film in the same kind of

way as any other native gone wild or lawless Wild West film.

But it also has some serious political comments and issues that to this day

remain... volatile in Australian society and in Australian politics and

potentially it's certainly not a film that one would want marketed in terms of

trying to ablate the blame for the genocides that occurred during both

colonisation but also that were still occurring 120, 130 and now over 200

later.

always tell a mission replay.

He had seven sticks a week, Tucker.

Horse, sleeping in stables, no boots.

Where have you been, Master Blasen?

Haven't it occurred to you that you might be needed for higher things?

Hmm?

Ah, you do read, don't you?

Of course I read.

Morning, boss.

Yes.

There. No reference.

That's cause you can't bloody write.

I'll come to help you get rich.

Trust your nigger to turn my property into a black's camp then.

What about me groceries?

We need them. Look, the husband's not a charitable institution, Mr. Backsmith.

What for you lend your wife to a white boy? White fella don't lend his wife to

anybody.

I understand you're going to marry a white girl, Mr. Blacksmith.

You?

Marry a white girl?

I told him.

You owe me, Mr. Newby, for 900 yards.

Listen to me.

Don't you come to Bushlaw with me.

Have you seen my pal grave?

You'll only lose that child of yours if you stay with the blacks.

I believe you've got a real, genuine wife.

Jesus, you're a fucking bloody black.

Black bastards.

The chant of Jimmy Blackson is the chant of the underdog.

That's what I've done.

Declared war!

Right, so we have The Child by Robert Voskanian.

Now, this is one of my favourites. The Child, a terrifying thriller.

I wrote a book a few years ago called Nightmare USA and it's one of the titles

that got me interested in the area and made me determined to write the book.

when I made a list of people I wanted to reach, I was desperate to reach the guy

that made this film. So strange.

Immediately you just think, what world are we in here? I don't know where we

are. It seems to be set in the past. No -one actually refers to this, but

there's very, very old cars and people look a little out of time.

It was all filmed at a soon -to -be -demolished house on the property

to an oil company, the Standard Oil Company.

You see some sort of oil pumps in the background at various times.

It's got a kind of no -man's -land feel to it. You're away from the main roads.

There are some roads. The heroine arrives, drives down a sort of a dirt

the beginning of the film.

But there's this strange kind of... interzone feeling where you just think

doesn't seem to belong anywhere we're in california but you know it's there are

no traces of modern california in it and then within two or three minutes she

crashes the car and climbs out and has to walk through some woodland and

tilted angles and bizarre music they throw everything at you straight away so

the whole film feels bizarre from the very beginning the music is a kind of a

mixture of uh

Very, very melodramatic piano runs that sound like Richard Claydon warming up

before a concert. And then with synthesizers from the dark ages of

and really raw electronic sounds as well.

It's a great combination.

Again, it's just one of those things you think, what are you doing to it? It

sounds like an old -fashioned Mills and Boone romance.

with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop sort of jamming over the top of it, which is

just bliss, you know.

And it's also got the kind of performances that come from

filmmakers having to make do with who they can find.

So some people are good. The lead girl, the child herself, is excellent.

I thought she was supposed to be taking care of me.

Very, very creepy, scary.

sarcastic, mocking, insolent sort of girl. The kind of girl that John Waters

would have cast in a movie. She's just great.

You shut up!

Then you get characters like this old lady who takes up quite a bit of the

20 minutes of the film. My husband always complained I talk too much.

But I always complained he didn't listen enough.

I don't know if you remember those adverts for, like, kind of Stannis

that you used to get on television, where you get some old deer saying, sort

like, my niece bought me this. And sort of like they're kind of deliberately

done so she doesn't sound like a professional actor. Well, she sounds

come from one of those ads.

It gets dark in these woods very quickly.

Stay on the path.

Don't wander off into the woods.

Why? Are there any dangerous animals?

Why do you ask that?

The acting styles are all over the place. That just creates turbulence.

interesting turbulence in the film you know sometimes people feel like they're

skilled sometimes they're unskilled but it just wrenches you around in the film

and makes everything feel unpredictable so i don't mind that she's kind of rough

around the edges it kind of works harry you better harry it was made by a guy

called robert boscanian who was born in iran but he's of armenian descent and

then when he moved to america he studied film at film school in california And

whilst he was there, he met a guy called Robert Dadashian, and they became very

good friends. And Dadashian, born in Germany, was also an Armenian. His

were Armenian as well. So I suppose you could say, in a way, this is an Armenian

horror film made in America. The director and the producer both have the

family background.

And the DP was Iranian as well.

So it's a very unusual sort of mix, which, I don't know, maybe accounts for

of the slightly...

exotic and unusual, untypical feel of the film. It doesn't feel like a normal

American exploitation film.

It's also dubbed, which makes it feel a bit Euro as well, you know, a bit kind

of Euro horror, because it's entirely post -synced.

It's also quite surprisingly gory at times. I mean, it starts out seeming

it's just a weird, kind of a weirdo horror film, you know, where most of the

is going to be the strange style of the thing.

But then suddenly...

Things pop up, you think, oh, that's actually quite grisly. And you'd almost

grown used to it, just enjoying it for strangeness' sake. And then you get

ripped off. And towards the end, some really rather thrilling and exciting

zombie material as well.

Because the plot involves a little girl who has psychic influence and congress

with zombies that are living in the local cemetery. It's never explained

the hell's going on. She's just friends.

with the corpses that hang out at the cemetery, over whom she has some sort of

control. So if anyone pisses her off, then she just sends her friends to go

get them.

And towards the end, as you see more and more of these living dead creatures, it

turns into sort of a Night of the Living Dead situation.

Apparently the director and the producer, when they were trying to

kind of film to make, discussed Night of the Living Dead and said, well, this

made a whole lot of money for a very small outlay.

Let's try and do something similar. But it's got a lot of other elements in

there as well. It's got kind of the bad seed element of the vicious sort of

child and, you know, psychic elements as well, which are a mile away from the

usual kind of zombie sort of story.

I brought my friends with me tonight, Mrs.

Whitfield.

They want to meet you.

Generally speaking, a very unpredictable mixture of elements and a very out

there visual style.

And I think really one of the most special and unusual films in this

bracket of movie making that I've seen. I think maybe the reason why it

attracted the attention of people looking to censor or remove these films

the shelves is maybe the fact that it...

centered around a child and the idea being that you know here's a child who's

presumably been exposed to graphic horror in the making of the film maybe

were worried about that there are a couple of as i say a couple of bloody

moments which stand out it's hard to say because it's not it's not sleazy that's

the thing there's no sex so there's no um there's none of that kind of a

of sex and horror which really rings a lot of alarm bells for for the

In this case, it's some amusing, pleasantly splashy gore moments and a

child. I don't know if maybe it was just the fact that a child and the horror

stuff were being brought into conjunction.

That's the closest thing I can think of as a possibility.

The face of an angel.

The heart of a killer.

The power of the devil.

I want to know who you're meeting in the cemetery.

I don't have to tell you anything.

I'm going to work for them. I'm going to take care of Rosalie Norton. The death

of parents when a child is rather young, it leaves you feeling so alone.

I have friends. They do favors for me.

What kind of favors?

You'll find out.

Stay right here. I'll be right back.

All right, who's in here?

Rosalie, stop it!

They're going to come and hurt you both.

Hurt you bad.

Rosalie!

The child wants to play hide and go...

kill who's in here her power

is unearthly you go away rosalie go away and leave me alone her

acts monstrous her secret electrifying of unspeakable evil

terrifying thriller.

Christmas Evil, a film made in 1980 by Lewis Jackson, who would rather you

called it You Better Watch Out. I actually think that's a much better

too. Partly because Christmas Evil just, it got it lumped in. I mean, there's a

film called New Year's Evil, which is the same joke. But there were a whole

bunch of other films. Everybody knows the, you know, the Violet Night, Deadly

Night films, the psycho Santa slasher pictures.

Christmas Evil is just a lot better than those films, but it's also a lot more

ambitious. It's not just the simple guy in a Santa suit, you know, impales

people on reindeer antlers type movies, much as we love those kind of pictures.

It's a much more intriguing and complicated film about the meaning

of Christmas and that whole thing about, you know, naughty or nice.

And it's about a guy...

who believes in Christmas so much that he eventually goes crazy and starts

punishing people who defile the spirit of Christmas in a sort of

vigilante, Travis Bickle kind of way. But also, and this is a massive spoiler,

at the end it seems that he really is Santa Claus, yeah, in his van.

crashes into the river but flies off like the sleigh to prove that he's

in christmas so much he's actually become santa but i heard him exclaim as

drove out of sight merry christmas to all and it's a it's a very witty film

a you know a low budget grotty grungy new york independent picture come on

i want to stay home and watch tv who do you think you are your father get in

It was produced by Ed Pressman, who has a really interesting track record. He

backed Sisters and Conan the Barbarian, because he had the rights to that for

years and years. But his fortune came from the Pressman Toy Company, so they

were able to use his toy factory and his product to bulk out the Christmasiness

of it.

There's a remarkable central performance from Brendan Maggot who isn't quite fat

enough to play Santa The

original casting was

George Zunzer who later became a familiar character actor He's the big

sweaty guy in lots and lots of films. He's in Basic Instinct for instance, but

he

He fell out with the director during pre -production, so he got bumped, and

Brandon Maggett stepped in to get... I think the role of a lifetime.

He's also somebody who's very familiar. He turns up in lots of little parts in

bigger pictures.

But he really grabs this one.

I have something for you. I have superlative taste.

And...

His brother is played by Jeffrey DeMunn, who's another now very familiar

character actor. He's a favourite of the director Frank Darabont, who puts him

in everything he makes.

But you see, he was once young, which is something you get with character actors

occasionally. When you see the film they shockingly made before, they became the

grizzled grey old guy that they're now known for playing.

Why won't you understand?

I wanted an older brother.

Somebody to look up to, to be proud of, to talk to.

My brother is an emotional cripple.

It's a film that's had an on -off reputation.

It got hauled in a bit with the crackdown on tasteless Santa slashes.

people looked at it and said, actually, I'm not even sure if this is the right

genre pigeonhole we've got it in. There ought to be somewhere else for kind of

truly demented spirit of Christmas films.

John Waters is a great admirer of it, and so am I.

I've always said it's one of the best of the Christmas horror films. I'd put it

in its box probably with Gremlins or A Christmas Story or Black Christmas.

All right, now sing Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. Come on now, louder now, with more feeling. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

It's had a certain...

revival of late. It's a film that's now available in a much nicer DVD edition

than the rather grimy video release that we're celebrating here.

This was an Ivor Film Services release.

They billed themselves as from Pinewood, which is the heart of British film

industry. I'm sure they had a prefab unit somewhere near Pinewood.

I have a funny feeling this was one of those videos that just got hauled in

because of the company's other product. They had Night the Bloody Apes and the

Texas Chainsaw Massacre and some much gorier pictures.

It may well have ticked off the hot button of it being about Christmas. In

America, there was this weird scandal about the horror of making

a horror film about... Christmas as if it had never been done before.

In fact, I mean, you know, those of us who grew up with, you know, Joan Collins

being strangled in Tales from the Crypts, all that kind of stuff, thought,

just an old idea, why are you upset now?

But they were over Silent Night, Deadly Night, and I think Christmas Evil kind

of got scooped in with that.

Merry Christmas!

Although, as with a lot of the films we're talking about here,

In the long term, being tarred with this brush was not a bad thing, because

it made...

the movies more collectible, it made people seek them out, and those on the

that had certain qualities, that meant that at least people saw it, it wasn't

the thing you get when you track down Final Exam, and you think, huh, this

somebody, and then you forget it completely, it was, oh, this upset

you know what, it's actually quite a good film.

Good boys, Gunman.

But if you're bad boys and girls, your name goes in the bad boys and girls

And I'll bring you something horrible.

We hope all the boys and girls out there have been good this year, don't we,

Bill? We sure do.

I

have

something for you. I have superlative taste.

police can identify him. Merry Christmas, Frank.

Gary, he's gonna get them. Avoid anyone dressed as Santa Claus.

When that kid's scared again, they won't think everything's coming to them so

easy. They're bad?

Santa's hit list is goddamn selective.

He's making a list, checking it twice.

Gonna find out who's naughty or... No, no, it wasn't any of these Santa Claus.

His suit had dark fur.

Don't! It's gonna hurt our kids.

We're not even sure it's him.

Not sure my ass.

Look at the fur on that suit.

Communion, or the cult horror movie of all time. Well, not quite, but Alfred

Sowell's movie is pretty good. It featured the debut of Brooke Shield.

Oh,

you look beautiful.

The reason why it kept getting re -released and re -titled as Alice, Sweet

Alice, Holy Terror.

Brooke Shields in Holy Terror.

And it's mainly all about Alfred Sowell's childhood when he was growing

Paterson, New Jersey.

It's all geared around characters he knew, put into a psycho -thriller

He always said that he saw the church as this Gothic castle and the mass as a

blood sacrifice.

He wanted to do something about that. I met him at the time of release of the

movie, which was put out by Hemdale.

Communion. What is the mystery of the murders that happen again and again? Is

Alice? She's only 12 and wouldn't hurt a fly. Or would she? And see Tintorera,

Communion and Tintorera in a big double thriller programme at a cinema near you.

And he told me then that in 1961, which is the timescale of this film, that's

when the church in his area was at its most powerful.

I invite you to tell them Amen.

that you wouldn't normally associate with a horror movie. Most horror films

you in the back of the chest. Here you get a brick in the mouth, you get a

in the foot.

These are vulnerable parts of the body that Alfred thought that we could all

empathise with.

He never made anything as good as this, unfortunately.

Pandemonium was awful, Tanya's Island was pretty terrible.

But he's still active in the industry as a production designer on TV shows like

Veronica Mars.

You'll notice a Psycho poster in one of the scenes.

That's Alfred Soul's deliberate attempt to steer you in the right direction,

because this is an homage to Hitchcock and to Roman Polanski at the same time.

Linda Miller, by the way, was Jason Miller's wife from The Exorcist, and

Roth, who played the pathologist, was the subject of her own movie back in the

50s, I'll Cry Tomorrow, starring Susan Hayward.

In holy terror, Alice was too old to play with dolls and too young to make

love. Brooke Shields, as you've never seen her before, she was too beautiful

play with boys and too young to play with men.

So Alice began to play with death.

She's made repeated requests that we could see a psychiatrist.

She has a knack of making things look like accidents.

She's dead.

She's dead.

She tried to kill me. No more dolls. No more toys.

Alice only plays with bodies.

It's too late to save her.

A story of unnatural love and unnatural death.

Brookfield in Holy Terror.

It's too late for prayers.

Okay, well, Dawn of the Mummy. Now, possibly the greatest trash aesthetic is

monsters versus models, and this film has it in spades. So basically, there's

Beauty and the Beast. Amanda D 'Ossorio did it very well in the third Blind Dead

film, Horror of the Zombies.

But essentially what you have here is a gawed -up version of a mummy movie.

by Franco Grammer, who was the Egyptian director of the film. He actually shot

this in Egypt, and what he did was, the story is essentially, as a lot of mummy

films is, you have a flashback to 3 ,000 years ago, and you have a pharaoh being

buried with a lot of his slaves, and a curse being put upon it, saying anyone

who disturbs this will, you know, become a cropper, essentially.

Hear me, O Egypt, to the riches of Zephyrman.

be stolen all egypt will tremble of course what happens is um in 1981 you

have some grave robbers and you also have some models flowing over from new

so they turn up in flares and early 80s fashions and the grave robbers find the

tomb they open it up and then by a stroke of luck well actually probably

luck bad luck the photographer decides actually that'd be a great place to

a fashion shoot so what they do is they go in there and the light and basically

bring back the pharaoh to life and of course as as it's the early 80s what

done he's obviously been watching some fortune movies the zombie pharaoh

with his henchmen to basically eat the models and chase them around the desert

and

it ends in a climactic scene in a egyptian town

Where, again, very Fortress Romero -esque scene, where Egyptian wife, in

wedding banquet, literally, the wife becomes the wedding banquet, and as they

pull back the curtain there she is, and then she's being pulled out.

And there's a slam -bam kind of fiery climax with the model throwing molotov

cocktails at a seven -foot zombie pharaoh, which is not the kind of thing

see every day.

No!

I do love this film. I mean, it's a shameless rip -off.

of the Romero and the Fulci films.

And Frank Agrama, he made lots of films, I think, in Egypt back in the day. And

I think this is probably his only horror movie, because he also made Queen Kong

back in 1976, which, of course, is a horror in a completely different way, as

I'm sure if you've seen that, you'll know. And Frank Agrama said with the

as they say, he was looking back, he shot it, most of it was actually shot in

Egypt. And so for a low -budget film, had fantastic locations.

But what he said, one of the problems actually with shooting in Egypt at the

time was gore was no problem at all, but nudity was a problem.

And so all of the actresses basically kept their tops on, which is not the

of thing you would expect in a film of this type.

And he said that was the one thing that they couldn't do with light -topless

nudity in the film. But essentially, it's a very, very gory film.

And even the better for it. And again, it's a great trash aesthetic.

You've just basically got beautiful women being chased by monsters. And what

more could you ask for?

With Dawn of the Mummy, essentially, yes, it was probably the extreme gore

got it noted.

It's really far too silly to be offensive in any way, shape or form.

course, back in the early 80s or even into the mid to late 80s, then people

worked up over much less. So, yes, it's probably the goreness that certainly saw

it being fingered by the long arm of the law.

and dawn of the mummy of course was uh put out by video space who also put out

of course you will speak uh you know a notorious video nasty so again that may

have been one of the reasons why it was nobbled by the uh by the boys in blue

egypt land of the pyramids a

nice place to visit now i'm going to be clear sailing

Saphira Moon, ancient pharaoh of Egypt, has slept for 3 ,000 years.

A mummy in an undiscovered tomb.

Only now to be awakened by invaders searching for his forbidden treasure.

Dawn of the Mummy.

What terror have these young Americans brought upon themselves?

How will they escape the pharaoh's deadly wrath?

His armies rising from beneath the ageless sands to avenge their master's

Help me, please!

Help me!

No one is safe.

Nothing can stop him.

There is nowhere to hide.

They just keep coming.

Armies of the living dead, thirsting for blood.

They are everywhere, and their quest for vengeance knows no limits.

to stop them but you can't escape from

the dawn of the mummy

bizarre

experiment turned teens into killers in dead kids here's the cover of michael

laughlin's debut feature which had it supported the name of its original title

strange behavior would not have had any of the tension that it got from the

police as a possible video nasty dead jid they'll scare

the living daylights out of you it was called strange behavior mainly because

was part of a trilogy i mean michael loughlin did do strange invaders the

part We never actually got round to the third part, which was going to be called

The Adventures of Philip Strange.

I actually went to New York and tracked Michael Laughlin down because I loved

the movie so much. And I was amazed to find out that he'd actually been the

producer of The Whisperers, Joanna and Tulane Blacktop, I mean, three other

major cult films. His love of 50s sci -fi and horror was the reason why he

wanted to make this movie. It was written, of course, by Bill Condon,

massive fan bill condon of course went on to do gods and monsters and dream

girls the musical wait a minute like i'd like to know a little more about what's

going on before you start this is a very very exciting experiment back then both

were sort of like 50s horror and sci -fi fanatics who got together to do

something in that idiom a little high am i supposed to be a little high This

film was produced in 1981 in New Zealand, which actually makes it the

New Zealand Osploitation movie, produced by Anthony Guinane, of course, an

Osploitation head honcho.

We invite you to come with us on a terrifying experiment.

The ending surprised a lot of people because it's actually not a shock twist.

actually ends very happily with a wedding, but Loughlin told me that was

original purpose of it, was because...

He'd seen so many movies with shock twists, he actually wanted to do

that was quite lightweight and normal, and he thought that was a twist ending

itself. An experiment with dead kids.

Why this is quite important in the scheme of things is because you'll

that Fiona Lewis sports the hairdo, and Ridley Scott was such a fan of this

movie that he made sure that Sean Young had the same hairdo in Blade Runner.

Also, Susanna Moore, who is Michael Laughlin's wife, was not only the

designer, she was the waitress that you see in the movie.

Horror fans will notice that the mask the killer wears is based on Tor

from Plan 9 From Outer Space, but what you probably didn't know is that the

of Dr Sangel was originally down for Klaus Kinski, but Kinski wanted too much

money, and so Arthur Dignam did it instead.

The combined forces...

and the so -called humanists had served to... What is this character?

..at least temporarily.

And not only did dead kids become strange behaviour, it also became Small

Massacre. That was the title it had on its video re -release in 1986 in a

proper, certificated version.

Here, in the peaceful midwestern town of Galesburg, nothing much ever happens.

Morning, Mr McNally.

The kids go to an ordinary college.

However, this is an ordinary professor.

He's dead.

And they help science with a few harmless experiments.

Two sessions, two days, a hundred bucks a day.

He was working the chance for new blood.

He killed little rabbits back there.

I tell you, there was different parts of different bodies in different rooms.

One nurse who couldn't find all the parts.

That'll make up kind of like a positive.

Bits and pieces missing from all the other bodies.

John, do you want me to call Donovan?

I swear to God.

With this little pill, the world will be yours for the next few days.

I feel a little high. Am I supposed to feel a little high?

He's dead.

And he's dead. And the dead don't come back and pay for men.

Oh.

Where's Mr. Brady?

Get him.

They dyed his hair, then they scraped it off.

They fed him until he couldn't move and they starved him.

They cut him open twice, once to take out a pancreas, once to take out a lung.

They even refrigerated him once.

Would you like to order now?

I'll have the liver, please.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'd like to know a little more about what's going

on before you start.

This is a very, very exciting experiment.

What did they do to you up there?

What are those needles for? What are you sticking me with?

She said it was like she was drowning.

We invite you to come with us on a terrifying experiment.

Help! Somebody!

Help!

It started all over again.

An experiment with dead kids.

Very strange looking people at this party.

I'm not wearing any underwear.

Dead kids.

They'll figure the living daylights out of you.

Fiona Lewis.

Michael Murphy.

Louise Fletcher. And Dan Shore.

Dead kids.

So we come to Death Weekend. It began with a rape, it ended with a massacre.

Actually, it begins with some bad driving, is how the thing gets started.

rape doesn't happen until about an hour in.

Very collectible, this one, on the Vampix label.

Good luck finding a version which has fewer centre cuts than this slightly

trimmed version of...

Actually, one of the classic Canadian exploitation pictures.

The nightmare begins.

From William Fruitt, the man who gave you Killer Party, Funeral Home, Blue

Monkey, and my personal favourite, Spasms with Peter Fonda and Oliver Reed.

He actually went for a slightly higher grade of guest star than

most. This is built around Don Stroud and Brenda Vaccaro, both of whom were

sort of people who you'd find just under the credits in disaster movies. You

know, big enough names for people to recognize in solid A pictures, but,

you know, surprising presences in exploitation. You can see why they both

it, because they get better roles here. Don Stroud plays your everyday...

domineering Marlon Brando knockoff bike psycho gang guy.

You'll get yours, baby.

With impotence issues and lots of social anger.

And Brenda Ficarro plays the fashion model who gets horribly abused but then

turns into an angel of vengeance and offs all the bad guys in the climax. So,

yeah, good stuff for both of them.

The rest of the cast are your basic Canadian familiar places who overact

intensely. Because if you catch her, she's going to give you a blowjob.

It does slot into that kind of home invasion, psychoterrorised normal people

fight back sub -genre of 70s exploitation. It's a bit, it's a sort of

evolution of the roughies of the 1960s.

A bit more of an edge, rather like House at the Edge of the Park. There's a lot

of qua stuff in there.

That's your car, your boat, this crap house. I mean, this means something to

you, doesn't it? What are you doing?

Spit it out.

What? Come on, spit it out.

In the end, this just tends to mean that there isn't that much political anger.

It's just misanthropic, rather than demonizing, you know, low -class

because it sort of says that middle -class people are just as horrible

really. So why are we even bothering?

Gotcha, Mr. Dennis!

Oh, my God.

I think Brenda Vaccaro actually brings a bit more of a human presence to it and

maybe is solely responsible for it being sort of more suspenseful than it might

because, frankly, it is rather cartoonish. The bad guys in this, like

demented scumbags who turn up in a lot of these movies in the 70s and the early

80s, you have to wonder what on earth are they thinking and whether they're...

have any thought that they'll possibly be able to get away with this because

they act so consistently stupid throughout that

if they hadn't been murdered in the climax

their life expectancy would be about 20 minutes anyway this

man and this woman are off to play house for a couple of days.

He's a wealthy bachelor.

She's a beautiful model.

They're looking forward to a terrific time.

The only trouble is, they're going to spend it in the house by the lake.

A 200 -year -old mansion surrounded by acres of woods and crystal blue water.

isolated hideaway, miles from anywhere and anyone.

But that's where the beauty ends and the nightmare begins.

The house by the lake.

A house of secrets.

A house of evil.

A house of pain.

A house of death.

My God, what's happening?

The house by the lake.

Inhabited by a power that enslaves all who enter.

And drives them to acts of unspeakable horror.

The House by the Lake.

Grand prize winner at the International Terror Film Festival.

Starring Brenda Vaccaro and Don Stroud.

A film scene you'll run from the theater in fright.

The House by the Lake.

Dario Argento's Jallo masterpiece, Deep Red. Here it is, Fletcher video,

complete with warning on the cover. It contains scenes of a graphic nature,

which is probably the reason why the police kept focusing on it all the time.

They really didn't do themselves any favours, did they, these video

by actually sort of exploiting the horrific nature of it. They actually

more attention on it as a result.

This is the English language export version, so it doesn't actually have the

elongated section in the middle where David Hemmings goes all the way through

that house. But it does have all the violence intact.

Of course, that's one of the reasons why Derry was quite famous.

for his movies at the time. I mean, this comes between the Animal trilogy and

his supernatural work, Suspiria and Inferno. It's clearly a transitional

in the fact that he used Goblin, and you can see the style sort of developing

really nicely. There's a real sort of, like, gothic contemporary ambience about

Deep Red that I really like.

It came after...

Argento's only flop, really, The Five Days of Milan, a historical romance that

he should never have made. He knew it.

He wanted to get out of the jello industry, really, because so many other

were copying him. But, of course, when he got back into it, it was with this

film, and it's one of the highlights of the whole genre.

It stars David Hemmings, mainly because Hemmings was the star of Blow Up, the

Michelangelo -Antonioni swinging 60s movie. It shares a lot of themes with

It's where he met Dario Nicolodi, of course.

He's always told me that's one of the reasons why the film is quite joyful.

it focuses on romance quite a lot because it was in the early days of

relationship. I mean, Profondo Rossa is one of those films that had so many

titles. I mean, Deep Red.

Suspiria II, it was released under in Japan, to cash in on Suspiria because it

was released after then, The Hatchet Murders in America, which I thought was

pretty sort of crude titling for it. Deliberately theatrical, the film opens

with curtains being parted and you go through to the parapsychology debate.

It's an interesting film for me because before you see each murder, you actually

see... um it being predicted in very unusual ways like david hemmings will

burn himself on a coffee machine what the hell

you want to do that for putting the bloody machine next to here and then the

next scene will be the actual death from burning so if you look at it through

that all the way through you'll see that the uh the whole um medium side of the

plot really does pan out quite well

To help him reinterpret his jello themes, Dario chose Bernardino's The

was actually Fellini's scriptwriter on Toby Dammit, one of the best sections of

Spirits of the Dead.

That's one of the reasons why I think it's quite well written for an Argento

picture. And although people think it's actually set in Rome and it's actually

mentioned as being set in Rome, Dario actually did film this in Turin. Now,

always filmed his movies in Turin because he's said that it's actually one

the most...

um hot spots of satanism in the entire world and he says more satanists live in

turin than live anywhere else i mean now whether this is true or not i i don't

know but turin of course was also the uh at the beginning of the Italian film

industry. It was never Rome. It was always in Turin.

But, of course, Mussolini moved it from Turin to Rome to keep it under more his

control. So going to Turin for Dario is like going back to the roots of Italian

cinema, and especially with the whole Satanism angle.

In fact, this title has a life...

Beyond the film, of course, because Profondo Rosso was the name of the shop

he and Luigi Cozzi decided to open in Rome, which is still going. And if you

want to go and visit Luigi Cozzi, he's there behind the counter every day, the

Via dei Gracchi. So go and see him.

And you will kill again. You're getting closer and closer to the most unnatural

kind of death.

Beyond shock.

What was that?

Beyond horror into total terror.

Murder runs wild.

Blood runs cold.

Deep red.

The conjecture is that an act of bloodshed was once committed in that

Didn't you hear that?

No, what was it?

I don't know.

Everywhere you look.

Everywhere you turn.

Death is running with you.

Here we have Demented, which is an odd one from the

80s. The tape was released by Media, which was based in the US.

And they were set up to release this and quite a few other titles, like Assault

on Prison 13, To All a Good Night, Light of the Living Dead.

It stars Sally Elise and Harry Reams under Bruce Gilchrist.

And it basically concerns a woman who, at the beginning of the film, gets gang

-raped in a horse stable.

And they catch her rapist and put him in jail, and she goes to a mental

institution. And when she comes out... her husband's having an affair and she

slowly starts losing her mind.

It's not a very good film. The lead actress was a former model and she was

mainly chosen for her looks, which is fairly inappropriate for a film of kind

concerning gang rape.

Sally Elise, actually, this was the first film she did. And then after this,

also appeared in Home Sweet Home and Down on Us, which is a conspiracy movie

that claims that the government murdered all the famous rock stars and hippie

stars of the 70s. And it does worry me that Harry Reams is using the name Bruce

Gilchrist in it. He must not like the film so much that he's not even putting

his own name on it. Considering his filmography, that's fairly worrying.

Right. Harry Reams was an exploitation actor. He was in a lot of porn films. He

also did a lot of straight stuff as well.

I suppose sex is out of the question.

He has a magnificent moustache, a rather buffoon haircut, and can be recognised

by his very stilted but sonorous delivery.

Boy, that is really unfair.

One of the most amusing scenes in the film is when the lead character finally

loses her mind.

She wakes up to find one of the neighborhood kids dry -humping her,

that he's going to rape her, and she finally snaps.

And up until this point, her acting has been fairly hysterical and over -the

-top anyway, but when the director says, right, you're now mad, you can

completely and utterly go over the top, she becomes a giggling, hysterical...

stereotype of a woman and keeps it going for about 20 minutes. And the more

murders she commits, the higher and more mad her laughter gets.

Which is probably why they use the figure of Jester for the logo of the

the beginning and the ending credits, because she starts to resemble more and

more a court Jester than anything else.

And it might be an inaccurate portrayal of someone mentally degrading into

madness, but it's certainly amusing.

Lady, you are definitely weird.

I know.

The film was probably on the section three list because when she goes nuts,

really goes nuts.

She was demented.

There's a lot of brutal murders at the end, and if the kids are responsible for

some nasty pranks, she takes it way, way out of context and proportion.

You can go now.

Oh.

and murdered each one in fairly disgusting ways, including a castration

piano wire.

Linda's unfaithful husband found his pleasures elsewhere.

Her mental condition was in serious

jeopardy, and no one was giving her the help she needed.

She was having nightmares, the same horrible dream, night after night, until

she couldn't distinguish it from reality.

Her nightmares chased her and chased her and

chased her.

Roger left his wife alone often to be in his lover's arms.

And those times alone were filled with sick, horrible illusions.

She couldn't take it any longer.

She became demented.

She got rid of her nightmares one at a time.

I'm sorry what happened to you. I swear to God I am.

Please, we didn't mean any harm. We were just having fun.

You hurt me.

You're never going to hurt me again.

You can go now.

Revenge is sweet and deadly.

She was demented.

Demented.

Here we have Jess Franco's The Demons, made back in 1972.

I guess it must have proven quite popular at the time for Go Video,

well as this release, they reissued it with a cover like that, a lot cleaner, a

lot smarter, a flicker.

I don't know, collector seemed to favour this one, but I don't know, I like that

one really.

Franco often used the names of his favourite jazz musicians as a pseudonym,

here he directs under the name Clifford Brown.

Set in the 17th century, it's a bizarre hod pod which mixes the non -sploitation

of Ken Russell's The Devils, which was popular at the time, but it mixes it

the witch -hunting and torturer films like Witchfinder General and Mark of the

Devil. It also adds some supernatural elements to the proceedings, as well as

Lord Justice Jeffreys character, who you might remember from Franco's earlier

The Bloody Judge. It's based on a real character, but it's very vague.

It's rather plot heavy as well to say the least. It follows the adventures of

two sisters, Kathleen and Margaret, who are orphaned and are played by Franco

regulars Anne Libert and Britt Nicholls. Franco regular Howard Vernon also pops

up. The sisters are raised as nuns after their mother is burnt at the stake as a

witch and who leaves the usual curse.

Anyway, the cursed couple, the powerful Lady de Winter, and Thomas Renfield

decide to visit the convent with the idea of having them condemned as witches

and brutally disposed of.

She will be submitted to the question, my lady.

What question, my lord? The witchcraft examination.

The trouble is, though, during a torturing confession, the kinky couple

fancy the idea of bedding the sexy young Kathleen.

It's exquisite.

That's tender flesh.

Meanwhile, her sister Margaret has been fornicating with the devil.

You're a witch's daughter and yourself a witch. You are now to become the bride

of Satan.

As you guessed, Franco includes copious amounts of nudity, sex and torture which

no doubt helped sell the film to sleaze cinemas around the world and then onto

home video.

It's a fun but very confusing film though to watch and it's probably worth

mentioning that The version that was released here in the UK by GoVideo was

shortened to just 80 minutes.

It appeared on video in other countries with varying running times, with the

longest running over 100 minutes.

In Germany, it was released with the title The Nuns of Clichy. I guess some

people like it because it's a proper non -sploitative movie.

I would guess it was sex and free because of the numerous things of

um there's quite a lot of them mind you saying that you know it's about on the

same level as mark probably not as brutal actually as michael the devil i

guess that was probably the main reason and probably the cover i mean maybe they

saw that cover first and thought well it looks a bit dodgy

This one is not a virgin.

Thank you.

I saw a repellent site. A half -naked sister lay there dreaming of odious

things. Her body was in ecstasy.

This woman is found guilty.

You stop this foolishness. Anyone would think you were possessed by a demon.

So next up, we've got Don't Answer the Phone. Now, this is probably one of the

sleaziest movies I've ever seen.

How you doing?

Everything okay?

You can see why it probably got the attention under Section 3.

Essentially, it's the story of Vietnam Vet, which was kind of like one of the

favourite sort of story devices of the 1970s. And in this case, what you have

essentially is a fat, somebody with bottom problems, played by Nicholas

had trouble with my ass. They sent me to a doctor for that. Remember, he keeps

on saying he's a problem with his ass.

And he phones up a very attractive lady psychiatrist on the phone.

Morning, you're on the air with Dr. Lindsay Gale. And he taunts her.

Basically, he's a photographer and he goes around taking pictures of models.

And after he's taken pictures of models, strangles them.

And in one instance, he takes a prostitute home and gets her to phone up

woman on the show and then kills her while he's phoning up.

And in fact, Nicholas Wirth, one of the good things about the film is I think he

actually put in a very dedicated performance.

as a complete sleazeball.

Do I measure up?

Huh? In real life, he was actually, on the manual says he was a greenberry, and

his hobbies were, I think it was kickboxing and fencing and wrestling,

fits very nicely in with this.

Run if you must.

Hello, operator.

The trailer makes out that what you're going to be watching is when a stranger

calls or Halloween or something. Hide if you can.

You can see why this film was actually filmed as a Hollywood Strangler, which

a far more appropriate title.

Donut's phone, there's very little phone.

actually in it. So if you're going in expecting to see babysitters in peril,

would be funny to have sat there with an audience expecting to see Carol Kane or

Jamie V. Curtis being menaced by someone in a mask and actually getting an

overweight VN arm vet strangling models, which is essentially what you get with

this. You can see why this got the attention of the law.

Interestingly, one of the things I love about these films, and not necessarily

this film, but a lot of these films, we actually look at the exploitation and

this is The term they use, and you look at the manuals they used to put out for

cinemas, they used the term exploitation.

One of the things they had for the cinemas in America when this came out,

they said was actually get a phone on the desk in the lobby and start ringing

so people walking past would pick it up and there would be somebody going, don't

answer the phone, and things like that, which I think is a great idea.

Don't answer the phone.

And essentially what it is is kind of like almost a right -wing reactionary

in the manner of, say, the Death Wish films, because what you have is these

very kind of sleazy cops in it.

You like your job?

No. Well, it looks like you lost five bucks, McKay. Kill me!

Get off of me, you fucker! The female DJ is essentially an emancipated liberal

force. I am not here to be the target of your half -assed sarcasm.

Captain Daly thinks I have something to contribute.

Who is then completely destroyed by the end of the film as well, and has to be

saved by men. So all round, this isn't a film to show your feminist friends.

Okay, well, not surprisingly, this came out from World of Video 2000, which, as

it says, it's tomorrow's world of video entertainment today. And of course, it's

stablemates, I can guess, and I want a better term. It was Nightmares and a

Damaged Brain, which is one of the most notorious video nasties.

Prepare yourself.

for the most intensely shocking motion picture of our time.

Nightmare in a Damaged Brain.

Well, just an example of how mad things were back then, David Hamilton Grant

released Nightmare in a Damaged Brain on obviously the same label as this, and

even though it was only a few seconds longer than the BBFC sanctions release,

got sent to prison for it back then, which it just goes to show we were

about a very, very different time, and it was obviously a scary time for

films out like this.

Run if you must.

Hello, operator?

It's an emergency. Can you help me?

Hide if you can.

Scream if you are able.

Who's there?

But above all, if you are alone, don't

answer the phone.

He is out there, somewhere in the crowd.

Behind me.

Beside you.

Ready to kill again.

No attempt to conceal the body.

It's almost like he wanted to be discovered.

The nurse.

The monster.

The starlet. The student.

The secretary.

I am frightened of you.

What does that do to you?

You recognize that person?

He had

done

it before.

He would do it again.

He is doing it now.

Don't answer the phone.

Eaten Alive, or to give it its Italian title, Mangiati Vivi, was released in UK

cinemas by Eagle Films and then later on by Vampix on video in the UK.

Eaten Alive is based on a tragedy that occurred in November 1978 in Guyana in

South America.

The Reverend Jim Jones had formed a cult and had some 900 people with him. And

when the American authorities tried to intervene, he gave them all poison,

including children.

So this was a story that had hit the news.

quite around the world, and of course filmmakers weren't slow to cash in on

tragedy. First off were the Mexicans, who made Guyana, Cult of the Damned.

Within four months of the tragedy occurring, Stuart Whitman playing the

role. And American television jumped on the bandwagon soon afterwards, making a

film of the tragedy starring Powers Booth, and that was called Guyana

The Story of Jim Jones.

Umberto Lenzi was no stranger to the cannibal genre and had directed Deep

Savages back in 1972 in Thailand.

The stars of that film were Mimi Lai and Ivan Razumov, who in fact appear in

Eaten Alive with Razumov playing the reverend himself.

Brethren, two great perils endanger the well -being of our community. And

remarkably, actually, it looks quite similar to pictures of the real Jim

Dark, quite handsome, quite satinine.

Clearly very charismatic.

Those devils want to see me locked up in a prison cell, but they'll never get to

do it. I will not leave my people without their leader.

However, the lead actor is Robert Kerman, better known as Zarbola, and

the American adult film industry.

He had a couple of colleagues with him, actually. Jack Teague from Debbie Does

Dallas and Gerald Grant from Radley Metzger's Score both appear in the film

well. The leading actress is Janet Agron.

The choice of Janet Agron as the very blonde... rather Scandinavian looking

leading lady is intriguing because she obviously is both a contrast to her

sister played by Paola Senatore, but also from all of the savages. So she

back those colonial ideas of a white woman under threat.

amongst the savages.

Lindsay chose to set his film in Marowka in New Guinea rather than Guyana in

South America.

I have to remind you that there are still cannibals in the southeastern

of New Guinea.

What? The actual shooting location was actually Sri Lanka and it's fairly

certain to assume that the reason they shot there is the producers Mino Loy and

Luciano Martino of Dania Films had previously shot Prisoner of the Cannibal

in Sri Lanka a couple of years early and the film had been a great success and

also made a lot of money again in the Far East. It's important to understand

that the main market for these movies wasn't Europe, but in fact the Far East,

where extreme gore and sexual violence was less of a cultural

taboo than it was in Europe. The themes of animal cruelty in Eaten Alive are

actually very, very hard to stomach.

There are a number of scenes that include a monkey being crushed by a

with its sad eyes looking at the camera as its head is crushed.

There's a baby alligator that has its head cut off and is then sliced open

its neck to its tail. There are tribesmen who eat live snakes, live

snakes. The Reverend Jonas' cult in the case of Eaten Alive seems to be based

around the idea of the cobra.

And the film does seem to be taking advantage of the wealth of snakes

in Sri Lanka and then appears to try and kill as many of them as possible.

The violence meted out of the cast in Eaten Alive by special effects makeup

Raoul Ranieri is pretty excessive.

These include a widow who's gang raped by her husband's three brothers, a

who has his penis chopped off before being stabbed, Ivan Razumov violating

Agron with a huge dildo dipped in snake blood, and a native who's macheted and

then beheaded.

This violence...

was always going to cause the film trouble with the British censors. But on

of that, the animal cruelty made it an absolute certainty that the film was

going to find its way onto the DPP section 3 list.

This is ironic given that the film had already been passed for theatrical

distribution in a cut version and it's the same cut version that was in fact

released on video in the UK.

One of the interesting things about Eaten Alive is that not only did Mimi

and Ivan Razumov come over from Deep River Savages, but actually some of the

footage from the film is reused in Eaten Alive, specifically the death of the

crocodile and the woman being stabbed.

And further footage actually comes from Prisoner of the Cannibal God, notably

the killing of the monkey by the snake and the castration scene.

So a lot of the material that appears to be very controversial in Eaten Alive...

that clearly was part of its problem for the DPP with footage that had already

been released in other films.

Another reason that the film almost certainly fell foul of the DPP was its

graphic cover art, which shows the thought of Mimi Le being attacked by a

and a knife held to her neck.

Interestingly, when Cannibal Holocaust was released, the film by Ruggiero

Diodato, the cover art included the legend under the film's title, Eaten

And one can't help but wonder whether the English -language version of

Vivi, Eaten Alive!, wasn't inspired by this amazing piece of artwork.

I was finally re -released after the video recordings act on Elephant Video,

this version was further censored. Two of the leading cast from Eaten Alive,

Mimi Leigh and Ivan Razumov, actually appear on three titles on the DPP's

Cannibal, aka Last Cannibal World, Deep River Savages, made by Lindsay, and of

course, this one.

Three homicides.

Three men killed with tiny darts dipped in cobra venom. Cobra venom?

I have to remind you that there are still cannibals in the southeastern

of New Guinea.

What?

Brethren, two great perils endanger the well -being of our community.

The cave dwellers hungering for our flesh and city dwellers ought to enslave

Keep your mouth shut. Get out of here. I don't do business.

Those devils want to see me locked up in a prison cell.

But they'll never get to do it. I will not leave my people without their

I got him. There's somebody down there. Go, Meraki.

Enter the Devil, which is not to be confused with a retitling of the sex

that came out later, also known as Disciples of Death.

Disciples of Death, a nightmare from out of the past, reborn to turn the hours

of darkness into a time of terror.

And since neither the Devil or Death's disciples actually appear in the film,

the villains are...

A weird Christian sect called the Penitentes, who've had other

movies made about them, crossed with sort of Mayan human sacrifice guys.

You've heard of the Penitentes?

Penitentes were active over in the New Mexico mountains until very recently,

1940s. Their rites were a strange mixture of Christianity and old Indian

customs. My assumption is this was filmed as something else entirely and

got more exploitable.

if rather generic, title stuck on it.

It's sort of part of a cycle of early 70s films, which are, I suppose,

Rosemary's Baby Goes West.

I always think of them as the robed redneck films. They're films like Race

the Devil and The Devil's Reign. They all have the devil in the title, which

about demon cults out west.

There's a slight...

Manson vibe going, but it's much more the chanting in Latin.

Every TV cop show in the 70s did an episode with a bunch of

cultists like this. You know, like Starkey and Hartshawn, Macmillan and

would come across people with the same robes doing the same human sacrifice

stuff. This was made by a director producer called Frank Q.

Dobbs, who didn't actually direct that much else he made uphill all the way and

one of those rather late burt reynolds movies but he was a big man in texas

production he produced the sequel miniseries to lonesome dove and a bunch

of other quite big tv western projects almost everything he made was a western

so i suspect that's where um you know the texas film industry's heart lay and

even though the The cover and the promotional material makes this out to

horror picture.

It's almost much more a modern -day Western.

It's people go missing in the desert.

Hey, there's something in there.

Fire.

It's a hard way to go.

There's a, you know, a lawman in it, although he's a bit of a dickhead and he

doesn't make it to the end. And there's a sort of respect for the anthropology

of this made -up religion.

It's almost like those found in the Aztec temples.

They were used for sacrifice.

Human sacrifice.

This has gone much further than the Penitentes, much further.

The Penitentes were known for flagellation.

There's a famous exploitation picture called Lash of the Penitentes, which

supposed real footage of flagellation.

But on and on they climbed toward their hills of Calvary, bearing their

punishment bravely.

Oddly enough, considering how offensive that would be for the BBFC, they don't

do too much flagellation in here. There's a bit of it, but most of it is

the conventional, you know, let's drag the heroine out into a cave, chant some

Latin over her and stab her as an offering to whatever great god gazebo

they're bowing down to before the eclipse. She must know and

understand the power...

It's not a terribly eventful film.

It's certainly a lot less fun than Race with the Devil or The Devil's Reign. It

has a kind of interesting desert atmosphere.

And it's one of those minor films that you forget a week after you've seen.

But while it's on, it's sort of watchable. There's stuff going on that

relate to other films that are more fun than this one.

As to why it was trawled in as a video nasty by association,

Lord knows, they may have been thinking of another film. I cannot imagine, yeah,

if it had another title, if it hadn't mentioned the devil, it would have

probably just gathered dust on the video shelves without anybody noticing.

It could easily have played afternoon television.

And it's very unsensational in nature.

It's probably what means that even now it doesn't have much of a cult

There aren't people out there campaigning for the Enter the Devil

edition on DVD.

So I think the waters have closed over this one.

of death, a nightmare from out of the past, reborn to turn the hours of

into a time of terror.

Disciples of death. A nightmare from the past.

Reborn to create hell on earth.

Disciples of death.

Okay, well, we have Jess Franco here with The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein,

which has been released under many different titles over the years.

Les Experiences Erotiques de Frankenstein, or La Maldición de

which translated from the Spanish means Curse of Frankenstein. Apparently it

also made it onto film as Curse of Frankenstein in English at some point.

I rather wish that they'd gone with Erotic Rites of Frankenstein across the

board, because although now that's quite an obscure title for the film, given

that it only came out on...

UK video back in the day as that. I missed that one. I think The Erotic

of Frankenstein is a great title. It's a much more exploitable title and kind of

fits it better, I think. It's one of the best Jess Franco movies.

Given that quite a few of the really bad Franco films came out on video in this

country, it's a relief to be able to say that this is one worth seeking out.

It's from 1972, originally under a shooting title Les Plaisirs de la Nuit,

Pleasures of the Night.

It's a beautiful widescreen scope compositions, a rampage basically

horror iconography. To get a handle on this, you need to go back a little bit

and think about the fact that Franco made Count Dracula, a version of the

Dracula story in 1970, two years before, with Christopher Lee, allegedly, and

then the idea of this film was to try and tell the original Bram Stoker story.

Well, they didn't pull that off, and Franco took a beating in the press

the hype for Count Dracula was that it was going to be the first...

truly accurate rendition of the book. Well, it wasn't. No -one was

satisfied with Count Dracula, and I think Franco in particular seems to have

needed to exorcise this bad experience by returning to the subject of Dracula

and the Gothic horror tradition in a very different mindset.

Count Dracula is very stuffy and staid and almost trying to be a hammer film.

This film and its twin, Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein, are delirious.

No holds barred, all bets are off, the rules are out the window, sort of a

gothic fantasy.

You've got characters floating in from the Dracula story and the Frankenstein

story, but they're not acting in the way they're meant to, and there's no

attempt to crowbar them into a sensible storyline.

This is, like, far more inspired by the Fumetti Italian comics and by the

Bande des Inés Franco -Belgian comic strips.

that Franco was very, very keen on. And also it introduces this element of

eroticism, which is a million miles away from anything that you would have got

in the Hammer films. Even though people associate Hammer with cleavage, they're

not really sexy films, are they? And sex isn't really something that the Hammer

studio really seemed very comfortable with. There's a great scene, for

where Cagliostro, the mesmerist and magician, who now controls

monster with thought energy, a great idea in itself.

orders the monster to whip a servant and Vera Frankenstein, Dr.

Frankenstein's daughter, tied up within a circle of knives. The idea being that

when one of them cannot stand the whipping any longer, they will have the

of whether to pitch forward onto the knives themselves.

It's a film that gives one of Franco's leading men, I think, possibly his best

role, and that's Howard Vernon.

Now, Howard Vernon was the original Dr. Orloff in The Awful Dr. Orloff, which is

possibly his best -known role. Certainly it was the role that a lot of people

have in mind when they think of his work with Franco. I think this is possibly

better, and it really... A lot of the power of the film revolves around the

the camera sort of soaks up Howard Vernon's charisma and really draws out

this incredible energy.

There are some...

close -up shots of him where he's playing, as I say, a mesmeric magician,

you genuinely believe that he really could send waves of thought energy into

other people's minds. It's a very powerful performance.

It also features one of the greatest incidental characters in a Franco film,

Melissa the Bird Woman, who is played by this wonderful actress called Anne

Libert, a fascinating -looking woman.

And it's a sort of a dream mishmash of a woman with... bird feathers and claws

and talons who communicates just through screeches and amplified bird noises.

It's just like something out of a surrealist painting or something. She's

wonderful. And the actress Anne Lubert, who plays her, has got this kind of

strange opiated quality where she just kind of feels as if she's just come from

an orgy. She just looks sort of depraved and debauched and yet incredibly

glamorous. So it's great casting, really interesting faces in front of the

camera. And it's got a Frankenstein monster sprayed silver.

I mean, you know, it's just a visual treat. I find it hard, given how

and strange the film is, to believe that anybody wanted to put it on the...

..try and get it on the video analysis list purely on the basis of the film

itself. It's such an alienating film for most people. I would have thought that

they would never have got through it. So I suspect it's probably the cover art

of bound, semi -nude women.

And that's probably all it took.

Just, you know, OK, we've got women tied up in chains.

That's bound to be sleazy, nasty and horrible and something that we should

And I think that's probably as far as it went.

I'd be amazed if any law representative of law and order ever made it through

this movie to the end. I really would.

It hurt me.

I have succeeded.

He's able to talk.

Though you're blind, you can see farther than common mortals on this earth.

What does the future hold?

I foresee pleasure and death and blood.

I foresee plans and dreams succeeding.

I foresee the creature Frankenstein created, reaping the most beautiful

assuage your desires.

And I can also foresee the creature wholly at your command.

Are you a devil?

I'm afraid Dr.

Frankenstein just passed away.

He was trying to give me instructions, but none of it really made sense.

From this moment on, I'm your master.

To a young female, a woman of great beauty.

And then bring her with haste to your new master, Cagliostro.

Let nothing impede you, for none can escape the master's power.

If that were a Frankenstein.

We shall devise an amusing sport for the two of them.

The buzz will reign on the planet of Earth.

Tonight we unite the past and the future and a new race is to spring up. We are

about to celebrate together the most extraordinary event of all time.

Gus Draconis' 1978 The Evil is a wham -bam, thank you ma 'am, haunted house

movie, which is kind of a precursor to the popular films like The Amityville

Horror and The Changeling from the late 70s and early 80s. It stars Richard

Krenner as a psychiatrist and his wife, Joanna Pettit, who buy a massive,

sprawling haunted mansion. Obviously they don't know it's haunted at the

And they take a mixture of his students and also some of his old psychiatry

patients to do it up. But what do you think, huh?

It's enormous.

Yeah, really, what do we need all this space for? Well, let me put it this way,

the price was right.

Of course, it sounds like it's going to be a flash movie if you get all these

people into a haunted house, but what it actually turns into is they get

basically trapped there overnight. They can't get out and they get attacked.

There's electrocution.

It's almost, again, a precursor to the films like Bulgey's The Beyond.

where you have a gateway over hell. The film starts off in quite a kind of, it's

quite scary to start off with.

But it gets sillier and sillier and sillier.

Until it reaches the apex of silliness, which is when you find out that you've

actually got a gateway to hell and the devil is in the basement and the devil

no one else but Victor Borneo, who is a fat devil in a white suit.

which is a very strange payoff for any kind of movie.

But I kind of guess it's the 1970s, and this is what you got when you took too

many drugs and made horror movies.

And the director, of course, also did Swinging Barmaids with Diane Thorne,

of course, notoriously was Ilsa in the Ilsa films, and also Moonshine County

Express with Claudia Jennings as well.

Nobody ever suspected what ancient terror slept beneath a Vargas house.

Stories get started about any old house that's been vacant for a while.

What kind of stories?

Oh, just stories.

Just old wives tales.

Look out!

Terror that turns laughter into screams.

And loving pets into killers.

For the house belongs to the evil.

Disturb not he who is here held in chains.

Victor Borner, the evil.

A new world, Victor.

We have here one of my all -time favorite films, Magical Mafia Style, or

known as The Executioner, but it was also known as Like Father, Like Son. It

had... more than one release in the UK. This is from the Hello Video release.

My personal favorite is the Videotapes release, which has a terrific cover,

really lurid, really trying to tempt a viewer to buy the video or rent the

video. The film has a fairly interesting story.

Duke Mitchell was a lounge entertainer who did songs in the style of...

and Dean Martin.

He was actually with Sammy Petrillo, did a double act, and appeared in a few

black and white movies.

But his real dream was to direct a gangster movie of his own.

Oh, come all ye faithful.

Shut up, guys. I'm trying to make a movie.

In fact, after The Godfather, he was determined to direct a gangster film

told the truth about the mafia.

Every time you see the word Sicily, the next word is mafia.

We take the reps.

Not the Jews, not the Greeks, not the Calabres or the Noblesse.

So if I'm going to be known as a killer, I'm going to show you how to kill.

The script for Massacre Mafia Style is based on mainly stories he heard during

his time as a Las Vegas entertainer.

And the thing about Duke was that he put his money where his mouth was. So he

used all of his money to finance this film.

And the end result is fairly fantastic.

It's like a very grindhouse version of The Godfather.

If I give a guy everything, I want something back.

I don't want to be treated like a run -of -the -mill hooker.

That's a hell of a thing to say.

It's pretty much the same story. It's about Mimi, who tries to not get

in the mafia, but finds himself more and more deeply ingrained.

And it's a lot of violent set pieces.

There is a fairly spectacular scene where a pimp is crucified, and there's

hangings and meat hooks, which are very, very violent.

Duke Mitchell was actually fairly good friends with the Vegas set.

Sinatra's son and Duke Mitchell's son used to play tennis all the time, and

Sinatra used to visit them. And in fact, Sinatra was one of the pallbearers at

this funeral.

And so he was all part of that Rat Pack set, but he was never a major member or

anything.

I think one of the things that separates Duke was that he really, really wanted

to get these films made. And he sold and raised funds anywhere he can because he

truly believed that he was telling Mafia the way the Mafia should be known,

especially Massacre Mafia style. He has a monologue near the end of the film,

which is the plight of the Italian immigrant in the US.

And, OK, the delivery is not great, but the words are truly heartfelt.

And when Duke's delivering them, you really feel the emotion come through.

it's actually, regardless of how corny or whored it is, it's one of my favorite

bits of cinema.

You and I and Bowens here are the last of organized crime.

There are no more mobs. The politicians have their own mobs. The president has

his own mafia problem.

The film didn't have much of a release history, unfortunately.

It didn't do very well at the cinemas.

It's probably on the Section 3 list because of not only the violence, but

there's also a lot of derogatory language. In fact, the film is full of

monologues by the main character, which are sometimes self -pitying and

sometimes fairly racist.

There are two trailers for the film.

Both of them set the music.

The second one, it's actually set a track composed by Geoffrey Mitchell,

son, who's a musician, who also lived extensively in London and played with a

few rock and roll bands.

The first one is set to an Italian tune, and it's actually one of Duke's own

tunes, the one he used to sing on stage, not the composer, of course. And it is

a tracking shot of him and his best friend in the film walking through,

havoc and mayhem.

And it makes for a fantastic viewing. Anyone who sees that trailer is bound to

want to see the film. It'd be almost impossible not to.

The Duke also did one more film, Gone with the Pope, which was never finished.

In fact, the reels were left in his cupboard when he died.

But these were recently edited together by Bob Murawski, who's a big fan of Duke

Mitchell. And he has been touring the film all over America. So we might

get to see what Gone with the Pope was like.

Round and around while we're dancing, my heart makes us glad that we're living

today.

Each time I feel like romancing, my heart always goes tickety -tickety.

Round and around while we're dancing, my heart makes us glad that we're living

today. Each time I feel like romancing, my heart always goes tickety

-tickety.

Oh, my

God.

Bambi Bambi

Some may pass the test, God help the rest.

Some may pass the test.

Lisa! God help the rest.

That's fairly appropriate for a final exam because this is one of the rest.

In the early 80s, after Halloween and Friday the 13th had made

enormous fortunes, there must have been 50 or 60.

Generic slasher movies in production at the same time.

Most of them even got theatrical releases in Britain. Things like

He Knows You're Alone and When a Stranger Calls, Happy Birthday to

Me, Don't Answer the Phone. All of those got major theatrical releases.

Final Exam just came out on video.

I think shows you just how generic and ordinary it is.

Of all the slasher

movies, this has, I think, the least interesting villain.

It's a nameless guy in a green jacket.

Who... kills students for no apparent reason in not very interesting ways.

And he doesn't even really start doing it until the last half hour of the film.

The build -up is that stuff that we learned to endure in the 80s of

frat boys playing stupid pranks on each other in order to fill out the running

time and

If there's a single memorable thing about this entirely ordinary film is

features the least amusing fraternity prank ever, which is that during an

in order to distract the authorities while he steals the test paper,

the head...

fraternity guy has his mates turn up on campus in a van wearing balaclava

helmets and jump out and pretend to spray the crowd with automatic machine

fire and some of their confederates fall down pretending to be dead

so yes they stage a mock

campus shooting in order to have a laugh

And what's really strange is that the authorities treat this as if they had,

like, dyed the pond green or hung some underwear from the flagpole.

Get yourself some criminals here.

Didn't you hear about that multiple shootings?

Did these guys do it? I thought it was pretty funny myself, didn't you?

It's just, oh kid, what do you know?

And after this has settled down, naturally everybody involved in this

horribly murdered later, but probably not horribly enough.

The only other even mildly interesting thing

about it is a casting thing more than anything else. The kind of... Creepy,

nerdy guy with a crush on the heroine, who also is obsessed with serial killers

and goes on and on about them. A mass murderer.

Two kids were snuffed while parking at the lake. Is played by an obviously gay

actor. You don't think some of the guys are sneaking off to try and get in

shape, do you?

Nah. To the point where you think this is going to be part of the story, but

it's not. They just got a gay guy to play the role and didn't do a rewrite to

take out the bit where he's supposed to be in love with the girl.

And he gets killed too at some point.

Beyond the point where you think it's almost interesting if the nerd will turn

out to be the hero and save the heroine. Nah, nothing doing. It's got all the

stereotypes. You know, there's the stupid jock. There's the slutty girl

sleeping with the professor.

There's the geeky guy who's obsessed with serial killers.

There's the nice girl who's going to survive at the end.

They probably are your old friends by now if you've watched as many of these.

slasher movies, as most horror film fans have. Directed by Jimmy Houston, who

later made My Best Friend is a Vampire. But that's about it. It's an entirely

unmemorable campus slasher film.

Final exam, it's probably the last slasher movie you need to see.

At Lanier College, they have the finest security.

The best teacher -student relations.

No fraternity season.

Strictly enforced curfews.

Who's that?

And a killer.

He's come back.

Final exam.

When are you going to realize that the whole world isn't made of psychopaths?

There's a murderer around campus killing people.

Some may pass the test.

God help the rest.

He's come back.

Time to get on down with Foxy Brown.

Foxy Brown.

And... All those other hype things that they used to say in promotional

materials for this particular genre of blacksploitation.

I think there's almost a subgenre of Pam Grier -sploitation.

I have no fear.

Pam Grier is here as Foxy Brown.

She owned.

this genre of the tough sexy chick who was pushed into taking vengeance against

the bad guys who did something terrible to her man or her relative or her dog or

whatever i want justice for a good man this man had love in his heart

and he died because he went out of his neighborhood i think we

have to say that that jack hill was one of the best directors of these type of

films sister i think what you're asking for is revenge

You just take care of the justice, and I'll handle the revenge myself.

So I think this is the best of the Jack Hill -Pam Grier collaborations.

It's the purest of them. How do you like it?

Very impressive.

It's simply, you know, long build -up, bad people do bad things, Pam Grier gets

annoyed, takes on the villains.

There is a real weird mismatch in some scenes that makes me see why it would

have irked the censors. It's mostly a kind of fun, reasonably light -hearted,

vigilante action picture where you're behind it. But there's this rather long,

gruelling scene where the heroine is drugged and sexually abused by rednecks,

which... pays off with a kind of gruesome revenge sequence, but it goes

a bit too long for the kind of fun exploitation film it is. I'm beginning

that old feeling.

Funny how fast it comes when a chick has really got the goodies.

You see this quite often in 70s films, where they throw stuff in that, in

theory...

is what you want in a picture like this but actually is a bit of a turn off and

you sort of want to see Pam Grier kicking ass you don't really want to see

tied to a bed and being groped by a sweaty bald middle -aged disgusting

guy which there is a bit too much of in this before we get to the much

more satisfying scenes in which she sets fire to these blokes

Otherwise, this is straight -up 70s action exploitation. I've no idea why

this was signalled out apart from Friday Foster or Coffee or TNT Jackson or all

the others as being the one that would be trawled for a video nasty, but, you

know, it is slightly theme -y, but it's not...

anything different from any one of a dozen other pictures.

When Foxy Brown comes to town, all the brothers gather round, because she can

really shake them down.

Pam Grier, that one chick hit squad who creamed you as coffee, is back to do

a job on the mob as Foxy Brown.

You tell me who you want done, and I'll do the hell out of him.

A chick with drive who don't take no jive.

That woman, she's crazy.

There's no telling what she'll do.

And murder if you don't treat her nice.

Sounds like a public menace. Sure do.

Foxy's got guts.

No ifs ands or buts. I better warn you, I got a black belt in karate.

And I got my black belt in bar stools.

She won't budge when she carries a grudge. I want justice for all of them

lives are bought and sold so that a few big shots can climb up on their back.

Sister, I think what you're asking for is revenge.

So there ain't no hope for dudes who deal dope. I swear, baby, I don't know

you're talking about.

We're going to kill ourselves a couple of niggas.

is here as Foxy.

Foxy Brown.

The 18th highest grossing movie of 1980 was Long Night at Camp Blood, or to give

it its retitled name, Friday the 13th.

Friday the 13th.

Here it is on Warner Home Video in its complete uncut version.

This version wasn't seen in America until years later.

Of course, there was a lot of differences in the original script, and

Josh Voorhees for a start, even though Mrs. Voorhees, played by Betsy Palmer,

was still the killer.

Well, I'm Mrs. Voorhees.

An old friend of the Christie's. Her role was offered to Estelle Parkins

originally, but Estelle turned it down.

And Sally Field was originally going to play the part of Alice too, but it did

feature Kevin Bacon in his debut feature.

Written by Victor Miller, who turned Kojak scripts into paperback novels, we

know where the real inspiration for Friday the 13th came from. It was Mario

Barber's Bay of Blood.

This was a film that played in a double bill to Sean Cunningham's Last House on

the Left.

Cunningham obviously took note of the body count script and decided to do one

himself. He's admitted this freely, so we all know that that's where it comes

from. You may only see it once, but that will be enough.

Betsy Palmer didn't actually do any of the murders in the movie. That was Tazos

Stavrakis, Tom Savini's assistant.

In fact, you can see his hairy arms in a lot of the scenes when they're actually

doing the throat fittings. That can't have been a woman at all.

This was quite a controversial movie at the time because Paramount, who released

it in America, it was an unusual film for them to do.

They were looking at exploitation moves, making an absolute fortune like

Halloween, and they thought, we want a piece of this pie.

So they picked up this very, very low -budget movie and promoted it to death.

was a major studio doing this, and they made $40 million on the first release of

this film.

Three, four, five, six, seven, eight,

nine, 10, 11, 12, Friday the 13th.

You may only see one, but that will be enough. Friday the 13th opens around

midnight tonight in the West End and at selected suburban cinemas.

A lot of people actually wrote to Charles Bloodhorn, the owner of

Pictures, and said, What are you doing? You can't release this.

But, of course, money talks in Hollywood, as it always does, which is

went on to become, possibly, the most successful franchise of all time.

The film was re -released in a cut version, but also you've got to remember

another inspiration for the film came from Brian De Palma's Carrie. That so

influenced the ending, where Jason Voorhees leaps out of the water onto the

boat. It didn't matter. It became one of the most keynote...

of the series and led to Jason Voorhees becoming the lead character in every

successive sequel.

Hello?

Who's that?

Oh, hi.

What are you doing out in this mess?

One.

Three. We weren't doing anything. We were just messing around.

Four.

9 11

12

Friday the 13th

you may only see it once.

But that will be enough.

Friday the 13th.

One of the quickest arriving sequels in history is Friday the 13th Part II. It

came within a year of release of the original one.

Why should Friday the 13th, 1981,

be any different?

Friday the 13th Part II.

Originally produced as Sean S. Cunningham.

wanted unrelated sequels in the mode of Halloween III, Season of the Witch,

later on, a separate story.

But when he realised that everyone was reacting to the ending of Friday the

with Jason, he knew he had to follow that character.

The original script, indeed, was called Jason.

Jason was originally played by Warrington Gillette, but he couldn't

stunts, and so an ex -cop, Steve Dash, took over. That's the reason why the

bag's on his head, so you couldn't actually differentiate between the two.

The body count continues.

Now, Tom Savini, who did the wonderful make -up effects for the original,

like the idea of using Jason as the sequel character, and he was off doing

burning anyway.

So Carl Fullerton took over. And it's interesting that everything that Carl

Fullerton mainly did was cut by the MPAA in America because it was considered

too strong.

In fact...

Friday the 13th Part II suffered because of the success of Friday the 13th.

Everyone was amazed at what Paramount got through in that movie and so decided

to ruthlessly cut this one instead.

The day you count on for terror is not over.

The original twist in this film had Mrs Voorhees... head in the fridge and it

was opened and she smiled at you but that was considered way too over the top

way too supernatural so that was completely axed by steve minor the

actually was sean cunningham's gopher on last house on the left and by the way

john fury who plays the character paul holt jason's out there was actually born

on friday the 13th

On a June night in 1980, Friday the 13th, 12 of her friends

were murdered.

Why should Friday the 13th, 1981, be any different?

Friday the 13th, Part 2.

The body count continues.

14. We're all doomed.

You all do.

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

Seventeen.

19.

21.

22.

23. Sandra? Jen?

The day you count on for terror is not

over.

This is a copy of GBH. It's by a man called Cliff Twemlow, who I wrote a book

about. Cliff was the...

austin wells of salford and this was his first foray into the home video market

and it remains a kind of cult classic to this very day because of its content

it's exciting action sequences and it's very strange and very bizarre

relationship to manchester gangland culture

And as it says on here, the long Good Friday set a new and exciting trend in

British films following right on its heels is GBH.

The Orson Welles of Salford, Cliff Twamlow, was a nightclub bouncer from

the age of 16.

Are you going to behave or do you want throwing out?

We'll behave.

But he then got part -time work at Granada Studios as an extra in things

The Caesars and also a lot in the...

Bar of the Rover's Return in Coronation Street. And there he made friends with a

variety of people in different jobs at Granada, like Derek Hilton, the music

producer, and Peter Adamson, who would later go on to his own kind of peculiar

fame. And David Kent Watson, who was probably the best sound engineer at

Granada, but who left there in 1969 to set up a recording studio in the centre

of Manchester.

Cliff Wood, through these people, discovered the wonderful world of...

theme music and jingles and whatnot. Because he couldn't write music or play

instrument, he used to go around with an early cassette player and hum into

this. And he's supposed to have written something like 2 ,000 tunes and got a

contract with DeWolf.

So it was background music, jingles and...

Even songs, he put out suites of songs, one of which was used in Dawn of the

Dead, I believe, and some of his stuff was recorded by the Pretty Things under

variety of names.

pure psychedelia. Another string to the Orson Welles of Salford's bow was that

he decided to become a pulp fiction novelist. And he wrote, when he was

hospitalised after a particularly severe beating, a kind of bouncer's philosophy

called Tuxedo Warrior. But just for that alone, he deserves to live forever, and

it's a great title.

And Tuxedo Warrior was optioned by an American film production company.

And Cliff got £25 ,000.

and a trip to Zimbabwe because he got a bit part in the movie. And it was there

that he was turned on to the idea of making films.

When Cliff gets back from Zimbabwe and figures, I'm going to make a movie, he

writes the script straight away. And then he thinks, what am I going to do?

he goes to David Kent Watson, who by now has got a video production company

called Ice. I think mainly they were doing weddings.

Why not shoot a movie? So off they go with their one camera, and they

write a manual that Rodriguez would be impressed by of guerrilla filmmaking.

So Cliff would walk into a pub and say, the manager said it was all right for us

to film this fight sequence.

Now, the odds were that somebody would say, well, I'm the manager and I haven't

given permission, so go, oh, sorry, I made a mistake, and you'll go.

The person behind me said, oh, OK, all right then. And that's how they'd film

the fight sequences in pubs.

Car chases, they'd just block the road off and then film the car chases.

gunplay in what later became Gunchester.

They walked around armed to the teeth with sawn -off shotguns, Webley

this, that and the other. John St. Ryan, who went on to Hollywood fame and

fortune, it was the first movie that he'd ever been in because Cliff used to

work out in a gym with him and said, we'll have you in a movie.

Nobody tells Big Nick Rafferty when he's had enough to drink.

He'd never acted.

He then later on went to become Bette Lynch's boyfriend in Coronation Street

Sean Connery's stand -in in various Hollywood movies.

So it gave a start to a whole lot of people.

You know you're a stubborn Irishman.

Just be having a drink now, then, huh?

From one Mancunian to another.

GVH is set in a kind of mythical Mancunian gangland.

It's bloody, it's violent.

It's populated by martial artists of the area, including people like Steve

Powell, who was trained by Bruce Lee.

GBH were apparently...

a big hit with the troops on their way to fight in the Falklands. This is the

very early days of domestic video, and it was World Video 2000, one of their

biggest hits.

And if you think back in those days, you could rent videos almost anywhere,

newsagents, the corner shop, garages.

They would buy a copy, and those copies were up to £35, £40, which in those

days was quite a bit of money. Then they'd rent them out.

And it's supposed to have sold something like 6 ,000 copies in the first year.

So for World of Video, it was a big hit.

Cliff and David Kent Watson, who was his director then, realised that there was

a fabulous potential market for VHS.

And that essentially is how he spent the next 10 years.

piggybacking the next production on the money coming in from the previous one.

But the problem is that Cliff had a very cavalier attitude to royalties.

And he would go to the Millionaire Club in Manchester, which was populated by

fairly rich people, not Peter Stringfellow's club.

And he would offer people a chance to be in the movie business.

But he would often, like the producers, sell 120%.

So now when you're trying to track who's got the rights to what, it's an

extremely murky, strange and... ..confusing business.

You see, I'm no saint, Donovan. I think kids ought to be protected.

Spare me this shit.

Cliff made, over ten years, ten movies.

GBH2, which was a return to GBH, which lasts...

Twice as long, because almost all of GBH is done as a flashback in it, while the

old crew reprise their former roles.

So a man with a vision, and unfortunately a man whose vision was cut

his untimely death, brought about by him not winning the Grandad Universe

competition at Salford Tech.

Cliff lied about his age, he always put five years on top of it. So when he came

second...

despite the fact that he wasn't old enough to be in the competition. He took

steroids in order to bodybuild, and unfortunately it pumped his heart out.

But Cliff is now an inspiration to a whole generation of filmmakers in the

of England, and his reputation is spreading far and wide.

So hopefully there will be a Cliff retrospective in the pipeline at some

in the not -too -distant future.

Keller's back.

Took over the rainbow rooms last night. Heavies came in on the dormant. Wiped

the floors.

When I say go, we'll cripple the bastards.

My club next.

The zoo.

If Keller wants something, he takes it.

I want that club. Do you understand?

Nobody can stand up to Keller.

There is one man who can stand up to him.

Oh, yeah? Who's that?

The Mancunian.

may we come.

Now we're really going to work out.

You don't look very tough to me.

Who do you expect?

Charles Bronson.

I'm too old.

Nobody tells Big Nick Rafferty when he's had enough to drink.

I

didn't know this

was a pill bar.

It is.

What about those two pots of air, then?

Graduation Day, one of the feeblest of all slasher movies.

It even got a feeble poster tagline. There are 200 seniors at Midvale High

seven days till graduation.

Huh? There are 200 seniors at Midvale High and seven days till graduation. It

came to you from the professionals at Pinewood, Ivor Film Services, who on the

back are proud to say that other video gold titles include The Stranger and the

Gunfighter, Bloody Birthday, The Slipper and the Rose, and Hugo the Hippo.

Frankly, there's probably more scary stuff in Hugo the Hippo than there is in

Graduation Day.

Isn't that the kid who died a couple of months ago?

Yeah, real shame.

Fucking Graduation Day, they make a big deal out of it.

Like it was something special or something.

It's one of those movies where you watch it... And halfway through you realise

you were remembering another film that was sort of similar. I was remembering

The Graduation, or maybe The Prowler, or maybe Final Exam, or Cutting

Class, or Rush Week, or any of those other campus slasher movies.

This is a campus slasher movie.

It stars...

Christopher George, great exploitation character playing the arrogant coach.

You broke your concentration, that's what happened.

I've never seen anything so sloppy.

It doesn't really matter, coach.

Just shut up and do your job, huh?

Who has pressured one of his athletics team to die on the field, so someone's

killing all the rest of them in mildly appropriate ways.

Oh, Michael Pataki, our old friend from director of Mansion of the Doomed, is in

it playing another grumpy authority figure.

All right.

All right, seniors.

You can't behave. We're just going to have to call this whole thing off.

Is that what you want to happen?

And a bunch of kids you'd never seen before and you didn't see again come on

get killed. It is.

Quite the most ordinary of these movies, I have to say. There aren't any more

real classes. Tomorrow's graduation day.

And there are a lot of ordinary slasher movies around.

There's a mystery in it, but it's utterly transparent.

There's sort of a premise that the sports team are killed with their own

equipment, but actually they don't even do that much of that. There's not too

much of the playing with the javelin.

Hey, give me my ball.

There were plenty of other films in which people die in exercise -related

The last Final Destination movie had an acrobat dying while doing

a gymnastic routine that is so much more impressive than anything in this

picture.

I have no idea why anyone would find this offensive.

You've got to be kidding.

Tomorrow is graduation day. I know that. I can't imagine even the most

censorious watching this and then remembering it the next day to phone up

complain. This is just not fair. I'm going to be up half the night with this.

But somebody must have done once.

There are 200 seniors at Midvale High and seven days till graduation.

The class of 81 is going out in style, and they're having the time of their

life.

It's been a great year for Midvale High. The track team finished first in the

state. Then again, Midvale always produces winners.

Sally Prescott is the top gymnast in the school.

She plans to go to college in the fall.

Paula Pascoff won five cross -country events in the past year. She jogs to

school every morning.

Ralph Johnson is the football team's star halfback.

Pete McFarlane set the state record in the pole vault.

Tony and Dolores were king and queen of the prom.

The class of 81s being fitted for caps and gowns and coffins.

There's 200 seniors at Midvale High and seven days till graduation.

Too bad there'll be no one to celebrate with.

Graduation Day.

Happy birthday to me. Possibly one of my favourite slasher movies from the early

1980s. It's actually much maligned, but I think it's a great little movie. In

fact, when I say little movie, it's probably the longest slasher movie that

ever made, and also one of the biggest budgeted, about three million.

Because of the bizarre nature of this birthday party, pray you are not

It's about killing teenagers, as most slasher movies are. What you have is

knobby crawl for top ten at an exclusive school being bumped off one by one in

the sixth of the most bizarre murders you will ever see.

Happy birthday to me.

Six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see.

Virginia, don't go away.

At the rate they're going, there'll be no one left for Virginia's birthday

dinner.

Alive.

Pray you are not invited to the party.

Happy birthday to me.

Now on the West End and all over London from Sunday.

Now, it's arguable, are they the most bizarre murders you've ever seen?

not. But as you can see, the iconic artwork on here, which is shish kebab

murder.

Ironically, on the poster it says, John will never eat shish kebab again. In

fact, there's not a character called John in there.

What the film has is someone having a dumbbell dropped in their nuts.

It has a kind of Isadora Duncan style murder with someone having their scarf

thrown in while they're working on a motorcycle.

It stars Melissa Sue Anderson, who's better known as one of the girls in

House on Prairie. It was also directed by J. Lee Thompson, who is probably best

known for actually directing Cape Fear. It also went on to direct the police

-tastic Charles Bonson, Ten to Midnight, with the naked killer chasing people

around. J. Lee Thompson surprised the producers, Andre Lincoln, John Dunning,

this is a Canadian film, by the way, of course, when he actually attacked the

film with gusto.

They were a little bit worried. They didn't think he would actually like

horror film. But in fact, the cast and crew actually said they couldn't stop

shouting, more blood, more blood.

Basically, he just loved doing the film. It also starred Glenn Ford, who was

obviously a big star in the 1940s, 1950s. And apparently it wasn't a

particularly happy shoot for him. And there's some great stories about him

punching out assistant producers and all sorts of things on the film. Of course,

the film is topped off by something. You love it or hate it twist ending.

It's probably the closest to a Scooby -Doo.

episode you're going to see in the slasher movie um if you've not seen it i

won't spoil the ending but essentially um what it is it's if you can imagine

pantyhose being ripped off somebody's face to show like in a mission

style way somebody underneath completely unlikely ending in fact um the

producers when they were making the film they said there were three endings,

they were shooting three endings, and that's because, actually, they didn't

an ending.

So they made it up, they went along, and actually, I won't spoil it for you, but

a person who actually turned out to be the killer at the end of the movie got a

phone call after they finished making the movie saying, would you mind coming

back? We need to shoot you as a killer. And she said, I can't be, I don't, I'm

not the killer. And it turned out she was.

So happy birthday to me. It's one of the silliest, but also one of the most

entertaining slasher movies you're going to ever see. It was released in 1981 at

the apex of the slasher movie.

It was probably actually... One of the most successful, I think it made

something like $10 million at the American box office.

And, of course, it was released in the UK at the cinema, very successful in the

UK as well, and on video on RCA, a silver label in the UK.

There were quite a lot of rumours that, in fact, it was released more uncut in

the UK than in the States. There were bits cut out of it, in fact, and when it

was released in America, there were quite a lot of cuts made to it, little

and pieces here, mostly to the brain surgery scene.

And I think there may have been one or two seconds extra in the RCA label

release in the UK.

Well, I love the film so much because it's handsomely put together and it

doesn't take itself too seriously. And I think that's one of the beauties of

horror movies from the early 1980s, slasher movies.

Personally, they're my favourite. I really love the popcorn slasher movies

the early 80s. It's got a fantastic scene in the beginning of Leslie

who was a great screen queen. She was in Funeral Home as well. Now, she dies

right at the beginning.

In a scene that looked like it's inspired by what they've done to your

be the Italian movie where she thought by the killer with a switchblade And cut

the throat now a lot that you can see lots of cuts in that there's also a

at the end Where one of the actresses that she was attacked and hacked up with

an axe And they film the scene right at the end of the movie, but it's never

been seen anywhere, which means that Happy Birthday to Me is begging for a

decent uncut release.

It's a bit of a mystery why this film would be on Section 3. I mean, I kind of

guess, I mean, what is the reason? It's probably this is the reason. It's

somebody being attacked with shish kebab, which I kind of guess if you went

psychotic barbecue, there's a chance that somebody might attack you with

kebab. And obviously the authorities were very worried about that. But as far

I'm aware, Happy Birthday to Me played at the cinema very successfully. It was

out on video.

And as far as I'm aware, there were no shish kebab murders in the UK or

else for that matter.

Someone's having a party for the top ten, the senior class snobs.

Before they get to celebrate, six of them will die in the most bizarre ways

you'll ever see.

Virginia, don't go away. Come over here, Virginia.

It is up to you to determine whether you wish to subject yourself to fear,

terror, and shock.

Because of the bizarre nature of this birthday party, pray you're not invited.

Right, well, we've got Headless Eyes, which is one of the more extraordinary

films to have come out on video in this country.

Thank goodness it did. It's still incredibly obscure and hard to find in

other form.

This is real New York scuzz. If you've got a taste for that kind of grimy,

street -level sort of movie -making that you get in things like Driller Killer

and Maniac, this is that kind of movie, but ten years earlier. This is made in

1971.

It's such a... Dirty, grimy film. It feels like it was filmed in a pith

doorway. You know, it's just got that kind of, you know, just off the

of 42nd Street sort of feel to it. In fact, it's kind of a fascinating film

because it feels like it's the kind of movie that's shot in and around 42nd

Street and is destined to play in 42nd Street. So it's on this weird feedback

loop where if you ever saw this at the time in the theatres that would have

shown it, you'd have left and probably walked down the same streets you were

just watching. So, very scuzzy film.

It's kind of...

It's like the cinematic equivalent of a really scary old bag lady.

You know, you just think, what is that? It's not very pretty, is it? It's not

very pretty, is it? A lot of it's handheld, very, very sort of grimy

16mm photography.

It's definitely made on the hoof. I doubt if there was ever a shooting

anything like that. It feels kind of made up scene by scene.

It's another one of these films about a killer who you meet early on in the

film. So the whole film is about this miserable, whining, self -pitying creep

who takes out his frustrations on other people. And it all kicks off at the

beginning with, I think, just one of the most perfect three or four minutes of

exploitation, because where this guy breaks into a woman's apartment and she

wakes up whilst he's rifling through her drawers trying to find money.

And as he tries to throttle her to shut her up, she grabs a spoon from her

bedside table and gouges his eye out with it.

Perfect, perfect, perfect.

What a great way to start a film, gouging somebody's eye out with a spoon.

And to make matters even better, he...

climbs out of the window and down the fire escape.

And on the soundtrack, there's a loop, and it is just a loop of the same

my eye, my eye, my eye, just going round and round.

So the whole thing just feels just mad. It's just a bizarre, bizarre film.

And then it turns out you jump forward a little bit in time and he's working out

his frustrations about having his eye scooped out by creating artworks where

suspends human eyeballs from his victims. He preserves the eyes of his

in blocks of perspex or blocks of ice.

You know, kind of decent conceptual artist, really. It's sort of like Eat

Heart Out, Damien Hirst, I think.

This is long before him.

It's a wacky plot, you know.

And it's kind of catheterising that kind of whole soho, bohemian idea of, like,

you know, kind of trendy artists who set up their own little shops with selling

their own kind of avant -garde art.

Except that this guy's a real utter creep who's doing it for real and he's

genuinely killing people.

By the time you get to the end of the movie, you can almost sense that... The

film kind of ends because they've run out of money, basically.

It doesn't kind of tie up, there's no narrative development and no threads

together. It's just a kind of, OK, we're over 72 minutes now, that's probably

enough, and, yeah, so let's stop.

Kent Bateman, the director, there is a question as to whether or not he did

actually direct it. It's been suggested, rumoured.

but with no proof, that it's actually directed by the named producer, Henri

Pichard, or Ron Sullivan, as he was known, who was a porno producer.

Certainly when you look at it, you think, yeah, I can believe that that was

by somebody who made their name in the porn industry.

What makes you suspicious as well is that when you see the next Kent Bateman

film, it's a 1977 movie called Land of No Return.

It bears no relationship at all to Headless Eyes in style or subject matter

appearance. It's a very conventionally shot children's adventure film set in

mountains with a heroic sort of figure played by William Shatner. And that's

Kent Bateman's name on it as well. And they seem like he's either genuinely

schizophrenic...

Or he made Headless Eyes as a lark as his first project and swiftly became

more adept later on. But if you were to put the two films side by side, you

wouldn't suspect they were made by the same person.

Whereas if you look at Ron Sullivan and his porno work, yes, you could put

Headless Eyes next to that and say, yeah, there's a continuum there.

But I don't want to try and take Kent Bateman's credibility away as the

of this film. His name is on it.

He is the named director.

And although...

He's yet to give an interview on the subject. It would be fascinating to find

out the full story behind actually one of the most interesting and creepy and

peculiar exploitation movies of the 70s. The reason this one ended up on the

Section 3 list is clearly because it's about eye violence and most people are a

bit... um squeamish about violence to the eye i'm sure that at the time things

like zombie flesh eaters with you know very very graphic attacks on on the

eye will have sensitized the police to the idea that that's something that was

real no -go area And so if the film is called Headless Eyes and the cover tells

you it's about a guy who pokes out the eyes of his victims and then the first

five minutes a character gets their eyes scooped out with a spoon and you see it

dangling down their face, that's probably enough.

Again, I doubt whether or not the people who attempted to prosecute this film

watched more than five minutes of it, but in this case that's all they needed

watch because there is some grisly eye violence within the first five minutes,

so job done.

He called himself a collector.

But what he collected meant someone had to die.

A maniac is loose.

Obsessed by an uncontrollable urge to kill.

He's watching you.

But when you see him,

it will already be too late.

Run and he will catch you.

Hide and he will find you.

When you give him the eye, He was very pretty.

You're already dead.

This

is

Hell Prison, 1980.

Filmed by Edward G. Muller, which is a pseudonym for Eduardo Moolagia.

it's a woman in prison film and you've got a bevy of beauties stuck in the

middle of a forest who are in this prison camp you you think look who's

you smell like a goat it's an interesting little film on the basis of

that it has some philosophical points to make about whether people are savage

brutal naughty because they're inherently bad wrong and evil or because

because of society it's society that rules us Yeah, sure, like you rule here.

The way we live in this field under your rule is uncivilized.

Tender, my ass.

Now, I seriously struggle to think of another film where, by such points, it's

been made with so many booze and shots.

Actually, it's one of those things you do end up, after about five minutes,

thinking, yeah, one in the eye. And seeing how it was obviously kind of

marked for a male audience in the sense of you see...

various different types of girls. You've got the kind of pretty little femme and

you've got this kind of butch prison warden who used to be one of the

herself.

Do you see the kind of different type

of women that you kind of think, yeah, people are going to get, you know,

excited about seeing that?

It's actually in some ways quite a difficult film to watch because there is

lot of torture involved in it. You see, for example, one of the girls at one

point, she's kind of strung up, you know, kind of Christ style.

You actually feel her humiliation.

The interesting thing in some ways as well is about the way that the music is

used in it. We have...

A couple of instances where you actually have diegetic music that's actually

from within the scene being used. You see, obviously, situations where record

players are used to contrast some quite beautiful classical music against the

extreme violence.

She will remain pinned down upon that tree trunk until midnight.

I won't let you use my music for your sadistic exhibitions.

It has got some alternative titles. For example, Escape from Hell. It was re

-released as Savage Island. It was basically a composition of this film and

Hotel Paradise, which was the companion piece.

And it's important to note that both of these were shot back -to -back, so we

have this slicing going on. This was done by Charles Band. He kind of recut

bit and also added new stuff with Linda Blair.

Despite her involvement in it, she actually told the distributors that she

very concerned that the film would be marketed on her back, because as far as

she was concerned, she was just a little cameo role.

Linda Blair fought her way back from hell, and nothing was going to stand in

way of her revenge.

Savage Island.

However, the distributors, being the lovely guys they evidently were,

ignored her.

So in the publicity stills, she was essentially shown as being dressed like

Sheena with the most amazing high heels and a bloody great bazooka.

Women,

trapped on a prison island, forced into slavery, depending on sadistic guards

for survival. With nothing to trade, but their buried souls.

I saw you colliding with your fucking black ass.

Jealous bitch.

I'll break your head open.

They were brutalized.

Humiliated.

And tortured.

Until they were willing to risk anything for freedom.

Even death.

The Hills Have Eyes, like several films that were big in the sort of video nasty

era, began rather respectively in Britain. It was premiered at the London

Festival. I saw Q there, Android played there, Dawn of the Dead played there,

Death Trap played there, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was famously a London Film

Festival choice.

So... From a debut, as it were, in the Houthian confines of what was then the

National Film Theatre, and is now the BFI South Bank, it got a step up from a

grindhouse exploitation relief.

I remember it was one of those films that stuck around a long time.

The last time I saw it theatrically on its first run was as a B picture to John

Hoff's Incubus.

So it was one of those movies they would put out as the lower half of a double

bill almost because it would boost whatever your A horror picture was.

would say, oh, and we can go and see The Hills Have Eyes because it's on again.

They wanted to see something different, but something different saw them first.

What began as a vacation ended.

As a nightmare.

A night of terror.

A day of vengeance. No one was spared.

The lucky ones died first.

The most shocking, terrifying film you will ever see.

The Hills Have Eyes.

Certificate X. For details, see local press.

For Wes Craven, it was kind of an interesting...

It was a return to the world of Last House on the Left, but he had changed

mode from being kind of a grim, in -your -face, disgusting, semi -art

filmmaker into basically making action pictures.

Hills Have Eyes is the same kind of movie as Last House on the Left

thematically. It's normal people and mutants locked in a combat which has

social significance.

But it also shows Craven's mastery of staging action.

He's one of those filmmakers who started out as an editor and you can really see

it. He can time an action or a horror sequence in the way that people used to

say Frankie Howard could time a joke.

Craven can actually stage what is conceptually an ordinary horror sequence

make you jump. And in The Hills Have Eyes he has stuff that's brilliantly

conceived.

And then he adds the filmmaking stills. What the hell is this?

That's just some stuff that I...

It's another one of those horror films that's basically a western.

It's the settlers go out into the wilderness and are attacked by wild

Although, yeah, this is kind of post -nuclear testing Apaches, so there's a

of gruesome horror element to it. It is one of those films that's not as gory as

you remember it.

because it's just the editing is done in such a powerhouse style that you think

you've seen a lot more gruesome stuff. It's got a lot less sort of cannibalism

in it than you think is there, although there is certainly an element of

cannibalism in it.

You keep an eye on that young tenderloin baby.

You can see why it was a sort of video nasty type picture because it's

thematically got all this stuff.

But then I suppose the problem is that if you're so serious, you sit down and

watch it and...

What are the frames you want to take out? And the fact is, all of them is

you want to remove, because it's kind of so well done that there aren't those

gruesome set pieces you can take out.

It's just the whole film is pitched at such a high -octane level that if you

want to condemn it, you've got to get rid of the whole thing.

It did seem to cross over.

It's one of those movies that had...

a bit of a reputation outside genre.

I think a lot of older critics saw it, and because they loved westerns, they

that from it.

But none of these bastards ever come as close to killing me as my own goddamn

wife and her goddamn roadmaps and her wrong turns and her goddamn historical

screaming and her... Watch your language.

So it wasn't quite as given the kicking that some other films we now rate were.

The Hills Have Eyes is one of those pictures that proportionally probably

better in Britain than in America.

The Hills Have Eyes 2, the much derided sequel, is technically a semi -British

film because it was financed off the back of the profit that The Hills Have

had made in Britain.

way out in the desert further than the eye can see beyond all

towns all roads where few have ever been who'd put a welcome sign

out here the hills still have eyes it was a name that uh

that meant something in britain

And I think this has to do with the fact that movies like this in America were

distributed in a much more diffuse, almost state -by -state fashion.

So even if they did really well, you couldn't get the impression of something

being a bigger hit than another action -exploitation horror -type picture.

Whereas in Britain, if a movie like The Hills Have Eyes or later The Evil Dead

broke through, then you had a demand in Britain for a sequel.

And your British video companies would be only too willing to get in and part

finance. Way out in the desert, the family of Jupiter holds sway.

The sand runs with fire and blood.

Obviously, that worked for the Evil Dead. That was less successful in

the Hills Have Eyes into a franchise because, as we know, Hills Have Eyes 2

a bit of a disaster.

And the gills still have eyes.

And, like a lot of other films on the Video Nasties list, the title at least

lingered in popular memory long enough for somebody to greenlight a remake.

In fact, not only has The Hills Have Eyes been remade, The Hills Have Eyes

2 got remade.

They wanted to see something different, but something different saw them first.

The Hills Have Eyes.

Mister, don't take your family back in that area.

The silver has been gone for 40 years now.

Imagine nothing back in there but animals.

A lot.

The old creep told you not to get off the road.

What began as a vacation ended as a nightmare.

I'll be hell to pay now.

She thought she knew what the world was all about.

But nothing prepared her for this.

The hills have eyes.

How are you going with my baby? Yeah, that way, Dick.

A mother fighting for her child, losing it in the worst possible way.

I hit him with a tire and I split his face wide open. That was a bad mistake.

I'll come back for you later, girly.

Why are you doing this?

The story of an American family who lost everything except the will to survive.

Murdered, raped, burned, but not beaten. The Hills Have Eyes. The story of one

family's refusal to die.

I'm going to get those animals.

The hills have eyes.

A night of terror.

A day of vengeance where no one was spared.

No one.

Kill the baby!

They fought back. Anything was a weapon.

A family dog.

The most shocking, terrifying film you will ever see by Wes Craven, writer and

director of The Last House on the Left.

The hills have eyes.

The lucky ones die first.

Right, Home Sweet Home, a 1981 slasher movie with an utterly generic title.

He was coming home.

Home Sweet Home.

Yeah, if you go on the IMDb, you'll find about a dozen films called Home Sweet

Home. And this is probably the last one you're going to look at. Directed by

Nettie Pena, who has two other credits.

One for a very recent eco -documentary about wind farming, and one as a

on the hardcore porn movie Dracula Sucks with Jamie Gillis, which was actually

one of those movies that exists both as a hardcore picture and as a sort of

mainstream sex comedy. So from that period when porn was kind of ambitious.

The producer...

Don Edmonds, who made the Ilsa films, is in Home Sweet Home as an actor.

I would bet that it was actually shot at his house.

Something about the house it's set in just tells me this is...

Somebody in the adult entertainment industry owns this place, although he

interesting, he has the original posters for both versions of King Kong that

existed at the time in the decor, which is kind of cool.

The executive producer of this film was Alex Rabar, who we all know as the star

of The Incredible Melting Man.

It has a few other odd, interesting people in it. The little girl is Vinitha

Shaw, who grew up to be a sort of starlet. She's in Eyes Wide Shut.

remake of the hills have eyes and 310 to yuma and 30 days of night and already

she's the best actress in this film i have to go to the bathroom the psycho

killer is played by jake steinfeld sometimes bill just as jake who

became a trainer to the stars in the 80s when stars needed trainers his gym was

called body by jake the trouble is He later on, in sort of his media

appearances, had a kind of goofy, goonish, sort of big -lunk image.

So it's hard not to see him playing a PCP, hopped -up, psychothereal slasher

here without thinking that, oh no, he's just laughing.

He's not very good as a psycho killer.

The story is so basic. It opens with...

Killer escapes, killer kills somebody and steals their car, then goes into the

country where there's a house full of people and he kills them all one by one.

It's so basic that you sort of expect a twist at the end, something where it's

not him, it's somebody else who's done it, or that he's been specifically

brought in to kill someone. No, there's none of that. It's just utterly random.

A bunch of random people turn up, they get utterly randomly killed.

Most of the actors in it...

Don't have any other credits. They look like the kind of people who might have

been in porn films. Not that I'm saying they were.

But they still look like the sort of fringes that hang around.

It is the kind of slasher

movie that a few weeks after you've seen it, you barely remember.

Except for one character.

The Mistake.

Hey, hey, everyone.

Now that the redneck is gone and the other two assholes haven't returned, we

have a party. Played by an actor called Peter DePaula, who is the son of the Don

Edmonds character and for some reason wears clown makeup throughout and keeps

doing really strange, weird, irritating comedy stuff.

He keeps interrupting people when they're about to have sex.

Oh, wow.

And when he gets murdered halfway through the film, it's a real relief

don't have to put up with him any longer.

He's a really, one of the most annoying characters in exploitation cinema.

But...

Actually, by virtue of that, at least he is the only memorable thing in this

film.

So we have to give Peter DePaula a credit for something, because forever

Home Sweet Home is the film with the mistake in it.

Hey, you want a beer?

Wow. It looks like the boogeyman has been here.

He's extremely dangerous.

My God.

And he could be on PCP.

The Bradley Ranch was situated in a desolated area on the outskirts of Los

Angeles County.

Thanksgiving was a time for merriment and friends.

They didn't know their visitor was coming home.

To continue a massacre he started eight years before.

They were all frightening childhood images in his mind.

Images he had to get rid of.

Listen, man.

Listen to me.

Women are no good.

Only cause you problems, man.

My mother was no good like that! Crazy guy!

There was nowhere to run.

No one to stop him.

He was there.

Ready to kill.

Scott!

Deranged and powered by excessive doses of PCP, he created cruel and

mutilating horror.

He was coming home.

Home sweet home.

Honeymoon Horror came out in the UK from AVI Video, the same company that gave

us Island of Death.

The director of Honeymoon Horror, Harry Preston, was also a prolific author. He

wrote some 90 books, most of them ghostwritten for other authors.

But he also wrote a number of books himself, including a guide to teenage

called Everything a Teenager Wants to Know About Sex and Should.

So Preston had a career as an author as well as a filmmaker.

The production history of Honeymoon Horror is somewhat convoluted.

began shooting... in the late 70s, probably around 1978.

In fact, you can tell from looking at the actor's costumes.

He was two months into editing before the producer ran out of money and the

was taken away from him.

Subsequent to that, the producer had another filmmaker shoot some dreadful

scenes starring a genuine county sheriff and his deputy, clearly based on the

sheriff and his deputy in Smoking the Bandit, which would have been current

around the time the film was made.

We got one dinky little old squat car and they don't even have a number on it.

Now what the hell do you want?

Preston was clearly trying to make a slasher movie.

I mean, essentially the film is about three couples taking their honeymoon in

isolated motel on an island.

And the film is meant to be a serious thriller.

Unfortunately, the new footage that was shot is played entirely for comedy with

a whole series of comedic music cues, and the result is it ruins the tempo of

the film.

Well, tell it to her again. Over and goddamn out!

If Preston's experience in making the film wasn't exactly positive,

I believe he managed to take his revenge. In 2003, he released a book

Shot in Dallas.

which is a fictionalized account of the shooting of Honeymoon Horror.

Preston's unusual in the fact that he was happily and unabashedly gay,

that was probably fairly unusual in conservative Texas in the late 1950s.

The reason I mention this is, in fact, when you watch Honeymoon Horror, it's

quite funny because all the victims are women.

That means there's somebody else in the aisle that's been killing all the women.

And the camera concentrates on the figures of the male characters.

Look at those muscles.

18 inches.

I hope you're talking about his arms, dear.

In particular, the character of Gary, who's tall, blonde, skinny, smooth, and

Preston takes every opportunity to show him either undressed, lying in bed, or

wearing just a towel. In fact, there's a lovely piece of dialogue where his

wife, talking about supper, says, It's the biggest piece of meat I've ever

And then Gary replies, Hey, I thought I was.

Gary, put some clothes on.

And he walks into shot wearing no clothes.

The reason the film found its way onto the DPP Section 3 list baffles me.

There's not a great deal of violence, and what there is would now pass for a

without any trouble at all. An actress is stabbed in a shower.

Another actress has her arms chopped off.

There's no concentration on gore.

And frankly, the film is largely...

tedious.

Possibly another reason that it fell foul of the DPP was the cover artwork

in fact it's probably the most noticeable thing about the film. In

Honeymoon Horror is really a rather unremarkable film and to be honest if it

hadn't found its way onto the DPP's section 3 list no one would probably

remember it at all.

The film cost a mere $50 ,000.

is very low budget, is very slow, and without its notoriety, there's a good

chance the film would have sunk without trace.

We should have plenty of business this season.

Oh, yes, young lovers coming out to Lover's Island.

This place there gives me the willies.

I'll be glad to get home tonight.

It's the perfect spot for honeymoon.

No interruption, no TV, no telephone, nothing but this beautiful peep

and quiet.

Crazy kids.

I hope they don't run into Joe. He'll scare them to death.

It's almost too quiet. Too isolated.

Suppose something happened.

Like what?

You are jumpy. What's the matter?

It's kind of spooky.

Look, there's nothing spooky about it. There is.

Away from everything like this, it's weird.

You don't know the half of it.

That means there's somebody else in the island been killing all the women.

Well, who knew mini chainsaws would prominently feature in the future space

programmes? But here they are. They turn up in Norman J. Warren's Inseminoid, or

Horror Planet, as it was called in America, produced by Richard Gordon. I

he'd given us masterpieces like Tower of Evil, Corridors of Blood, Horror

Hospital. But this, well,

let's be honest, conveyor belt alien rip -off was made for a million pounds and

was shot in Chislehurst Caves.

Somewhere in the depths of space, a horrific nightmare is about to become

a reality.

I know because I was there. In fact, I was there when the power kept being

drained because it was so cold that it had to keep shutting down.

One of the reasons why I could actually talk to Stephanie Beecham and Judy

Geeson, the two stars of it. I mean, Stephanie Beecham was obviously in it

because she looked like, well, vaguely looked like... Sigourney Weaver from

Alien, and Judy Gieson, who I think gives an amazing performance in the

but she absolutely hates it. I mean, this was her last film before she sort

moved to America and sort of, like, then became famous in the sitcom Mad About

You. It was written by Nick and Gloria Maley. Now, Nick Maley was a make -up

on Star Wars and Superman.

He was the one who actually created the twin baby aliens that you see in this. I

mean, it's gory, it's silly, it's... Quite good fun, I think, and for the

budget, I think, as is always with Norman J. Warren's movies, he can really

something really look good.

It was on the Brent Walker label.

Brent Walker, a big sort of, like, gambling consortium.

I remember George Walker for a series of baked potato restaurants from the late

60s. But here he was, in the 80s, putting out Inseminoid.

So she's going to be a mother.

Allegedly on the video Nazis list because a group of feminists complained

it. A pregnant woman apparently gone and seen it and passed out. I mean, what

does that tell you? But I mean, you know, this is one of Norman's, you know,

one of his best, not one of his worst.

But the only thing to say about this is if you're a pregnant woman, just don't

watch it.

Far below the surface of a sub -zero planet.

Hidden in the freezing mists.

Something is watching.

Something is waiting.

Quietly in the dark.

Biting its time until the right human comes along.

And then... Then it will strike.

Not just to kill.

But to do something far, far worse.

Soon, she's going to be a mother.

And there might not be anyone left alive to witness the event.

Which will be a

pity, because it promises to be a very, very unusual

birth.

In the depths of space, a horrific nightmare is about to become a

reality.

In Seminoid, afar from human birth.

Invasion of the Blood Farmers, made in 1972, crept out on video in the early

here. This was one of those films, because it's a stupid title, I had heard

before it came out. I mean, it's listed in the various books that Walt Lee and

Don Willis wrote about horror pictures.

And I remember there was a period when, as a British horror fan, you would see

lists of all these films and assume you would never.

see them. These were the movies that were never going to play theatrically in

Britain.

They were never going to turn up on television in Britain. And then suddenly

there was this new medium and these movies were out there. I remember

watching Invasion of the Blood Farmers and actually being astonished because it

is sub -amateur.

And I didn't realise there were lots and lots of regional American films like

this, which looked to me like just some people had got hold of, yeah, the camera

equipment that they were usually shooting their holiday films on.

It's so basic, so thumpingly inept. I mean, if you look at the... climax of

movie where lots of stuff is happening but it's a single static shot of a bunch

of people falling over and as this blood sacrifices and it's got a really

ridiculous premise as well to do with druid living in modern america people

the sangroid druids are worshiping again and preparing a new blood sacrifice

and searching for a special person for that big sacrifice that's going to bring

back the evil druid queen, who never does quite come back. If you're building

to the return of the arch -evil, you kind of have to let the arch -evil turn

at the end. You can't just avert it at the last minute, which is what happens

here. I'm so glad that the nightmare's over.

Anyway, the director, the titular director, as you say, is Ed Adlam.

Michael Findlay, who made Snuff, is kind of associated with it, and it sort of

has the feel of his work as a director. He also hopped in and out of, like,

exploitation films and porn movies, and it has that, you know, thumping, clod

-hopping, basic setup stuff. The performances are all...

I don't know, regional community theatre level stuff. Some of them are quite

endearing and some of the dialogue is sort of loopy. Within a week, the lab

be flooded with human blood.

One interesting person worked on this film, Frederick Elms, who is the camera

operator, the person who presumably...

set that camera up on the tripod and took a tea break during the climax of

film. He later on was the director of photography on Blue Velvet and went on

become a collaborator with Ang Lee on Hulk, Brokeback Mountain, all those

films he shot then.

So that's a long way from Invasion of the Blood Farmers. But hey, everybody

to start somewhere.

It's just a farmhouse and looks pretty innocent from the road, but once you're

inside, you'll see what really happens on a terror farm.

Invasion of the Blood Farmers.

Coming in the dead of night. Coming to plant the living and harvest the dead.

Invasion of the blood farmers.

Within a week, the lab will be flooded with human blood.

I can't stop it.

Are you strong enough?

More raw terror. More stomach -turning shock than you can take.

Therefore, we warn you.

Don't eat before you see Invasion of the Blood Farmers. And you'll have nothing

to lose.

No.

No. No.

They plant the living and harvest the dead.

Invasion of the Blood Farmers. Released by NMD Films. In color. Rated PG.

Parental guidance suggested.

So the next film is a film by Armand Masroani called The Killing Hour. And

film promises a lot, actually. It's a film about a clairvoyant. And in many

ways, it does follow a traditional kind of giallo narrative, with the exception

of the introduction of a slight supernatural element.

It started as a game.

And turned into a nightmare.

So it does...

tend to create a certain kind of promise.

The Killing Hour, a film in the finest tradition of suspense.

When it opens, it's very grotty, grim, late 70s New York, so you've got that

kind of maniac meets zombie flesh -eaters. There was a certain way that

liked to see New York in the late 70s that really apprehended its griminess.

It's basically the story of a murderer.

and a young woman who is an artist who sees murders.

She was an art student.

She had the power to see things beyond the normal range of human senses.

She saw murder.

And it also has a lot of commentary in terms of things like the relationship

with the media and the police because they want to keep it secret and then it

all gets revealed and so there's lots of...

male tension between, you know, the liberation of narratives of violent gore

titillation that we all adore.

It's got quite an elegantly elaborated narrative and it's got the lovely punch

line at the end that many jiali have.

Quite a seedy and grotty one, actually.

However... The murders are incredibly clinical.

It's almost like it's a film about the reflection on murders and the

relationship between the murder to come and the murders that have been.

But the spectacle of murder is simply not there. And I found that quite

because obviously in that kind of situation, the spectacle of the murder

grammar of the film. So it lacked that.

Oddly, the drawings were quite good.

in a very expressionistic kind of monk way. So that's another little

thing that we can add. But I think Mastroianni's career was a broad kind of

career. He did some exploitation films, he did murder films, he did He Knows

You're Alone, he did those kinds of stalk and slash films.

And it's certainly a film of its time. It just feels like it didn't quicken to

that level. And had it been made in Italy, perhaps it would have looked

different.

technically it could have been put on the list because the money shot so to

speak spoiler alert look away now is that at the end you find out the reason

the killing occurs because of an initial what began as consensual lots of

men having sex with one woman and ended up with one man getting a bit over

excited and he turns the sex into murder and

it's relatively explicit, I guess. But I think that in terms of a general

scene, perhaps the perversity of the gang raping as much as the murders

is what could have been the reason why it was put on the list. Having said

it's certainly...

The reason that I argue that it fits into that whole Giallo stream is because

those kinds of images often occur at the end of late 60s Giallo. So

obviously it was sort of the British relationship to the exposure.

And it does, in terms of an aesthetic, exploit that late 70s New York seediness

that really did become quite a...

sort of fantasy in the minds of a lot of people who, you know, when we were

watching films in the late 70s, New York had a certain kind of texture about it

and the films, Mise en Scene does exploit that kind of texture. So the

of that could be one of the reasons.

It started as a game and turned into

a nightmare.

She was an art student.

She had the power to see things beyond the normal range of human senses.

She saw murder.

She was cursed with a terrifying talent.

She became a silent witness to murder.

I saw the drawings, Verna.

Two men were drawn into the killings.

One was a cop.

What do you want?

The other, a TV reporter.

We both know those killings aren't just another statistic.

I want to use them on my show.

How do you make these drawings?

My hand takes over.

How does that happen?

It's unconscious.

I'm not going to let anything happen to you.

Both men became involved in her life.

Both men loved her.

One of them had to kill her. I want the girl kept out of this. Don't put her on

the show.

Are you paying her rent? What's all the interest?

You might try to kill her.

The Killing Hour, a film in the finest tradition of suspense.

So, the last horror film, also known as Fanatic sometimes.

Fanatic.

Everywhere he looked, he saw beautiful people.

All Vinnie wanted was to be part of it. It re -teams the romantic leads from

Maniac, Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro in a film together again.

I just want to talk about the film.

We did the last horror film and suddenly I thought, wow, you're an amazing actor

to work with, you know, to actually watch work.

Fantastic actor, really good. I miss him. I miss him very much.

And the plan was, well, we talked about it, to do another, maybe some sort

of a sequel to Maniac. I think he had it in his... I think there was some plan

to do it, but sadly he died too young.

And this coveted prize goes to a man of true genius, a wizard of the cinematic

arts. And actually, the whole movie seems to be built around their

persona. It sort of elevates Caroline Munro to the screen demigod status.

I mean, it's Caroline Munro's Sunset Boulevard or Seven Year Itch or

This performance is by far the best.

We wanted to kind of produce something, and my then -husband had ideas to

do a film.

And we got together with David Winters, who became the director, and he was kind

of writing, so they sort of co -wrote it with Joe in mind. Because we got on so

well doing Star Crash, we kind of wanted to follow it up, doing something, some

vehicle. So the vehicle was written around Joe and myself, really, the

characters. Joe Spinell's real mother appears playing his mother in it.

Vinnie, are you sure you're making a movie?

And I have to say...

No one is ever going to give a nice little old lady a bad review except me.

is terrible in this film.

Stop thinking about those crazy ideas.

Martin Scorsese's mother, who's in several of his films, she's really good

compared to Joe Spinell's mother, who is like...

Sub E .D. Massey in this, I've got to say.

From her performance in this, I suspect her spaghetti sauce recipe was dreadful

too.

But anyway, that's enough of picking on somebody you can't fight back.

Why are you doing this to me?

I don't know. Why do I have to do anything? I just have to do my thing.

Caroline Munro, we have to...

She was one of the, and still is, one of the most beautiful women in the world.

You couldn't take a bad photograph of her. However, she had the misfortune to

working in the early 80s, where some of the worst costuming and hairstyling ever

was inflicted on truly beautiful women. This kind of two -tone skunk look that

she has in this picture.

You've made your last horror film, goodbye.

Huh.

I think it was actually a clever film insofar as with what we had to work

which wasn't a huge budget at all.

Don't you have any fears that you might become the obsession of some fanatic?

And if so, have you taken any security precautions?

Not really. I believe that people understand the difference between real

and illusion.

And we also made use of the film festival, the Cannes Film Festival.

to be a front runner for best actress for her chilling performance in Scream,

the smash horror flick. In fact, it was shot kind of guerrilla style at the

Cannes Film Festival in 1981.

So you see lots of really interesting ad mats in the background and a few

glimpses of celebrities in the far distance.

You know, we literally go in and shoot scenes and then sometimes be hoiked out

and said, Oi, what are you doing here? You know, so we...

Took a lot of poetic license with things.

So it was very much you had to really be on your toes and the crew and

everything. It was a great experience. It was really a hard film to shoot.

There's even a weird irony that Caroline Munro is going to get the Best Actress

Award at Cannes for appearing in an extreme horror picture.

The first time in the entire history of the Cannes Film Festival, this prize is

awarded to an actress playing in a horror movie.

However, if you look at the record, that year Isabella Gianni won for

Possession. So it could have happened. It was possible to appear in a video

nasty and get the Best Actress award at Cannes. There are some grotesque

caricatures of the kind of people you find in the movie industry.

I wouldn't hire him to shine my shoes.

There's, I assume, a lot of in -jokes and feuds going on, being paid off.

David Winters, the director, actually appears in it as a sleazy Hollywood

character and stages his own murder, which is quite funny.

So it's a film that I want to like a lot more than I actually do when I sit down

and watch it. The problem is that David Winters was not that much of a director.

Joe Spinell, one of the great bit part character actors of the century.

There's nothing but a crazy fan.

Actually, it was Robert De Niro said he was the best character

actor of his day, Joe.

He was talking about Joe.

And Joe worked with everybody. He worked with De Niro and Stallone and Al

Pacino. He'd worked with everybody.

You don't understand me!

Whenever you see him in a big budget movie where he has two or three scenes,

he's astonishing. I love him in Nicholas Roeg's Eureka, filmed the same year,

where he's a giggling hitman, and he's terrifying in that. However, give him

more than two or three scenes, and frankly, your tolerance for, your need

Joe Spinell in a movie dries up.

I don't think he's as annoying in this as he is in Maniac, a film I think he

practically sinks.

But... There's something alternately disgusting and whiny about his

He does this thing that a lot of really great heavies do when they're given a

lead role.

He goes down on his knees and begs for your sympathy.

He goes for the pathos. He does the sort of crying clown

act.

Frankly, he's better off just playing a dead -eyed killer.

Then there's something about him as, you know, his screen character that really

works. When he sort of turns around and starts whining like Lou Costello, it

doesn't really play for me.

Another publicity stunt. What a cute idea.

Well, great, great.

The Last Hunter, Antonio Margheriti's war exploiter, that actually is the

fan's perfect war movie because it features so much gore, so much

it's actually a really good movie.

So David Warbeck is the last hunter.

Actually, he was supposed to be the deer hunter too, il cacciatore due, but a

rights issue meant they had to actually call it The Last Hunter.

I mean, David Warbeck, of course, odd known from Sergio Leone's A Fistful of

Dynamite. He had one of the best death scenes, so one of Ennio Morricone's best

scores ever.

He was also up for Bond at one point. He was the milk tray man.

I mean, he was in so many sort of like movies of the early 70s, The Sex Thief.

He was on TV with Hayley Mills.

I didn't know him then. I only knew him because of his Italian exploitation

career, which he loved, which he embraced.

I mean, he would come back and give me all the gossip about Margheriti, about

Lindsay. I mean, I was agog with the stuff that he would tell me. And

working on Trog with Joan Crawford, her chasing him around on that movie was one

of the funniest things I've ever heard in my life.

So many stories.

So many I can't mention. I would love to. One day I will. But David Wolbeck,

me, was the ultimate Italian movie star.

I don't want to argue about it anymore.

I don't think about it anymore, understand it anymore.

This was the third in a contract deal that he'd done with his agent Giuseppe

Peroni. David always used to tell me that Giuseppe Peroni would make him sign

deals like three films at a time. And this was the third of a package that

included The Black Cat and The Beyond, the two Lucho Fulci movies he'd done.

David loved his Italian exploitation career.

He had so many stories about it. He really embraced it. And I think the fans

really loved him for that. I mean, I actually watched The Last Hunter with

at the very first screening.

And I'll always remember him turning to me halfway through and saying, oh, my

God, I run like a girl through that hail of bullets. I'm never going to run in a

movie again. And he never did.

He loved working with him. In fact, he worked with him twice, again.

I mean, you know, Hunters of the Golden Cobra and the Ark of the Sun God.

I've got so many stories about David. He was one of the loveliest people you

could ever meet. He actually lived in a converted convent in Belsize Park.

And I'll tell you, the parties, orgies, let's face it, and New Year's parties

that he threw were, I think, some of the best I've ever been to.

If you were invited to one of those, you were really part of the inner circle.

Why did they get you up like that?

Them. Huh?

Them. They come in here by the hundreds.

Jesus Christ!

It was filmed in the Philippines, on actually some of the same locations as

Apocalypse Now.

David always told me that it was one of the hardest films he'd ever made.

Very gruelling, very hot, very difficult conditions.

In fact, Riccardo Palatini, the cinematographer, died in a plane crash

through the film and had to be replaced.

But really, I've got...

Nothing but fond memories about this movie. I really like it. I think David's

great in it, and he loved it.

Apart from the scene where he's running through the hail of bullets where he ran

like a girl, but that really made me laugh.

I miss him very much, and I miss David very much.

You listen, I've got a top priority mission, so you get this fucking thing

I don't give a shit about top priority.

Change your mind?

No!

Who's she?

I'm a foreign correspondent.

My name is Jane Foster.

Watch where you put your feet now, honey. There's VCs under every rock.

We're never going to get the hell out of here.

Never, ever. We will, we will. We have to.

What is your bloody mission?

Shut up!

Your mission?

You hate the VCs.

I don't have time to hate them.

I kill them.

I don't want to argue about it anymore.

I don't want to think about it anymore or understand it anymore.

It's enough to think I don't want to live anymore.

Even Charlie knows you have a mission behind their lines.

So what the fuck is it they set you up to get yourself killed for?

How long you been here?

Huh?

It doesn't matter anymore.

Why'd they get you up like that?

Them. Huh?

Them. They come in here by the hundreds.

Jesus Christ.

Get out of here.

It's very difficult.

Especially when I watch Steve blow his brains out because you went and ditched

him for your cause. But I'm here because they gave me an order and because I

obey when I get issued orders.

You're a lying son of a bitch.

Come on, you must have known it would come to that.

If you feel on trial, I can't help you.

Steve!

Right, so we have here The Love Butcher on Intervision, one of the earliest

tapes to come out in this country. This is one of the first wave of videos from

a company who boast that they already had over 200 titles. So Intervision were

all over the shop at the time with a hell of a lot of really collectible

on their catalogue. The Love Butcher, OK, well, I mean, you can tell

why that one got into trouble just from the title. And it also presents other

difficulties for the film as well.

Not only does it attract the attention of people who want to censor and remove

this kind of, you know, sort of sleaze from the shelves, it gives a misleading

sort of sense of what to expect from the film. Now, I saw this back in the 80s

when I was renting out, you know, all the usual suspects, Driller Killer and

Cannibal Holocaust and all those things.

And, of course, you pick up The Love Butcher and think, hmm, well, that

outrageous.

It immediately sets your mind racing with the possibilities because you think

it's going to be basically a kind of a sex and horror.

uh sort of uh slaughter film and probably extremely tasteless uh it's

really quite a different film it's actually more of a satire in a lot of

there is a bit of violence i mean somebody gets a you know somebody gets a

garden fork through their chest quite early on which is always kind of nice

do

you enjoy this being a ghoul It doesn't have that kind

of, you know, level of gynecological butchery which the title seems to be

suggesting it's going to offer.

It's got nothing along those lines, really.

We're looking for a psychotic killer, Russell, and psychotic killers don't

necessarily all act the same. It's actually about a very nervous, kind of

gimpish sort of guy, a guy who's a gardener.

who seems to have all the disadvantages, you know, jam jar glasses, going bald,

sort of a withered arm, I think, and generally kind of the last guy to get

What's wrong with me, Les?

Wrong? You're ugly.

That's what's wrong.

You're a mental and physical cripple. No one loves a cripple, or can one abide a

mental moron. But he has an alter ego, and his alter ego is an arrogant...

confident, swanky sort of Lothario who sees himself as God's gift to women.

She shall love me, Caleb, as much as she hated you.

I am love, total love.

And if anyone is mean to the gimp side of his persona, then he returns and

visits them later in his Lothario posture.

I just wish there was something more I could do.

and seduces and then murders the women that were so dismissive of him earlier.

In the course of telling this story, a lot of the fun lies in the dialogue

because the Lothario half of the character, the lead character, has some

lines. You think I'm insane?

Wrong!

You're insane.

The world's insane.

I'm going to awaken you from this earthly nightmare.

Very much in the vein of Doctor Strangelove with...

You know, the character in Dr. Strangelove who believes that women are

drain his vital bodily fluids.

It's that kind of level of sexual paranoia coupled with the kind of

arrogance. And there are just some very, very quotable lines in the film. Your

feminine pulchritude is detestable!

And you were trying to drain the energy from me!

But it's not a brutal film in the way that the title suggests. So that's part

the problem with the movie, why it's perhaps not developed as much of a

following.

because it can feel like a bit of a letdown on first exposure. The on

credit for directing is by a guy called Michael Angel, or Mickle Angel, a Greek

-born director who worked in the theatre, and this was his only film

credit. He'd worked on films for other people, but this was his sole directing

credit.

But apparently this was not ultimately finished by Mr Angel, because he cut a

version together under its original title, The Gardener.

You can see why that title was going to have to be replaced. The love butcher

errs in one direction and the gardener is going too far in the other direction.

It's just boring.

But anyway, he cut his version of the film together, showed it to the

and everyone else thought it was terrible and unfellible.

Mr Angel didn't take very kindly to this and said, well, that's the film.

If you don't like it, I'm out of here.

And washed his hands of the project.

Fortunately, the director of photography was Don Jones, who we've already

encountered in relation to Abducted or Schoolgirls in Chains.

Now, Don, as well as being a DP, is also a very skilled director.

And the producers said, please, will you shoot some new material to try and

rescue this project?

So Don... went out and filmed new material, wrote extra elements of the

because apparently the Michael Angel version wasn't making a lot of sense,

salvaged the movie and made it into something that could be released.

It would be a shame if Michael Angel, who I think is now deceased, it would be

shame if he didn't get the credit that he's due, because I think, by all

accounts and by Don's account...

Something like two -thirds of the film is his.

So it's probably best treated as a doubleheader. It's by Michael Angel and

Jones. As well as the title, which I think probably accounted for a lot of

notoriety and presence on the list. When you do get down into some of the attack

scenes, you are again dealing with a man menacing, terrorising and then

murdering women.

It's not super grisly and it's not super explicit in terms of sexual material

either. But it does have some tension and some... It is quite unnerving at

times. Given that there is this strange slippage in the film between a satirical

feeling and a horror feel, it perhaps unnerves viewers because you're never

quite sure how to take it. And then when it does veer into pure horror, I think

perhaps that just kind of uproots people's sense of security.

You can't just...

find it funny it is actually quite unpleasant at times as well but it's not

among the more explicit films it's just maybe a slightly queasy feel that the

film has as opposed to any major scenes that are particularly shocking

there's been six murders in this part of the city

all similar we're looking for a psychotic killer russell and psychotic

don't necessarily all act the same but of course the love butcher

Oh, thank you.

Oh, it's lovely.

Yes, Lane.

Whoever did this is weird.

Not just sick, but a real weirdo.

It's nymphs like you that are Caleb's killers.

You emasculate a man with your bottomless body pit. You leave him empty

unfulfilled. Wrong look?

Nothing.

That can't be fixed.

You drain him like a sewer into a cesspool.

Say, what are you, some kind of cuckoo or something?

You can't go on doing those terrible things, Les.

They're evil.

You're going to destroy us both.

I can and I will.

Women love me, Caleb.

I'm not like you. You're ugly, but I am handsome and delighted.

She shall love me, Caleb.

As much as she hated you.

I am love.

Total love.

I am Lecter.

And I am alive.

Oh, my God.