House On Straw Hill

‘House On Straw Hill’ has either an illustrious history or a terrible reputation, depending on how you look at these things. It was the only British film on the 1984 list of banned video nasties, mainly because of its fairly explicit mix of sex (some consensual, some not) and violence (some consensual, some not). Made in 1975, it exists in any number of different versions, and under several different titles, although a more or less definitive version has recently been released on Digital Versatile Disc.

The always odd Udo Keir plays Paul Martin, a successful author who rents a remote cottage in Essex in order to work on his second book.  He has an on-off relationship with porn star Fiona Richmond, i.e. he gets on, then off, then sends her packing. Their ‘love’ scenes have a rough and ready quality that makes them seem more explicit than they really are, but then some of that might be due to him putting on latex gloves every time they get it on.  

Paul hires a secretary over the phone to help type up his masterpiece and is delighted when she turns out to be Linda Hayden, who brings her usual blend of jailbait precocity to the role, and forgets to bring a bra. Linda is a compulsive masturbator and, when she is caught fiddling with herself in a field by a couple of bicycle riding 'youths' (including an already balding Karl ‘Brush Strokes’ Howman), an unpleasant rape scene (is there any other type?) ensues.  This young woman is not quite the pushover she seems, however, as the yokels who assault her find out to their cost.

The last half hour explodes in a frenzy of rough sex and sharp knives and a soap opera plot twist which makes enough sense to validate all the huffing, puffing and intimate touching  that has gone before. Unlike the BBFC, I wouldn’t describe the film as nasty, rather as an adult psychodrama that occasionally gets a little too adult for comfort: if Ingmar Bergman had made it, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece (it’s worth remembering that Bergman’s film ‘The Virgin Spring’ was the inspiration for ‘Last House on The Left’). Probably.

I enjoyed the rural setting (it was filmed near Chelmsford, the furthest extent of 'my' Essex), and the scene where Keir drives a brakeless Morris Minor into a pond. I liked Linda Hayden, who always does an excellent sexy psycho, and I was intrigued by Fiona Richmond’s lissom body and bricklayer’s face. Most of all I enjoyed hearing extracts from the book Paul is working on, which sounds like it’s going to be truly fucking awful.

Music lovers will be pleased to hear that the film has a rather good soundtrack, but you needn't take my word for it as my friend and colleague Fearlono has made a custom soundtrack for it that you can download at his smashing website Cottage of Electric Hell. One thing: you will need to pretend to be an adult to gain entry, as there are grown up themes and some sexual swear words.  

Oddments

Perennial heavy Pat Roach gets heavy in 'Gangsters', and I'm not just talking about his jewellery.

Gangsters: The Bottom Five

As a final 'Gangsters' note, I just wanted to revisit the bit about the ‘abysmal’ acting. I can’t think of another show that has such a poor cast. I’m not sure if there was a dearth of black and Chinese and Asian actors around at the time, but the ones they have (with the exception of Sayeed Jeffrey) are terrible, and elaborate, overwritten dialogue plus unconvincing performances / mangled diction leads to a number of strange, stilted, uncomfortable scenes that do nothing apart from highlight that it’s all a big panto. Perhaps given the show’s experimental leanings this was deliberate, but either way it makes for a slightly awkward and jarring experience.

Anyway, in reverse order, here, in my opinion, are the five worst actors.

Maurice had a long career as an actor, latterly appearing in 'Howards Way'. He was always pretty wooden, but here he has to keep it all together as the star and he starts creaking as soon as he's asked to convey anything out of the ordinary. One of his signature bad acting traits is a soundless, mirthless laugh, and he uses it a lot here and it really gets on your nerves because because it's so poorly executed and incredibly fake.   

This is writer Philip Martin. He can obviously act (he played the villain in the original play very well), but his second series impersonation of W.C Fields is funny for approximately two minutes and then just seems staggeringly self-indulgent, especially when he can't quite keep up the pretence in key scenes.

Familiar to British audiences in both Chinese and Japanese roles, Lee always seems fast asleep. When he speaks, you can neither hear nor understand him, and his face doesn't form any kind of expression, so you're fucked if you're trying to follow the plot.

Aside from the fact that we share a first name, Mr. Satvendar does very little for me apart from to annoy. Shrill, slow to react, fond of rolling his eyes and almost forgetting his lines, Paul adds insult to injury by suffixing almost every sentence with a high-pitched hollow giggle and killing virtually every scene he's in stone dead. Awful.

This fellow is just terrible. He can't even walk around convincingly and his laugh (bit of a  recurring motif - I often find you can judge an actor by how they laugh and cry) is a thing of cringing terror. Luckily, his character is written as something of a joke (he has a ridiculous hat and keeps quoting from gangster films) and he gets knocked off pretty quick so it's not like he's given much to do - but what he does do is SHIT.

Who's your favourite terrible actor? And your least favourite? And what's the difference? 

Gangsters

'Gangsters’ is a weird show that, over time got weirder and weirder. Starting off as a ‘Play For Today’ before becoming two (very different) series, it is ostensibly about the murky world of organised crime in Birmingham, but also works as a treatise on race, society and the nature and conventions of drama itself. If that sounds heavy, don’t worry, it does it all in a tongue in cheek, often bizarre way. Oh, and a lot of the acting is abysmal.

 Maurice Colbourne plays John Kline, a former SAS man who is the archetypal tough, good man in a rough, bad situation, inexorably caught between rival underworld groups that are characterised by both their particular line in crime and their ethnicity. There are the Asian gangsters, who specialise in human traffic, illegal immigration and extortion; black gangsters who concentrate on drugs and prostitution and, over-seeing the whole bun fight, there are white gangsters, who sit back and take the lion’s share of the profits. The initial play was straightforward enough, a quirky but basically conventional drama that, apart from the racial diversity, and Brummie setting, could have starred Jimmy Cagney.

The two series that followed, however, go to strange places, eventually ending up somewhere between post-modernism and disappearing up its own exhaust pipe. In Series One, Kline battles to keep a nightclub open, keep the Law happy and play opposing criminal factions off against each other. He also falls in love with a posh junkie and part time prostitute. It’s far from conventional, but has structure and an element of realism, albeit a reality that could quite easily be imagined. Heavily stylised, the characters are many and mad as hatters, a multi-racial rainbow of thugs, twisters, bullies, bastards and undercover Pakistanis.

‘Gangsters’, in all its incarnations, is, like so many flawed things, absolutely fascinating, and far more interesting retrospectively than any number of tighter, tauter, straight crime dramas. Yes, it can get on your nerves, but it provokes a reaction, and that is assuredly a very good thing.

There's Nobody There

As with 'The Ghosts Of Motley Hall', no matter how much paranormal mischief went on, there was always something inherently depressing about 'Nobody's House' (1976), a comedy about the ghost of a Victorian pauper child (who didn't even have a name) and his fun and games with a contemporary family.

Great music (by Anthony Isaac, who worked on 'Survivors' and, later, 'Supergran'), but these are unsettling credits, particularly the spectral outline disappearing into eternity.

F*** Me, It's Freddie!

FMIF as Mr. Rockbottom in the otherwise woeful 'Never Too Young To Rock'. At least he looks like he's enjoying himself, love him.

Space 1999: Space Brain

So there’s this big brain out in space, yeah? A massive cerebral cortex that is apparently linked to a myriad of other galaxies, a huge intergalactic noggin nut that gives life and energy and warmth and comfort to millions of life forms, and has done for countless millennia. Yep, the good old space brain. What the space brain hasn’t anticipated, however, is Moonbase Alpha, a giant, drifting rock that cannot be steered and, even if it could, is populated with aggressive, pant suited middle aged people that don’t see why they should get out of the way of this thing that’s been there forever, so lets fire all the lasers they have and send an Eagle to blow the thing up.

That’s the basic premise of Space 1999 episode ‘Space Brain’. It’s one that sums up for me just how poorly the inhabitants of Moonbase are prepared for the unknown and how very human, i.e. moronic, their reactions to anything they don't understand can be. In ‘Star Trek’, Kirk and his crew do everything they can to follow ‘the prime directive’, non-interference with alien races and planets (this obviously does not extend to their women) but, in ‘Space 1999’ if Commander Koening can’t kick it, kill it or cock it into submission he simply drives his detached satellite through it like a drunken Bulgarian lorry driver through a low bridge whilst wild eyed Aussie Alan Carter lobs nuclear charges at passers by. When you think about it (and clearly I do) Moonbase Alpha is a terrible advert for humanity, and fashion, and, most of all, script writing. 

The space brain tries to stop it, of course, taking over personnel, talking to the computer and finally, desperately, filling the base with bubble bath, sorry, cleansing space anti-bodies, but it’s a foregone conclusion: where Alpha goes, death follows. The end result: 300 ‘just passing through’ humans are safe; millions of aliens minding their own business are doomed. Oh, and one totally fucked space brain. The End.

Marvellous stuff. Honest!    

Space 1999: Missing Link

'Space 1999’ never fails to raise an indulgent chortle and wry shake of the head, does it? It’s so inherently ridiculous and utterly loveable and, every time I see an episode, I can’t help but smile at its insane inanity.

‘Missing Link’ is a case in point. After an Eagle Transporter crash, Commander Koenig hovers between life and death, only kept alive by a plastic tray with some flashing lights on it. Doctor Russell, despite being in a committed relationship with him, seems desperate to pull the plug for some reason, and is only kept from doing so by the fact that there’s a fight every time she goes to touch the button.

Far from being in a vegetative state, however, Koenig is actually a prisoner on the planet Zenna, the permanent guest of an alien anthropologist called Raan (Peter Cushing, painted gold and wearing a silly hat and daft wig). Raan wants to study him to gain insight into humans, who he believes are the missing link in his own people’s evolution. Raan’s daughter Vana also wants to study Koenig, but from a less scientific point of view, i.e. she fancies him (she’s only alien, after all).

Choc a bloc with fantasy sequences and fights, ‘Missing Link’ is lots of fun, although slightly confusing in the way Koenig seems to so ready to abandon Moonbase and Doctor Russell in favour of a life with Vana. Interestingly, it is this burgeoning relationship that sets Koenig free: Raan might like to study humans, but he certainly wouldn’t want his daughter to marry one.

‘Space 1999’ is a fascinating show for so many reasons, not least for its incredibly ambitious attempt to bring the whole of the universe to us on a budget of £150 an episode. They try terribly hard, but it never quite works out, especially as often their efforts are undermined by sheer shoddiness and lack of attention to detail: costumes that don’t fit; monsters that have zips: life support systems with spelling mistakes… I absolutely love it.

Room For One

Mining can be a depressing, deadly business, and in 'Room For One' (1976) the National Coal Board take their private information films into 'Seventh Seal' territory.

You're Invited To The Torture Party

‘Satan’s Slave’ is a film that director Norman J. Warren sweated blood to make, spending years on getting the finance into place. His efforts were rewarded with a sizeable UK hit and, best of all, a really cool piece of work that still entertains today.

Crazy old Michael Gough stars, here sporting an outsized moustache and, on occasion, a goat’s head mask. He has designs on his niece (Candace Glendenning), believing that her sacrifice will bring about the resurrection of a centuries dead witch. He is aided and abetted by his creepy rapist / murderer son who alternately woos and threatens the girl, who is especially vulnerable as her parents have just been burned alive in a mysterious car accident.  

Full of energy, verve and a keen sense of the grand guignol, ‘Satan’s Slave’ powers towards a surprising finale, but only after knocking off several cast members in a succession of grisly murders. Gough is his usual urbane / psychotic self, but a special mention should go to Martin Potter, who plays the evil son. Potter also appeared in ‘Goodbye, Gemini’, so seems to specialise in deeply fucked up individuals with a habit of stabbing their way out of uncomfortable situations. Potter is aided in his characterisations by his unforgettable face: at first glance rather handsome but, on closer inspection, waxy and haunted, like a contorted mask. It’s a great asset as an actor, although I wouldn’t want it between my ears.    

Satan's Slave

F*** Me, It's Freddie!

FMIF as the pensive Dr. Charles Logan in 'Journey To Where', a 1976 episode of 'Space 1999'. no, that's not the late Pat Butcher with him, it's Isla Blair - no big earrings, see.

Panic On The Streets Of London

Given its long time prominence as a major world city, it is perhaps surprising to realise that London has been menaced by Giant Apes only twice in its near two thousand year history, as well as slightly chilling to think what could have happened - and might very well happen again...

In 1961, Konga, a chimpanzee from the Congo transformed into a 300 foot tall killer ape by bad science, terrorised the streets of the capitol, eventually ending up at Westminster, as if he were on his way to deliver a petition bearing ten thousand signatures asking that he not be massacred by a platoon of machine gun and mortar wielding soldiers.

Unlike the astronaut / alien hybrid attack on Westminster Abbey in 1953 (a mere two months after the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the same building) there is, unfortunately, no live documentary footage of Konga's rampage, but the incident did immediately inspire a film version which contains my favourite line in any language from any time: ‘there's a huge monster gorilla that's constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets!’ As in real life, the filmic response to this poetic statement was, sadly, 'KILL IT!' and poor, sweet Konga was shot to bits by unsympathetic squaddies. Poignantly, Konga reverted to his original form on death: a rather sad little chimp - with five hundred holes in its tattered carcass.

Less than twenty years later, the city once again trembled at the mercies of a prodigious primate, this time of the female gender. The curvaceous Queen Kong was the unofficial ruler of the island of Lazanga until she was snatched away by a British expedition and brought back to London as a tourist attraction, never a good idea. 

Understandably pretty miffed, Her Majesty the Monkey escaped her captivity and, of course, made her way to the Houses of Parliament where, happily, the situation was resolved without fatalities because of her love for a squat, unfunny ape man hybrid,  although an Action Man helicopter was badly damaged. Queen Kong returned to Lazonga by barge and London breathed a sigh of relief, shrugged its shoulders and went back to thinking itself cooler and far more important than the rest of the UK.

Curiously, the city authorities continue to be remarkably complacent about the dangers of another giant ape attack. In the thirty five years since Queen Kong’s short reign of terror, the Thames Flood Barrier has been completed and stringent anti-terrorism measures introduced, yet London remains frighteningly vulnerable to the savage fury of a massive runaway killer monkey. It's bananas.