An Appalling Amalgam

God knows I love Pete Walker films, even the dodgy ones, but 'The Flesh & Blood Show' just doesn't do it for me, which is awful, as all the component parts are there, they're just badly and lazily bolted together.

The action all takes place at Eastcliffe On Sea (actually Cromer in Norfolk), where a group of young, hairy actors are brought together by a mysterious production company to improvise a play that will apparently be staged in the West End at some point (the bits we see are awful, so it would probably have been a very short engagement). The rehearsal space is an abandoned pier and, because they're skint, the lads and lasses of the company kip there as well. It's a cold, damp, eerie place, and something bad happened there that no-one can quite remember.

One by one, the girls disrobe and get murdered, and then everyone else looks shifty and nutty in order to satisfy a daft twist ending that could have made sense if it hadn't been so badly botched. Walker seems to lost his way entirely at times: virtually every opportunity for a decent sequence is compromised by poor editing or filming, or, in dramatic terms, relies on the most incredibly illogical behaviour. It's horror by numbers, random numbers at that, and he's so much better than that.Also, for a film that runs for a 100 minutes, it's also extremely slack, and the last half an hour, including a final 3D flashback (the 'Scooby Doo' moment of explanation), is interminable.

It has a fair cast (the silky voiced and always likeable Ray Brooks, foxy Luan Peters, Jenny Hanley, Candace Glendenning, sexy Jane Cardew), good music, a great location and the germ of an idea, but it never flowers into anything decent. Balls.

Here's the trailer.

The Flesh and Blood Show

Whiny Dancer

‘Die Screaming, Marianne’ is a difficult film to categorise in many ways but, at heart, it’s a good old fashioned Victorian melodrama, albeit one with mod accoutrements and a heroine who works as a go go dancer.

Susan George plays Marianne ‘Hips’ MacDonald, a troubled dollybird on the run from secrets and a weird family set up (Mum is dead; half-sister hates her; Father likes his daughters a little too much). Poor Marianne believes the only thing she has going for her is her lithe body and, as a result, she freely donates it to interested parties on a regular basis. When things become complicated, she moves on, packing her pathetic little bag, slipping on her Dr, Scholl’s and moving on like a pouting, bra-less Littlest Hobo. To be honest, to use the parlance of the period, she's a bit of a drag, man. 

Her main issue is that she has the account number of a Swiss safety deposit box in which her late mother stored a number of incriminating documents about her father and, Dad, a defrocked (or whatever) Judge wants them back. Her half-sister, Hildegard (played by super skinny Judy Huxtable, soon to become Mrs. Peter Cook) just wants Maz dead, especially as she is due to inherit a lot of money on her imminent 21st birthday, money that will go to Hildegard if little Marianne is out of the way.

The film bobs along nicely for a while but, in the end, becomes a bit frenzied and confusing, albeit in an extremely languid way. I have heard that the shoot was complicated by bad behaviour from the young leads and this led to beleagured director Peter Walker having to rip several pages out of the script just to keep to schedule. That’s a shame, because although I enjoy random stabbings, car crashes, people (well, Chris Sandford, an actor I find detestable) falling down a hole and being left to die and, in particular, attempted murder by super hot sauna, ‘Die Screaming…’ never lives up to the promise of its credit sequence where Marianne, clad only in a spangly bikini and a few chains, frugs like a funky puppet to Cyril Ordanel’s groovy theme tune. If it did, we might have had something halfway decent, but it doesn't, and that's all there is it to it, I'm afraid.

Die Screaming, Marianne!

Marked For Torture

'Man Of Violence' (aka 'Moon') presents us with a domestic (and international) criminal world that is both swinging and sleazy, an underworld milieu of smuggling and double crosses, crooks pretending to be cops, cops pretending to be crooks, pop music, loose women, torture and casual murder.

Michael Latimer plays Moon, an amoral, bisexual, sharp dressed hustler who is quick with a gun and makes a living by playing both ends against the middle. He seems to only work for crooks, who expect him to be on the make and, to compensate, try to rip him off and kill at every turn. It’s a pretty tiring way to earn a crust, really, but there are compensations: lots of blonde women in their underwear (and out of it), the occasional pretty boy and, in this particular instance, a trip to North Africa and a shot at nicking thirty million quid in gold bullion.

Directed by Pete Walker, ‘Moon’ is too long and too slow to be quite the pop art pulp thriller it wants to be but, when it’s good, it’s excellent. Luan Peters gives an good and thoughtful  performance as Angel, but her future career was more or less dictated by her comeliness, i.e. 'no dramatic roles for you, my girl, just stand around in just your pants'.  

There are lots of scenes in which something genuinely surprising happens, or there’s a burst of violence or suggestion of sadism that reminds the viewer of James Hadley Chase at his nastiest and most prurient. Most of all, I kept thinking of a mod James Bond on a budget, although it is far grittier and dirtier and serious than, say, the twinkly, self-parodying ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, released in the same year. 

As it is it’s a fascinating curio, but with a bit more money and a few more takes (maybe a few songs) it could have been the British equivalent of one of Seijun Suzuki’s manic psychedelic yakuza films. Be warned, however, watching this film will make you wonder if you could get away with a bright orange shirt and a red and black neckerchief. The answer is 'NO'.

Man Of Violence

Switched On

‘The Big Switch’ is a proper b-movie: cheap, short and pretty meaningless. But it has a sense of style, is full of ideas, and manages to transpose the pulp milieu of Mickey Spillane onto London and Brighton in a relatively convincing manner, no mean feat when the chief villain is wearing hush puppies.

Made in two versions (needless to say, one with a lot more nudity, sex and torture), ‘The Big Switch’ trots along nicely, whipping from one hardboiled scene to another, full of tough talk, regular beatings, mod gear, discos, night clubs, endless cigarettes and unfeasibly large London apartments filled with objects d’art and discarded panty hose. The film winds up nicely with a shoot-out in the run down pop art setting of the amusement arcade on Brighton Pier, an unexpected snow storm propitiously adding to the atmosphere (and causing a couple of cast members to slip arse over tit, one while firing a gun – although he was obviously a great shot, as the intended target clutches their chest anyway).

‘The Big Switch’ is far from perfect, but nevertheless provides a great deal of casual entertainment, the odd thrill and, best of all, the occasional surprise. It may be cheap, but it’s certainly not worthless and is ten times better than, say, a punch in the balls.

The Big Switch

Coming Soon

Who could ask for anything more?

The Day The Screaming Stopped

‘The Comeback’ is not Pete Walker’s finest hour and a half, but it showcases many of his remarkable talents, including the gleeful desire to occasionally go too far. In fact, if the film has a main failing, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough often enough and, for the most part, is rather slow moving and uneventful.

Real life crooner Jack Jones plays an American pop star called Nick Cooper who, after a six year break from the music industry and a messy divorce, is making a comeback. What Nick doesn’t know is that his ex-wife has been brutally murdered and is currently laying sprawled over the stairs in the penthouse flat they shared. Walker periodically returns to the body so we can see how it is decomposing until, at the fly and rat stage, someone cuts the head off and puts it in a box and wraps a bow around it. It’s pretty nasty, but very effective.

Nick is struggling with his album, with nightmares, with horrible  hallucinations and nubile Pamela Stephenson. He’s either going mad, or someone is trying to drive him crazy. But which is it? Well, it’s the former. And who is it? His tranny manager? His sleazy roadie? Sexy Pamela? Nutty old housekeeper Sheila Keith and schizo gardener husband Bill ‘Compo’ Owen? If you’ve ever watched a Pete Walker film, you’ll have your suspicions. Whoever it is has a real grudge against his particular brand of ‘lascivious, gyratory’ music, even though we’ve only heard anodyne MOR from him. Oh well. It takes all sorts to dress up like an old woman and go around butchering people with a scythe, doesn’t it?

Occasionally dull, mostly entertaining, sometimes unpleasant, ‘The Comeback’ is not quite mad enough to be a counter classic, but is recommended, nonetheless. Pete Walker rocks!

The Comeback

Unholy

When Peter Walker is hot, as on ‘Frightmare’, he’s hot – when he’s not, however, well, there’s ’House of Mortal Sin’ ('The Confessional' in the US).

Father Xavier Meldrum (Anthony Sharp) is a Catholic priest with an idiosyncratic view on how a man of the cloth should behave. What he particularly likes to do is to make tape recordings of the confessions of young blond women and then use them to blackmail them into doing his bidding. It isn’t sexual, well, not in the hands on sense, but he definitely derives some perverted fulfillment from being a nuisance and making the girls pay for their ‘immorality’ (they have boyfriends).

Father Xavier isn’t just about the stalking and extortion, however, as he also likes to cover his tracks using extreme violence and murder: scalding people with hot coffee, braining them with incense burners, choking them with rosary beads, that sort of thing (these are probably the best sequences in the film, and they are surprisingly graphic and ouch-y).

The key to Father Xavier’s psychosis is his pressure cooker home environment: he lives uncomfortably with his mute, senile mother and his sinister, one eyed housekeeper (the reliably brilliant Sheila Keith, sporting a ‘Let’s Dance’ era David Bowie bouffant), who also used to be his girlfriend. Mother split the young lovers up many years ago, so now he torments girls who look like his old flame, and his old flame tortures his Mum whenever Father Xavier is out tormenting. It’s a bit of a tense situation that violently resolves itself in an ending that makes ‘Hamlet’ look like 'Peppa Pig'.

Despite all this, 'House of Mortal Sin' is, I’m sorry to say, rather dull. Yes, the violence is well done and, yes, the performances are very good (Walker always used the best actors he could), but, in the end analysis, the film just doesn’t work – every situation could be defused immediately if the characters just actually talked to each other and Xavier, who is in the frame from the off, is simply too sinister to keep on getting away with it, dog collar or not.

As you will see from the above poster, the promotional team charged with selling this modest little effort  touted it as the third part of an 'unholy trinity' of films along with 'The Exorcist' and 'The Omen', despite the fact that it has no supernatural elements whatsover. Worth a try, I suppose. Oh, and Peter Cushing was originally offered the role of the psychotic priest. Thank Christ he turned it down.

House Of Mortal Sin