Baby Love

'Baby Love' centres around the familiar plot device of a stranger who enters a supposedly perfect household and shags (or is shagged by) everyone, subsequently exposing how damn dysfunctional they all are behind the smiles and soft focus. 



Lucy is a fifteen year old strumpet in training who is suddenly orphaned when her sluttish mother (Diana Dors) kills herself. Mum's last wish was that Lucy go to live with Keith Barron, one of her few old flames to have actually done well for himself. Lucy's arrival throws the house into turmoil, not least because she has been trained to exploit her sexuality at every opportunity, and spends most of her time flirting, walking around in her bra and letting seedy strangers feel her up at the pictures. After a while, however, Lucy begins to long to be part of the family, only to find that the family rather like her as she is - a sex object that they can project their hetero and homo sexual fantasies onto.

'Baby Love' simply wouldn't get made today, if only for the fact that frequently nude star Linda Hayden was only fifteen years old at the time of filming. This role propelled her into a career in which she almost exclusively played, for want of a better term,  jailbait. In the various retrospective interviews I've seen with her she seems remarkably well-adjusted and good humoured about her ten years as a baby faced slut but, as she went out with Robin Askwith for a number of years, her critical faculties may be slightly impaired.

Some interesting guest stars in this, by the way - the aforementioned Diana Dors, right on the cusp of turning from pneumatic blonde bombshell to frowsy Earth Mother, and, in a small but sleazy role, dirty old Dick Emery.

The ghost of Diana Dors.



'Ooh, you are awful', etc.

The Sin In Its Shadows

Mondo films are, in essence, exploitation documentaries, i.e. they focus on the seamier, sleazier, bloody side of life and, although they are often as staged as carefully as traditional narrative films, they present it all in the name of truth, disdainfully holding a mirror up to this awful world whilst simultaneously zooming in on a load of breasts.

‘London In The Raw’ shows us various sides of our fantastic / terrible capital that the tourists don’t normally see (unless they’re sex tourists or, perhaps, sexy tourists). Much of it is fairly innocuous, however, although occasionally not for the squeamish (a hair transplant is shown in all its gory glory, for instance), but more or less everything comes with a side order of dimpled and goose-bumped female flesh: a tawdry cavalcade of prostitutes, clip joint girls and strippers, many of whom have enormous hair. Or do they? Given how obviously faked many of the sequences are, they could just be wearing wigs. The overall effect reminds me of a tourist information film directed by Benny Hill.

Occasionally monotonous, but generally very watchable, ‘London In The Raw’ was the second in a trilogy of London Mondo films made by sleaze meister (but generally nice guy) Arnold Louis Miller. The first ‘West End Jungle’ focused on prostitution; the third, ‘Primitive London’ will be under discussion tomorrow.           

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

A Moral Obscenity

'Frightmare' is an absolute corker: described on release as 'trash' by, oh the irony, 'The Sun', this film is gory, ridiculous, massively entertaining, and has a towering central performance from veteran character actor Sheila Keith.

Jackie is a normal, healthy woman from a very odd family. Her sadistic fifteen year old half-sister is out of control and running with a slightly crappy biker gang, and her father is a pathetic doormat, obsessed with his wife Dorothy's well-being. Dorothy, Jackie's step mother and biggest problem, is a psychotic cannibal / driller killer who entices lonely people to her deserted farmhouse on the pretext of giving them a Tarot reading, then kills them horribly and eats their brains. You might want to read that sentence again.

Hardly any of this makes sense when you stop and think about it, but it works brilliantly. The murders are full on enough to elicit that 'eew' noise when the knife / pitchfork / drill / red hot poker goes in, Deborah Fairfax is a rather fetching leading lady (wasted on speccy know it all Paul Greenwood) and Sheila Keith plays Dorothy to absolute perfection: genteel, vulnerable lady one moment, dribbling lunatic killer the next, but retaining enough of both to keep the audience guessing what she's going to do next. The scene where she cackles uncontrollably as she drills into a skull and is spattered with blood is unforgettable - it's hard to think of any other middle aged British actress ever going this far in a performance - it's a grand guignol tour de force, if that's not mixing my pretentious foreign descriptors.

Directed by the lovely Pete Walker, the last few minutes cop out a bit in terms of plot, but, in the end analysis, that's a small price to pay for such an entertaining and joyfully daft eighty odd minutes of dysfunctional family fun.

Frightmare

A World Of Psychotic Turmoil

Any reasonably with it person will guess the 'twist' in 'Schizo' after about ten minutes, only to then have to sit through another hour and forty minutes of slackly paced drama interspersed with three or four gruesome murders.

Is it worth it? Well, sort of, if only for the various attempts to keep the viewer guessing long after the surprise has been blown, i.e. making everyone act really shiftily at all times and, in poor old Jack Watson's case, getting him to gurn like a nutjob at every hand and turn. The most astonishing scene comes at a spiritualist meeting where, for a few minutes, this run of the mill slasher film suddenly turns into a supernatural shocker, plastic eyes, disembodied voices and all - although the bit where Queenie Watts gets a knitting needle through the back of her head is also worth a look.

Giallo-ish in form and similarly demanding in terms of suspension of disbelief, 'Schizo' isn't a totally worthless film, it's just limp and far too long but, even as I write this, I'm already starting to feel rather fond of the stupid thing.  

Schizo

Story Of A Nympho

'Fun & Games' was the second feature film from stunt co-ordinator turned prolific TV director Ray Austin. Perhaps better known under the sensational title of '1,000 Convicts & A Woman', it disappoints on every level. There are only about six convicts for a start.

Alexandra Hay is the Prison Governor's daughter, a 17 year old who claims to be a nymphomaniac but mainly seems to be looking for the attention Daddy never gives her. She spends her time clomping around the prison (which seems to actually be a second rate Grammar School) in skimpy outfits, sucking her thumb and making suggestive comments and laughing inanely: she's supposed to be incredibly sexy, of course, but she's actually just really annoying.

Not a patch on Ray Austin's debut film 'Virgin Witch', the film effectively sputters out after about half an hour and, after that, no amount of implied threesomes, grotesque neck breaks and escape attempts can take away the sense that some form of fraud has been committed.

Here's a clip where she cycles until she has an orgasm. Dirty bike.

1,000 Convicts and a Woman