Milton!

The formidable (and familiarly attired) Mr. Milton Reid turns up in 'Terror', playing a bouncer at a bizarre club where the main attraction is a stripping whip wielding punkette. When the customer get out of long, Milton attacks, neutralises and frogmarches their sleazy arses out. No lines, but plenty of action.

One Step Beyond Horror

‘Terror’ is absolutely brilliant from start to finish. Although there is a plot (something about a foxy witches curse), it mainly concerns itself with introducing (occasionally attractive) people before almost immediately putting them in perilous situations, racking up the tension with horror signifiers familiar from nightmares and other horror films and then summarily disposing of them in inventive, gruesome and bloody ways.  

What most of them have to do with the curse is anyone’s guess, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they die: beheaded by falling glass, smashed on the head by a falling spotlight that then catches fire, garrotted and then impaled on some railings. Most of all, there’s a whole lot of stabbing going on, and in really painful places, like the foot, and the crotch, and the mouth. I don’t suppose there is a nice place to get stabbed, but these attacks look particularly ‘ouch-y’ (if that is a word), and you can imagine contemporary audiences cringing as the blade plunges in.

Ostensibly a straightforward slasher, you keep expecting a ‘Scooby Doo’ dénouement where the killer is revealed - until the film climaxes in a full on supernatural assault in which that pesky, foxy witch turns up and wreaks her bloody final revenge which reminded me of ’Suspira’ on a shoestring budget, lots of dry ice and a wind machine.

Extremely enjoyable, and it features Milton Reid in a supporting role! It’s a classic, and the sort of film this blog is all about.

Terror

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

Bloody New Year

‘Bloody New Year’ is more like a fairground ride than a film: it’s cheap; it’s tacky; held together with bits of string and glue – but it’s fun, and it’s funny and you just need to give into it and enjoy yourself.  Oh, and keep your hands inside the car.

When a group of very old teenage holiday makers are shipwrecked on a seemingly deserted island, they take refuge in an eerie hotel decorated as if it were Christmas. Unfortunately for them it turns out that the island was the scene of a plane crash on New Year’s Eve in 1959 and that the plane was talking part in a time travelling experiment.  As you might expect, this has turned the island into an outlandish time warped hell hole where all visitors are killed by a variety of deadly apparitions, including fishing nets, disfigured ghosts, murderous silver screen sheiks, bannister knobs, tinsel and rough chain wielding psychos from the Butlins at nearby Barry Island.

It’s bizarre, frankly, and bears no logical examination whatsoever, but it’s a real hoot. The main issue for me is a very personal one: it’s too eighties. But then it would be, wouldn’t it, having been made in 1987. I remember that era well and despised the stonewashed denim and mullets look then, so it’s occasionally painful for me to look at now, but others may well get a kick out of it rather than a cringe.

‘Bloody New Year’ is wrong on so many levels, and by no means showcases director Norman J. Warren’s unique talents or prove a suitable swansong (he hasn't directed since), but it’s incredibly imaginative for a film that clearly cost about sixty quid, and is enormously good fun, which is what it’s all about, really, isn’t it?   

Happy New Year to all our readers!

A Far From Human Birth

‘Inseminoid’ (1981) is a pretty sleazy film, but it has some interesting moments, not least its attempts to remake parts of ‘Alien’ in Chiselhurst Caves in Kent on a vastly reduced budget.

The story (set in 2001) concerns a group of scientists / archaeologists working in an underground lab on a poisonous alien planet. Sandy (Judy Geeson) is attacked, raped and impregnated by a monstrous creature. Driven insane by the experience and under the malign control of her evil alien twin foetuses, she kills her colleagues one by one, dismembering them and drinking their blood.

‘Inseminoid’ had a budget of £1m (a pretty paltry amount in industry terms, a career high for Warren) and is surprisingly ambitious: it has an elaborate set, lots of costumes, stars (Geeson, Stephanie Beacham, some real life Americans), and even some overseas filming (Malta doubled as the alien planet’s surface). It isn’t any good, of course, and it can be quite unpleasant, but it’s an interesting film, not least because it was one of the first productions to bomb at the box office but become a success through video sales, a pattern that, with a few refinements, has become the predominant industry template / fall back position for almost every film made these days.

Inseminoid

Aliens vs Lesbians

Norman J. Warren was never the world’s greatest film director, but he was certainly a trier. Graduating from sex dramas like ‘Her Private Hell’ and ‘Loving Feeling’ in the sixties, Warren became a prime mover in the ‘New Wave’ of British horror films that began to appear in the wake of Hammer, Amicus and Tigon. Distinguished from the Old wave by its young and trendy protagonists, contemporary settings, freewheeling approach and lashings of Kensington Gore and the old in out, the New Wave was a short lived phenomenon, but it produced some interesting films while it lasted.

‘Prey’ was released in 1978 and, for what it’s worth, is Warren’s masterpiece. Sometimes compared to Pasolini’s ‘Teorema’ (!), the plot concerns an unhappy lesbian couple whose uneasy rural isolation is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious young man whose presence prompts a whirl of heavy drinking, fox hunting, cross dressing, emotional recrimination and sexual intrigue. Where the film departs from Pasolini, however, is that the young man is actually a dog faced alien scout, sent to earth by his hungry dog-faced masters to find a renewable source of protein...

Warren’s ‘masterpiece’ is not a great film, by any means, but it’s very interesting and, in comparison to some of his other work, surprisingly restrained and coherent, with well drawn characters. Unfortunately it suffers from obvious economies of production and some amateurish performances but then this is hardly surprising given that Warren had ten days and a £50,000 budget to complete his magnum opus, and couldn’t afford more than three takes on anything.

Occasionally gory, ‘Prey’ is extremely watchable, and serves as a great gateway drug to the rest of Warren’s highly addictive oeuvre.

Prey