DarkFest 7

Dark Climes and
Tripped Up Climbs

DarkFest 7
Organised by Allan and Yanni Bryce

It was February 2021. I was just under a year into what would be two and a half years of working from home due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It was a surreal (but strangely much missed) time and I had two things which reignited my appreciation of the art of film and reminded me that, sometimes, life could be worth living, for a bit, during those unusual times. One of those things was Severin’s Al Adamson box set (written up with links to all the reviews here) and the other started with a friend telling me that the great Caroline Munro was on a nice cover painting in a magazine in my local W H Smith. Now, after washing my hands for the recommended 20 seconds, I rushed to my local news vendor - masked up and keeping my distance from everybody - and purchased said magazine, The Dark Side.

And I rekindled my declining relationship with magazines again. Not because I’d ever not liked them but, I just didn’t realise people were still doing these things in print (thankfully... I hate digital editions of anything and just don't bother reading them). And the magazine was great and I haven’t stopped buying both that and its sister magazine Infinity since. The editorials by Allan Bryce are so fun to read and I really appreciate these gems of printed materials as I grab them each month. But then I discovered that, as an annual event, the Bryce’s organised a thing called DarkFest at the Genesis cinema (around the Whitechapel area of London). I’d not been tempted before now but the quality of the guests this year such as Caroline Munro, Linzi Drew, Valerie Leon and Eileen Daly plus loads of good stalls and six mostly cool horror movies taking place over 12 hours (from 11am to 11pm), all for the ‘great value for money’ sum of £40, seemed too good to resist this year. So me and a friend braved the rain and went to check it out.

Now, I’ve often said in my years of going to FrightFest that the horror film fan community are among the friendliest in the world and this was exactly the case here. Which is very fortunate actually as the crowding of all those stalls and wonderful people somewhat resembled the ‘stateroom scene’ from the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera (if you know, you know) and moving around the event was sluggish at best. I got the wonderful Ms. Munro to sign my Japanese At The Earth’s Core souvenir programme, had a word with Linzi Drew and also got a beautiful lingerie calendar signed by the charming Mrs. Moon, the organiser of the Misty Moon events. Alas, Eileen Daly left before I could get near to her which was a shame... this is the third time I’ve tried to see her and fate always conspires to keep me away.

Now I was worried about how my friend would take the first movie shown, Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas (reviewed by me here) since it’s... well it’s badly acted, badly written and badly directed. It’s also very fun but, luckily, my friend said it was her favourite film of the day. I then left her to the next movie so I could get a chance to visit some of the stalls and empty out my wallet (and also grab a hot dog) but when I rejoined her 20 minutes before the end of Scars Of Dracula (reviewed by me here only last week) I managed to trip over the stairs in the cinema in the dark and hugely exacerbated the pain in my knees after a perilous falling accident in 2019. As I type these words I am in total agony and can barely walk... which is not the best state to be in.

We then watched what is probably my favourite vampire movie of all time... the low budget, highly creative Razor Blade Smile starring Eileen Daly as Lilith Silver and directed by Jake West. It’s been restored and will be getting a proper Blu Ray release soon so I won’t do a full review yet but, if you’ve never seen this film, with Daly playing a Jerry Cornelius-like vampire turned assassin caught up in a deadly conspiracy... you’re missing out. It’s a wonderful film and deserves to be properly re-evaluated by modern audiences. I could never figure out why there wasn’t a string of Lilith Silver movies made after this one.

At this point I had a brief but nice chat with Rick Melton, the erotic artist whose magazine cover had caught my interest in the first place. He was a really nice chap and I am looking forward to a new book coming out, according to him, in about ten months time. Then, after this year’s ‘Slaughter Awards’, we saw one of Lucio Fulci’s best horror films, The Beyond (reviewed by me here). This was good fun but, surprisingly, had loads of walkouts. I’m guessing the audience was already very familiar with this movie and were somewhat jaded and needed refreshments by this point.

After that we were faced with two more films... Friday The 13th, which held no interest and, the mystery film which I’d correctly guessed was a screening of a new transfer of Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Alas, the screenings were already running around 20 minutes late and we knew that if we stayed past the advertised time we would both have trouble catching our last trains home from Liverpool Street station so, at this point, we decided to call it a day. Alas, this was when I’d found that Eileen Daly had just flown the coop and all the stalls were beginning to get packed away already.

So, apart from the overcrowding at DarkFest 7 (but hey, at least everybody was friendly) and the late running schedule, I had a blast at this year’s event and something tells me that my friend (who preferred it even to FrightFest) and I will be back again around this time next year for DarkFest 8, which I assume will happen. I’ll report back on that one as the opportunity arises.

Try Everything Once Except Incest And Morris Dancing

Electric Drew

Try Everything Once Except Incest
And Morris Dancing - The autobiography of a dangerous lady
by Linzi Drew
Blake Publishing
ISBN: 978-1857820348

I remember spotting this book back in the mid 1990s in a pleasingly dubious shop in Charing Cross Road. The shop had an upstairs full of ‘book bargains’ and a downstairs which was a cornucopia of eye watering and manhood popping pornography, should you brave your way past the age restriction warning on the staircase leading down... which might just have well been a height restriction to be honest (you must be this tall to ride the sexy magazines). I’d heard of Linzi Drew at the time and was kinda interested in reading that but, alas, had no cash on me to grab a copy. When I finally remembered I wanted to read it ten or more years later, the thing was no longer in print and fetching vast sums of money, well into three figures, if you wanted to order a rare copy of this tome. Nowadays it seems completely unavailable but I kept hitting the Amazon search annually and... sometime last year I got lucky when I saw a reseller listing a copy for just a few quid.

Now, my partial obsession with Linzi Drew began long after the first time I’d actually seen her in a movie (I’ll get to that in a minute). For me, it all started in the 1990s when my small suburb was ‘cabled up’ and then everyone given a ‘good deal’ to have holes drilled into their various window frames for a couple of cable TV boxes... before the prices were jacked up and the aforementioned cable company withdrew their boxes when everyone decided it wasn’t worth paying for a service which continuously changed the goal posts in terms of which channels we were and were not allowed to watch without paying some kind of costly premium. Anyway, I digress...

So I started flicking around and I found a channel called HVC, which only came on after about 9pm at night and which, for the most part, showed soft porn versions of movies and adult videos... my accidental introduction to ‘easy to pipe into my bedroom soft pornography’ was complete and it was there that I first became aware of Linzi, hosting a series of Electric Blue videos with her friend Marie Harper and basically entrancing me with her ‘very English’ accent, her captivating face and scintillating body.

However, it wasn’t, in actual fact, the first time I’d seen Linzi Drew at all and, I suspect, even if you are reading this now and don’t share a similar reminiscence about the kinds of movies and shows she made, then I suspect you may still recognise her. That’s because she was also crossing into mainstream movies and TV on occasion, albeit in highly sexualised roles, more often than not. Certainly a large portion of the public will recognise her as Brenda Bristols from An American Werewolf In London (playing in the ‘film within the film’ See You Next Wednesday). Or she might be recognised from appearing in various Ken Russell productions such as Salome’s Last Dance, The Lair Of The White Worm or his Nessun Dorma segment to the multi-directed Aria. Some might even recognise her in the generically titled role of ‘stripper’ in random episodes of beloved British TV shows such as Dempsey And Makepeace and, one of my personal favourite shows of the 1980s, C.A.T.S Eyes.

This autobiography, focusing on the author's happy intention that the title of the book is pretty good advice (can’t argue too much with that) starts off on her early life in Bristol, leading up to a quite spectacular (if that’s the right word) milestone in her life. She grows up fairly quickly in the early pages and she takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of her life as a groupie as she slept with members of various pop groups at weekends (Did I mention she is also the famous cover girl on the Roger Waters album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking?) and... it’s actually pretty well written. The style is quite informal and it breezes along through her world of hard work and sex, taking us through the decisions and outcomes of deciding to be an ‘adult model’ and, more often than not, letting us in on just who she slept with and giving us just a little taste of their ‘personality’ before going onto the next set of adventures... some with very famous people and some... not. I don’t want to mention any names here because, if you’re interested, you should track down the book but she certainly had a ‘howling’ good time with a certain director, got ‘hunted’ in the bedroom by a very famous racing driver and had some interesting times all around.

This book was written at a time when she was still in a relationship with Lindsay Honey (whom some of you might even know by one of his ‘porn names’, Ben Dover) but before the birth of their child Tyger Drew-Honey, who subsequently grew up to become famous as playing Jake in the popular BBC comedy Outnumbered. It’s actually quite a refreshing account of her life up until a certain point because you get a really interesting snap shot of what it’s like growing up somewhere like Bristol and then seeing someone applying their personal work ethic to the pursuit of a career in a much underrated profession... and making a good success of it in the face of the horrendous British censorship laws and prevailing attitudes. All this while going up against the bizarrely twisted ethics of people like Mary Whitehouse and coming off as, by far, the more intelligent and well adjusted person.

The last part of the book is where everything goes dark. After a successful run as the editor of the UK edition of Penthouse magazine (where she presumably honed the writing skills which shine so brightly here), she and Lindsay Honey were, quite wrongly I think (judging by the evidence as highlighted in this book), sentenced to go to prison for making and distributing pornography. She had to go for something like four months and you get a real idea of just how daunting it can be waiting a year or more for a trial and how it affects you as a person. It also then, quite fascinatingly, goes on to tell how she survived and just what it was like to be in a woman’s open prison at the time. I mean, she’s no Alexander Solzhenitsyn but she is pretty good at turning a phrase and, more importantly, conveying how something feels so, anyone interested in such things, might want to check this out.

And once she is free and awaiting the release of her partner, the book more or less ends and I was left wanting to know about the next stage of her career (which I understand included being an agent for her son). I believe she has, fairly recently, turned to writing again as, a couple of years ago, she had an erotic novel published under the name Linzi Drew-Honey called Every Shade Of Blue... which I suspect was an attempt to cash in on a series of books about another shade of a certain colour and which, I suspect, she’s eminently more qualified to write about than the writer of those particular novels. I might actually give that one a go myself, although I don’t tend to read that much erotica these days (I’ll review it on here if I do).

And, if you didn’t already guess, Try Everything Once Except Incest And Morris Dancing is a ‘reading recommendation’ from me, if you like discovering the warm, beating heart and sly intelligence of such highly sexualised personalities. It probably won’t appeal to everybody and it’s certainly a hard one to track down these days but, if you want a snapshot of life at a certain time in Great Britain of the 1970s and 80s then it’s a really good one to take a look at. Maybe give this book a try... at least once.

Respectable

Maxted Headroom

Respectable - The Mary Millington Story
UK 2016 Directed by Simon Sheridan
Odeon Films DVD Region 2

When I read on Twitter that Simon Sheridan, the writer responsible for the excellent book about Mary Maxted (aka Mary Millington), Come Play With Me - The Life And Films Of Mary Millington (reviewed by me here) had written, produced and directed a new documentary film about her, I was expecting something like a more seductive, pop culture approach to the lady’s life which would be a kind of abridged version of the book... but in no way a substitute for it. As it turns out, Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is both less and more informative than the tome in question. Which is a bit of a bonus, as far as I’m concerned.

The film starts off with the sound of film... proper film, none of that digital rubbish... running through a projector and, as you can hear the stock threading through on the soundtrack, the screen is dark and we hear the first of many recorded sound bites from Mary herself. We then get a quick rundown of the trajectory of her tragic life as a kind of précis of the film to come, in quick inserts from the various ‘talking head’ interviews which, as always in a film of this nature, fill up the majority of the running time. Which is what you would expect when the writer has obviously gone to the trouble of getting so many interviews with people who either knew her, encountered her or could bear expert witness due to their being in a similar profession (and it was really great seeing Linzi Drew again, to be honest). Anything else and the audience would feel somewhat short changed, to be sure.

Now, if you have read the aforementioned book on Mary’s shenanigans then you might feel that her early life story is somewhat glossed over here, perhaps. What you have to remember though is that you can’t throw all that detail in about a person from a book and expect the documentary, which is not that much shy of two hours anyway, to be either interesting or pacey. I think certain things are said which hit the key points and, if not all the facts and issues which may have gone into the lady’s psychological make up are highlighted here, they are emphasised enough that one can glean the main issues which led to certain behaviour later on in her life, perhaps. Either way, it doesn’t matter because anyone interested in reading more about the subject matter can purchase the aforementioned book and find out for themselves.

That being said, there is also a lot of stuff in this movie which I hadn’t actually heard before, to be honest and, unless I was sleep reading before, wasn’t included in the volume in question. It’s also quite possible that some of the stories and anecdotes which come to light here were either not available or actually not allowed to be printed at the time that the book was first published for various reasons. The first printing was released, after all, about 17 years ago. So, for example, I never realised... or at least it never hit home in my brain before... that Mary’s notorious short porn film Miss Borloch was actually one of the prize winners of what was the first ever porn film awards, The Wet Dreams Festival, at Amsterdam in 1970. Everybody who went to the event had to go naked and the judges included famous feminist writer Germain Greer in their number. Mary Millington was an even bigger star in Europe, it seems, than she was initially as an illegal, ‘under the counter’ star in the United Kingdom, at the time.

Another story new to me involved her, sometimes official, prostitution antics (for want of a better word), where it is alleged that Coleman’s Mustard once hired Mary to sleep with the head of Tesco so they could get their brand of product into the supermarket chain. Which is a bit of an eye opener, if this is true.

Other stories, like a more softened down version of her encounter with prime minister Harold Wilson are also present (if you want more details, buy the book) and her meteoric downfall involving the tax men, a corrupt police force (it would seem... who Mary paid protection money to but still managed to have them constantly raiding her sex shops), her increasing but completely unnecessary kleptomania and various other factors which culminated in her early suicide are all thrown into the mix. There’s also some things that don’t, necessarily, add up when it comes to taking a closer look at that suicide. It’s often noted that, in light of another brush with the law where they threatened her with a prison sentence, she retired to her room without her husband (who slept elsewhere in the house that night and who she was in the process of divorcing), wrote some goodbye notes and then ended her life by taking a large amount of pills washed down with vodka. And that’s indeed the story that the autopsy confirms. However, there is a big question mark in the involvement of certain other people, or a specific person, which is quite pointed in terms of the remembrances of some of the guests on this documentary and it’s interesting that several of them mention that Mary would never drink alcohol. Just being around the smell of beer made her feel sick. So... yeah... interesting stuff, I would say.

The way the film itself is shot and presented is very pacey and the whole thing never flags as the director balances the various interview footage of people such as members of Mary’s friend and family (which are heartbreaking in some cases), various lovers and major celebrities such as François Pascal and actor Dudley Sutton (who worked with her in the film The Playbirds - reviewed here) with excerpts from Mary’s films, recordings of Mary herself and the occasional bit of documentary footage of London in the 1970s... which I personally found most nostalgic since I was a child model at the time, working in my school holidays in various locations around London. Sheridan also adds the nice touch of coming back to new footage of the source of some of the on screen audio and visual excerpts... so he might precede an excerpt of a film with a shot of a projector showing it or go into a sound bite of Mary while showing a tape recorder playing the sample. He doesn’t do this a lot but he does it enough to make an impression and I kinda liked this way of handling it, all of which adds to an interesting watch.

Above all, from the various testimonials caught here, I got the impression that Mary Millington was much more about living a life of moral justice, far above the issues of the legality or illegality of what she was doing at any given time. So, for instance, she would stock illegal, ‘under the counter’ items in her sex shops because she believed it was the right thing to do and shouldn’t be against the law at all. There’s a lovely line from one of the interviewees in the film which, for me, summed up Mary’s brand of enlightened naivety very smartly. It's mentioned that she was a lady who carried "the spirit of the 1960s Summer of Love well into the seventies with her." I kinda like that idea and it’s maybe something we should all think about doing more of, methinks.

So there you have it. Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is a truly great little documentary that’s written, produced and directed by someone who has had an interest in Mary’s life for a very long time and can be considered something of an expert in this field, I suspect. In other words, a truly informative, sometimes thought provoking but always entertaining look at a tragic but very influential, in some ways, lady who also happened to be Great Britain’s first, bona fide porn star. The disc comes with the usual amount of interesting extras that are the normal expectation of an Odeon DVD release of one of Mary Millington’s films and this one gets a big recommendation from me. And if you do take a look at this movie and like it... then you can always go buy the book, too.