Bloody New Year

Temporal Of Doom

Bloody New Year
aka Time Warp Terror
UK 1986 Directed by Norman J. Warren
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

I can’t help but think that Bloody New Year was aimed at competing with all those terrible mid-1980s US slasher movies and that’s exactly why I would never normally watch this kind of movie, to be honest. In my book, giallo = good, US slasher = terrible. However, this is the last movie in the five film box set put out by Indicator, Bloody Terror - The Shocking Cinema Of Norman J. Warren 1976 - 1987. Out of the five films in this set I’d have to say I loved three of them but, for me, two of them were a little lacking for my tastes but, clearly, this last film is the worst one among them.

That being said, there’s more than the odd quirky flourish that sets this one apart from the generic 1980s slashers although, in all honesty, the lack of budget for a film like this really does show up its flaws. It does have some interesting things going on though so lets have a quick look...

After a terrible pop song and black and white credits showing a New Year’s Eve party in a hotel on an island in 1959 we get what, for me, is the first and only genuine jump shot of the film. This is where a girl is looking into a mirror at the side of the shot and we can see some of the things reflected in the mirror at the angle it is. Warren really took me by surprise here as a hand shoots out from the mirror and grabs the girl... there wasn’t a mirror there at all, just an opening with good set dressing. I have to say, after this genuinely startling moment, I was kind of let down by the rest of the film.

Now, there’s a problem which is not of the director’s making. The film stock is pretty distressed during these sequences and continues to be so for a while. I thought this was a clever and possibly first time usage in a horror film of deliberately distressed stock to show the audience that some of the footage was taking place in 1959. Alas, as more scenes play out about a group of friends (played by Suzy Aitchison, Nikki Brooks, Daniel James, Mark Powley, Catherine Roman and Julian Ronnie) who flea some trouble at a fun fair and pitch up on an island after their boat hits some rocks, I realised that, actually, we were no longer in 1959 after all. It turns out that when this was reissued by Vinegar Syndrome a few years back, the only print they could find was in terrible shape. They tried to restore it and, indeed, I think more restoration might even have been done by Warren himself for this new release but, frankly, for the first 40 minutes or so the film is in terrible shape. Still, a nice transfer of a film in terrible shape is better than nothing so... I’ll continue.

As the teenage friends wander around the hotel and surrounding environment from the credits sequence (which turns out to be Butlins at Barry Island, Wales), they start to get picked off one by one. However, this isn’t a standard slasher and it’s quite clear that antagonistic ghosts of all shapes and sizes are stalking the friends. The first shock being when they discover a small screening room in the hotel and a man from the film jumps right out of the screen to scratch one of the kids on the face before inexplicable disappearing again. This, of course, kills the young man in question because, as you know... um... scratched faces can be a life threatening injury (okay, no I didn’t know that and am not convinced, frankly). Also, the amount of emotion displayed by the group towards their fallen comrade seems a bit lacking to say the least. I mean, I know loss and grief are usually a good way out of the window in movies which have these kind of ‘get on with it’ stories to tell but, the lack of empathy on display here seems pretty ludicrous and unrealistic, truth be told.

From then on it all gets bizarrely surreal but, what could have been a bunch of good ideas suffers from the obviously cheapness of the effects and the general low budget look of the film. So promising scenes where a woman is attacked by an animated fish net, a moment where they are attacked by some kind of seaweed monster manifesting from the centre of a table and even a bit where the wooden duck carving on the bannister of the staircase of the hotel bites a woman on the hand are... well they just don’t quite make it. Which is a shame because they are nice ideas and serve to remove this film as far away as possible from the kinds of slasher pictures which were contemporaneous to this production.

During a TV broadcast the group are not really watching and, thus, fail to spot it’s actually from that 1959 party, the audience is clued in that an experiment with a new kind of cloaking device for a plane is something some scientists are condemning for fiddling with the laws of time and, I guess the lurking, ghost pilot and the explosion of the reoccurring crash of the plane explains all you need to know as to why various ghost characters, including the demonically raised and re-raised versions of the newest victims themselves, keep coming back to try and visit death on their former companions.

It’s a shame then that, towards the end of the picture, the ghost/demon thing of a fallen friend feels the need to re-explain the whole thing as to why everyone seems to be frozen in pockets of time at this late stage in the game when, frankly, the audience figured all this stuff out within the first twenty minutes or so of the movie. It does seem like overkill in a film that feels somewhat padded at times.

There’s lots of moving camera in this, especially hand held stuff which gets quite frantic during the fairground chase scenes at the start of the movie. It does get a bit tiring sometimes but there are some nice bits of framing here and there during the course of the film. Also, there’s a quirky thing Warren does for a lot of the first half of the movie where he has little visual punchlines to the ends of scenes. Admittedly, they’re all the same punchline and consist of some inanimate object in a room moving on its own, unnoticed by anyone else in the room at the time. This is presumably to build a certain amount of suspense until things really kick off and, I have to say, the moment where the hotel guest dressed as a sheik suddenly comes out of the movie screen, while not exactly a good jump scare, is fairly surprising and it’s things like this which kept me watching, to be honest.

I don’t think there’s any way this could have competed with most of the well made (although often quite dull) slashers of the time but the unusual blend of ghosts/temporal reality breaking down and, frankly, less than gory and not very well executed demises of the main cast as the film progresses, is enough to make Bloody New Year worth investigating if you want to see an alternative to what else was going on in horror cinema at the time. Well, I say cinema... I think this only got screened at a cinema in Ireland and went straight to video in most territories, including the USA. That being said, there were a lot of straight-to-video releases in those days and I’ve no idea how well the tape rentals of this movie did. Alas, this was Norman J. Warren’s last feature film and it’s a shame this is his swan song because I don’t think even he was all that happy with how this one turned out (I think there was some trouble with the producer and the budgets on it). One for the curious among you or those interested in this fascinating and much loved director but, not one I’d recommend to most people, to be honest.

Inseminoid

Pregnant Paws

Inseminoid
(aka Horror Planet)
UK 1981 Directed by Norman J. Warren
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

There was a point in my life when I went absolutely mad trying to see this movie.

It must have been around 1980/81, when I was 12, that I visited Chislehurst Caves in Kent. I loved caves because they were dark, dank places and I love soaking in that atmosphere (not much has changed in my sunny disposition over the years, to be honest). I remember the tour guide mentioning that they’d shot a science fiction movie there not so long ago but he didn’t think it had been released yet. My ears pricked up, of course, because I was very much into sci-fi at the time (and who wouldn’t be with films like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and The Black Hole playing at cinemas in those days?). So after the tour was finished, I crept up to the kindly old guide and asked him some details about the film. He couldn’t remember much about it but said Judy Geeson was in it and... after a while of scratching his head for a title, said it was called... something like Inseminoid.

So that was it... I spent the next year waiting for the new science fiction blockbuster called... something like Inseminoid, to land at my local cinema so I could take it in and marvel at a film shot in a place I’d actually visited. And then the next year went by and I waited. And another and I waited. No internet in those days you see... and no magazine coverage that I managed to catch. I’m assuming it did have a fairly wide UK release but it certainly didn’t hit my neck of the woods. It wasn’t for at least another two decades that I came across a second hand copy of the film on a DVD at the Camden Film Fair and finally got to see it. I remember I was not disappointed by it and, frankly, it was the main reason why I wanted this wonderful, five movie Blu Ray set by Indicator called Bloody Terror - The Shocking Cinema Of Norman J. Warren 1976 - 1987. And as it turns out, one good thing leads to another because, I certainly have had no regrets about getting acquainted with some of the movies in this selection.

The film starts with a very interesting set of star fields, somewhat animated like galaxies are boiling away in space, which is also somehow reminiscent of embryos and other aspects of human biology... not in terms of accuracy but it certainly has a flavour of that about it, I think and that certainly fits into the theme of the movie. Once thing to bear in mind is that I’ve always assumed that Inseminoid was conceived as a quickie production to be a ‘poor man’s A L I E N’, so to speak. According to one of the producers on one of the extras on this disc, however, this absolutely wasn’t the case and they might have well been shooting at around the same kind of time (which is weird given the film’s release date... must have had some kind of post-production delay is my guess).

The film has a fine cast of known and unknown character actors and includes Judy Geeson as the main protagonist/antagonist, Stephanie Beacham (who you may remember from such movies as Dracula AD 1972... reviewed here) and a young Victoria Tennant. Here they are part of a 12 person crew (predominantly women, which is interesting) who are part of a team of... well... space archeologists who have just discovered a strange, tomb-like structure leading on from their base camp in some caverns on a strange planet. And, despite no comparisons being made to A L I E N... two of the team are taken out by some crystal structures or an alien or... yeah, possibly both (I’m still not sure what the crystals were supposed to indicate). Then, in the process of looking for one of the two who has being taken over by some kind of controlling force (I never said the plot made any kind of sense, people), Judy Geeson’s character gets impregnated by an alien (who manages to drop out of the narrative, presumably for both budgetary and credibility reasons)... at which point, after a short while convalescing, Miss Geeson goes nuts and uses her new found superhuman strength and cunning to try and kill all the other humans before giving birth to aliens and... yeah. So no great amount of monster suit or model work needed because Geeson is now the antagonist here and, I have to say, she does a bloody good job of it. She has to scream a heck of a lot, get naked for a bit and also emote various alien/human points of view and doing it in what was, by all accounts, an already tough shoot. Very little of this film was shot in a studio, it turns out. 

 The caves in question were lit and augmented with ‘space base tunnels’ and, yeah, not great conditions to work under. That being said, as I discovered on one of the 'making of' features here, Stephanie Beacham said she had the most laughter and fun down in those caves than on any other of her film shoots and, frankly, absolutely everyone asked has nothing but good words on how brilliant a person Judy Geeson is to work with (apparently Beacham and Geeson are still good friends).

And, bearing in mind the shoestring nature of the budget and the speed of the shoot in such conditions, the film looks really good. Not everything but, honestly, most things from the bizarre space helmets which had two big headlights on either side of the head (and so give a really interesting ‘bright eyes from silhouette’ look when required) to the illusion of a small, underground rail car built on the dolly tracks from a camera... just really work and serve the movie well. It might not have much money behind it but you can certainly see that what was there was being worked very hard and it gives the film a nice, almost 'comfort horror', home grown feel.

Of course, although the trappings are sci-fi, it is kind of a slasher picture, as people are slowly whittled down by Geeson, with her alien brain working overtime so, it’s not too far away from what you’d expect from the director and, I have to say, although I already knew this was a watchable and entertaining movie, I have been acquiring more and more respect for Norman J. Warren with each movie of his I’ve seen (a shame then, that he hasn’t directed a great deal of them over the years).

The music for Inseminoid fits the film well and is once again composed by John Scott, who explains that he had to go the synthesiser route on the picture due to the budget. That being said, he does come up with an interesting, textural score and there’s another extra on this (like the one on Satan’s Slave - reviewed here) where he explains how he arrived at the musical elements for the movie... in this case, writing it as though it were an orchestral score and then trying to adapt it for electronic realisation.

And yes, being as it’s put out by Indicator, there’s a whole host of interesting extras with the film and it’s worth every penny.  Bloody Terror - The Shocking Cinema Of Norman J. Warren 1976 - 1987 is a great little Blu Ray set and Inseminoid is certainly an entertaining shocker. I mean it no disrespect when I say that it plays out like an expanded episode of the kind of thing you might see in the second season of Space 1999... but with a little extra nudity and gore. Which sounds pretty good to me. The film did not disappoint in comparison with my memories of it and, as usual, Indicator’s new transfer is superb... the film never looked so good.

Terror

A Witch In Time

Terror
UK 1978
Directed by Norman J. Warren
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Terror is the third of the Norman J. Warren directed films in the recent five film Indicator boxed set and, so far, I’d have to say it’s my least favourite of the batch although, it has a lot of people who seem to turn up in lots of stuff, whose faces you just seem to know, in it. Like a who’s who of obscure British character actors. Among the more famous of these, though, are two ex-Doctor Who companions - William Russell, who only lasts for the opening sequence... and Michael Craze (also from Satan’s Slave, reviewed here), who doesn’t last that much longer and just seems to leave the film for no apparent reason, due to having an epileptic attack on set and being ordered not to continue by his doctor at the time, from what I can gather.

Another couple of the more famous names in the cast are Glynis Barber (who you might remember from starring roles in the hit TV shows Blake’s Seven, Jane and Dempsey & Makepeace) and the late, great Peter Mayhew, Chewbacca himself, in one stand out scene where you assume he’s playing a menacing killer but, instead, turns out to be the local mechanic... if he turned out to be the plumber then I guess it would have been a porn movie. One last person who deserves a mention in a brief, blink and you’ll miss it section of a party scene is the absolutely brilliant Argento biographer, critic and FrightFest programmer Alan Jones, back when he was a lot younger and had some hair on his top side.

Now, the film was made, I suspect, to cash in on the burgeoning, gory American slasher films which were so popular at the time although, to his credit, I think the director’s influences lay elsewhere on this one. Now, the US slasher movie is a genre I mostly hate. There are a few good films which could be pigeonholed into that genre but not that many and, frankly, I don’t understand why people think those kinds of films are actually horror movies. I mean, how does that even make sense. I much prefer the more beautifully crafted Italian giallo films and also, to a certain degree, the Italian horror films and, though this film is probably an attempt to cash in on that US trend, I think it’s with the Italians that Norman J. Warren’s influences must lay... as the debt to them in this is quite overt in this one.

The opening sequence shows a pursued witch who is ‘man-trapped’ and burned at the stake while issuing a curse to the various generations of the family who put her to death. So straight away we have something strongly reminiscent of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (reviewed here) and the Italian connection continues into the credits, which is vaguely like some of those old giallo/spaghetti horrors that used slow motion frames of people in posterised colour washes (like some of the old Bava A Bay Of Blood aka Twitch Of The Death Nerve trailers).

Incidentally, the opening set up sequence is a nice bit of double rug pulling when it’s revealed the previous 5 - 10 minutes are part of a modern horror film’s rough cut being shown to the cast and crew at a private screening, in the same house as the setting of that film within a film. Then, in another slight add on to that, it’s revealed that the film’s producer, played by John Nolan and his actress sister played by Carolyn Courage, are actually the last in the family line and the film is based on the true story of their ancestors. So, a nice double whammy and a pure example of the writers getting to have their cake and eat it at the same time. The witch, when she returns towards the end of Terror, is even played by the same actress in the same make-up as the fictional production so, yeah, I like it when the cast and crew of a movie have some fun.

Another Italian connection is a sequence where a small studio starts pulling itself apart and attacking a crew member in the process... which seems ripped straight from the end sequences of Argento’s Suspiria and you can tell that Warren’s pretty much cribbed the lighting scheme from this. The intense greens and reds are almost identical but, I have to say, it manages to look a lot less classier than the template... although there’s a nice moment here when the film crew member gets attacked by the unwinding, spaghetti like tendrils of old film stock swarming over him from the cans (which, apparently, was seven reels of Saturday Night Fever in real life... or is that reel life?).

My only other real take home, apart from a nice stripper with a whippy S&M themed dance, played by Tanya Ferowa, is that the murders in this all seem a bit lacking. They’re gory enough but none of the impalements or weapon penetrations are shown on the body in context with the moments of violence and the fast cuts to make it all fit together along with the gory aftermath seem a little badly done... in direct contrast to the truly amazing stuff on show in Warren’s earlier film, Satan’s Slave. Incidentally, in the fictional film studios there’s a nice double bill poster for Satan’s Slave along with Thriller (aka They Call Her One Eye) which is really quite nice. I didn’t realise they were paired together for some releases... in fact, I hadn’t realised the latter got a cinematic release in the UK at all, to be honest.

One thing of note is the score by Ivor Slaney. It’s both interesting but terrible at the same time. Terrible in that it sounds like it’s being performed on a cheap, domestic Casio mini synthesiser bought from the local Woolworths but, at the same time, it’s quite a striking composition and it sounds like the instrument, if that is what it is, is being worked for all it’s worth. So that’s interesting. I wonder if a recording of this still exists?

Anyway, that’s me done on Terror. It’s not the best film but would be really good programmed as part of a semi-drunken all nighter with friends, I feel. Indicator, as usual, include a load of great extras and a really great transfer/restoration of the film. Another good reason to pick up their Bloody Terror - The Films Of Norman J. Warren box set.

Prey

Prey A Manger

Prey
UK 1977
Directed by Norman J. Warren
Indicator Ray Zone B

I’ve been wanting to see Norman J. Warren’s Prey for quite some time now. I did have a second hand DVD lined up to watch which I bought about ten years ago but, you know, having a thousand or so films in backlog and then having to write about them all means it can take some time to get to them and so, it’s yet another DVD which became redundant when Indicator brought out their excellent Blu Ray set Bloody Terror: The Shocking Cinema of Norman J Warren 1976-1987 a year or two ago. Honestly, I should stop buying limited edition Blu Rays because, by the time the next edition comes along, I still haven’t had a chance to watch the last one and I’ve become disillusioned with many boutique labels now bringing out so called ‘Limited Editions’, only to bring out a non-limited edition of the same product a few months later, well before anyone’s had time to watch the previous releases. Anyway... rant over on that one. Bottom line is, I finally got to watch Prey in what is probably the best restoration and transfer it’s ever going to get.

Which is fine because it’s a curious and quite strange film which, asides from the ending, doesn’t always do what you think it’s going to do. This might be, of course, because the schedule for the ten day shoot was so rushed that the writer was delivering the script on a day to day basis while it was being shot but, bearing that in mind, it doesn’t feel disjointed or unstructured or like there’s anything anybody would have wanted to rewrite at a later stage.

The film is about a predator who ends up spending time with two lesbian lovers who have a house in the country. And when I say predator... I don’t mean the usual sexual predator you might be thinking of. I’m talking more about the ‘alien hunter from another star system’ kind of predator. This one lands on Earth via the movie magic of ‘coloured lights flashing in through a window’ and later, this alien similarly disposes of a body with the similarly cheap technique of ‘lights somewhere in the bushes’. So, yeah, it’s an incredibly cheap film but what the production didn’t spend on effects like this is ploughed back into the ‘not so bad’ prosthetics and the practical gore effects, which are also pretty good.

Barry Stokes plays the alien... killing a couple in the woods when he lands and assuming the human form of the male. Due to the ‘fish out of water’ shenanigans usually reserved for comedies but used quite a bit here, surprisingly successfully, he ends up being called Anders Anderson as he gives his name twice and is mistaken. The two lesbian lovers (one of whom is actually bisexual, it turns out) are played by Glory Annen as Jessica and Sally Faulkner (from Vampyres, reviewed here) as Josephine.

The film plays out as a more serious form of romp as Anders tries to figure out the girls, is dressed by them in women’s clothing and is ‘affected’ by some champagne they give him. Meanwhile, and this is really strange, there seems to be a sub plot where Josephine has murdered a previous friend of Jessica’s (without her knowing, prior to finding bloody clothes and a flick knife in her lover’s chest) and there’s more than a lurking suspicion that one of them might have spent some time in the local madhouse. Or is Josephine just protecting Jessica and suppressing a deed that she herself committed and has forgotten? Hence the overly protective, older woman not wanting her to leave the house and grounds.

It’s an interesting premise but it never really resolves and, okay, perhaps this actually is a product of the ‘making it up as we go’ script writing on a daily basis but, I really enjoyed the off-kilter element it added to the story and it is useful in giving motivation to the actions of the characters and putting them into situations they wouldn’t normally get into... so I kind of like that it’s constantly hovering in the background.

Considering this is mostly done on a hand held camera (which I found out after, I didn’t notice and that says something about the skill of the crew and the distractions of the story, I think), it’s a nicely designed shoot. Some of the frame designs are quite beautiful and there are even some nice dissolves between static shots, which is not something you see done that often these days and, when done so well like here, gives a nice result.

There’s also a wild, extended slow motion sequence where Anders nearly drowns in a lake with really dirty water. It was apparently the first thing they shot and took two days out of the already short shoot, which seems somewhat disproportionate but it looks really good and that really isn’t clean water they’re in. It looks like they’re all taking an extended mud bath. Apparently, the lake was a local dump for all kinds of poisonous stuff so the cast had to be given shots to safely shoot the sequence. It works well though and, bizarrely, really just stops the film dead... but in a good way.

The gore effects are okay... a bit more aftermath than ‘of the moment’, which certainly wasn’t an issue with the director’s previous film Satan’s Slave (reviewed here)... but the prosthetics for those moments when Anders becomes some kind of panther man, are really well done, especially the red, slit eye contact lenses which occasionally manifest themselves (and blinded the actor whenever he had to wear them). There’s a remarkable shot of those eyes in close up where the slit, vertical pupil seems to dilate somehow... not sure how they did that back in 1977 but it’s surprisingly effective here.

And that’s mostly it for my comments on this one. Prey has an ending which you can see coming a mile off but, strangely, it still took me by surprise because I didn’t think the writers would bother to go there with it. They totally do and, although it gives it a ‘home grown’ kind of feel, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this one and will certainly look at it again someday (if I ever clear this backlog). Looking forward to watching the third film in this wonderful Indicator Blu Ray box set soon.

Satan's Slave

Slave Regina

Satan's Slave
UK 1976
Directed by Norman J. Warren
Indicator Ray Zone B

You know, I’d only seen one Norman J. Warren film before this first time watch.* However, since that other film, Inseminoid, holds a special place in my heart due to circumstances surrounding its release (I’ll get to that when I review it for this blog), I thought pursuing the recent Indicator Blu Ray boxed edition of five of this director’s films (including Inseminoid), was a good idea. Indeed, it turns out that in the case of this film, Satan’s Slave, it’s good that this is my first experience of it because it seems that the previous UK releases of it were cut down to something approximating the original ‘X’ certificate theatrical release. Somehow (and good on them), Indicator have been allowed to include a full on ‘director’s cut’ with the sex, nudity and violence enhanced even more than what the film-makers were allowed to get away with back in the day.

The film starts off strongly with a nice, strong graphic line drawing of a face which goes through a few transformations before it’s a skull with bulging eyeballs... then a cross and then various cards from a Tarot deck before returning to the bloodshot eyeball skull thingy (as is the technical term for this), all accompanied by composer John Scott’s wonderful score. Then we have a preliminary opening where a naked girl, played by one of the producers as the actress didn’t show up on set, is sacrificed in some kind of satanic ritual (including a nice ‘bloody eye’ effect reminiscent of some of those Hammer films where Christopher Lee played Dracula). Since Satan doesn’t actually appear in the film and I don’t remember the devil getting much of a shout out, I’m assuming the robes, blood and general nakedness are the only real reference to which the film’s title can allude. The main masked/robed priest doing the deed is, you can totally hear from his voice, played by Michael Gough so, when he comes into the main body of the story a little later, it’s no real surprise that he is just as much a threat as the character of his son Martin, payed by Stephen Yorke. And we also get a scene where Martin murders one of his lovers (he seems to have a few on the go at the same time) in a protracted sequence where he non-consensually smothers her to unconsciousness, ties and undresses her on his bed, then threatens the young lady with scissors before letting her go... only to change his mind by splitting her head in between a door and its frame before stabbing her.

The plot involves main protagonist Catherine, played by Candace Glendenning, who is accompanying her parents to visit her previously anonymous uncle, a day or two before her birthday. The car crashes (well it’s just a little bump, really) a few yards from their destination, a big country house. After Catherine gets out of the car to get help from her uncle for her parents in the front of the vehicle, the car inexplicably explodes. The uncle, his son Martin and Martin’s lover, Frances, played by Barbara Kellerman , take her in to recuperate for a few days. However, Catherine is prone to premonitions and visions, which makes sense since it turns out she is a direct descendent of some kind of witch from hundreds of years before. Michael Gough’s character has already sacrificed his wife to have said witch reborn and, although she doesn’t know it yet, Catherine is earmarked to be the next 'stab' at resurrection fodder unless she can escape.

It’s also nice to see former Doctor Who companion to William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, Michael Craze, as Catherine’s boyfriend. Alas, he only has two scenes because his second appearance has him taken over psychically by the long distance but, apparently mesmerising, mind powers of Michael Gough’s character, compelling him to throw himself from the roof of a block of flats with a rather grisly aftermath.

Now, I’m used to seeing British horror films by the likes of Hammer, Amicus and Tigon studios but this really is a proper piece of trashy exploitation with a UK flavour to it and it’s a very strong and entertaining work, to be honest. In fact, I’d say it’s a lot better than much of the US stuff I’ve seen in a similar vein, to tell the truth. It’s got lashings of nudity, sex and gore as part of its genetic make up and Warren seems to have no trouble capitalising on all these factors to make the film really work. Indeed, I was somewhat taken aback when the heroine of the film stabs an antagonist directly in the eyeball and we see it go in and then we get a few aftermath shots of the nail file she used still lodged in the guy’s eyeball. Something which the majority of directors mostly cut away from and it’s rare to see something this strong since Dali and Bunuel dissected a lady’s eyeball at the opening of their silent masterpiece Un Chien Andalou in 1929.

In a similar vein, although not as impactful and probably not the first time this was done, the moment when a door swings back to reveal a young lady hanging from the door and held there by the big carving knife which has gone through the front of her mouth and out the back of her head before being embedded into the wooden panel, must have been a few years early, at the time, before this kind of reveal became a more common factor in various American slasher films of the late 1970s and early 1980s (not a genre I get on with particularly... I prefer a well shot Italian giallo to those kinds of movies).

What also really works about the film, though, is the way some of the shots are designed. The colours are quite a bit more muted or greyer than you might see in a Hammer film of around the same time but the director more than makes up for it by getting creative with some of his framing, especially since his modus operandi seems to be to just start off with a static screen in which a character is seen and then moving the camera with that character in whichever direction they are going. So, sure, standard stuff in that respect but he manages to do some nice things visually which lift the sequences and it’s exactly the kind of stuff I like...

For example, one scene shows Catherine sitting alone in a room on a chair. She gets up and starts walking to the left of shot with the camera moving on her to keep her in the centre of the frame until she comes to a stop in front of a mirror. A she moves in front of the mirror, Stephen walks into the reflection of the mirror and comes to a stop opposite her (his real self out of frame entirely, of course) to start a conversation up. Another sequence has Frances wearing a nice purple and blue hotch potch of a garment but she’s standing in front of a painting of a lady wearing the exact same kind of purple tones. It’s all nice stuff and it’s this kind of thing which really contributes to the overall entertainment value of the film... for me at least.

One slight cliché is when composer Scott uses a kind of rip off of Bernard Herrmann’s classic ‘stab music’ from Psycho, when ever somebody crosses paths with a knife or, indeed, nail file or similarly pointy object. It’s a bit of a steal in terms of the way it borrows from Herrmann’s masterpiece but heck, even the great Jerry Goldsmith did a similar thing once (in Coma) so I can certainly cut this composer some slack here.

Satan’s Slave is packaged as part of the Indicator box set Bloody Terror: The Shocking Cinema of Norman J Warren 1976-1987 and, as you would expect from such a great boutique label, they’ve not only given us a proper, uncut version of the film for the first time ever in the UK but also put some great extras with it, which include a couple of commentary tracks (one with the composer), outtakes and deleted scenes, a making of featurette, a chat with the composer (who actually plays a part of the main theme on a piano for us) and an interesting comparison featurette on the censorship issues of the film. I was really impressed with this set and, I have to say, I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the movies in this collection sometime soon. 

*Since reviewing the movies in this boxed edition, I also saw his earlier film
Her Private Hell, which explains why that review beat these to the site.

Her Private Hell

Caught Snapping

Her Private Hell
UK 1968
Directed by Norman J. Warren
BFI Flipside
Blu Ray Zone B/
DVD Region 2 Dual Edition

I recently become properly acquainted with the work of director Norman J. Warren by way of the wonderful Blu Ray boxed edition from the Powerhouse/Indicator label, Bloody Terror: The Shocking Cinema of Norman J Warren. The contents of this box will be coming in over various reviews in the weeks and, possibly, months to come but, before I put those up, I wanted to take a look at Warren’s debut feature release My Private Hell, which I picked up on Blu Ray a couple of years ago from my local Computer Exchange shop for around a fiver. And, I have to say, the film is amazing.

It’s black and white photography and begins with a couple making love under the credits, with really beautiful photography which utilises the textures and abstract forms that can be achieved using this kind of filming. It immediately feels both European and somehow grittily English as the story, such as it is, unfolds.

Starting off with the arrival in England of Italian protagonist Marisa, played by Lucia Modugno, who appeared in such films as The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Danger Diabolik and Isabella, Duchessa Dei Diavoli (aka Ms. Stiletto, reviewed here), we follow her in her new career in ‘Swinging London’ as she is given board and lodging and a luxury lifestyle living in sin with the head photographer, all laid on by a modelling studio. So we have the photographer Bernie (played by Terence Skelton), his assistant Matt (played by Daniel Ollier), their direct bosses Margaret (played by Pearl Catlin) and ultimately Neville (played by Robert Crewdson)... plus a couple of Bernie’s ex-girlfriend models. The basic through line of the picture is the issue of nude pictures of a reluctant Marisa being sold on the sly and the tensions this causes within their small community as she swings between Bernie and Matt and ultimately gets confused and troubled by her situation (which really isn’t as hellish as the title makes it sound, to be honest).

However, what the film really is, is a time piece which nicely captures the 1960s London lifestyle (to a certain extent)... perhaps not as I remember it personally because I was just a toddler but, certainly the spirit as it’s often portrayed on film, at least. Mind you, I was born five days after this movie came out and in much less than two years I was a professional child model myself, working for a modelling agency called Tiny Tots (are they still around?)... and from what little I can remember of the atmosphere in the photo studios at the time... a lot of this rang true, to be honest.  

And, honestly, what promise this director had back then. It’s like Antonioni meets London all over again as Norman J. Warren matches the subject matter of the movie, the pursuit of the perfect pictures, with an astounding visual flair and jagged, ‘of its time’ editing style which really got me going ooh and ahh as I watched it (mentally oohing and aahing, for the record). There’s a real beauty to the way he manages to throw people together perfectly into the 1.33:1 aspect ratio of the shoot. I loved, for instance, the way he places people around objects and furniture, giving the shot a certain depth through a strong sense of perspective and then having people walking into the front of a shot and blocking out part of the view to present new compositional possibilities within the same frame.

Even on the rare sequences where he goes on location, he manages to treat the various environments such as the airport where Marisa pitches up at the start of the movie, as something which is interacting with the body shapes of the actors in some perfect set ups. For instance, during a forest montage sequence, bang slap in the middle of the movie, where Marisa goes out with Bernie to take some ‘fun pictures’, Warren manages to use the vertical tree trunks and angular, jutting branches to create little pockets of space to frame the actors in. It’s really nice stuff and it's this kind of harkening to the art form that kept me engaged with it all the way through. Not to mention that the actors are all pretty good and Marisa and Matt are quite sympathetic. He even manages to get a couple of overhead shots (whether using a crane... or just standing on the roof of a building is my guess) and it all pitches in with the monochromatic photography to dazzle the eyes.

There’s also a nice punchline to the film with, literally, the very last line of the movie. I won’t spoil that for you here but I wonder if the line was somehow shocking in it’s day or just, of it’s time. It’s fairly tame now but it’s also a nice bit of insight which possibly transforms some viewers' perceptions of the attitudes inherent in the film they’ve just been watching a little and, well... I appreciated the moment.

Unfortunately, the film was cut for time in the US version and also cut due to censorship of certain of the sexualised moments in the UK (see Dr. Adrian Smith’s informative essay detailing these as part of the accompanying booklet with the discs for more details). Rather than present the film as a composite, extended cut, the extra US moments are presented as three minutes of deleted scenes (along with several other nice extras which I haven’t had time to explore as yet). I would have preferred them to have been recut back into the feature presentation, for sure, because one of those deletions explains what I thought was a continuity jump in an earlier part of the film but... yeah, censorship causes problems folks, just don’t do it.

And that’s me done on this one. I think this may be my favourite film yet by the director and, given its successful reception back in 1968, I have to wonder why Norman J. Warren’s career took the path it did and why he plumped for a career in, more or less, B movie horror films (some of which are absolutely brilliant and others of which are... yeah, I don’t like to think of Bloody New Year too much). It’s clear just how talented he was and it’s a shame we’ve just lost him... he died in March 2021. I know his films will definitely live on for many though and, I’d certainly recommend Her Private Hell if you like the kind of cinema that was coming out of the London scene in the late 1960s, for sure.

VHS Forever - Psychotronic People

Tape Worms

VHS Forever - Psychotronic People
UK 2014
Directed by Mark Williams & Darren J. Perry
Son of Bill Production MultiRegion DVD

So I’d heard about this relatively new documentary film from the tail end of last year via Twitter, got kinda interested in it and then promptly forgot about it, what with all the other digitalised celluloid attractions on offer these days. However, when I realised I’d only been to three film fairs this year, instead of the 13 or so a year I was knocking back a few short years ago (due to varying reasons, mostly budgetary), I realised that I should maybe get myself down to the latest Camden Film Fair and see what was going on... mostly because I’d been hoping to catch up with the stall of the Camden Fair’s organiser at this year’s London Film And Comic Con (reviewed here) and, like a fair few other dealers, he’d not bothered with that one this time around.

Anyway, when I got there I visited a stall run by Tony & Donna Clarke of the Psychotronic Video Store (www.psychotronicstore.com) who were selling a fair few treasures, including the beautiful limited edition (only 300 copies folks) Lucio Fulci playing cards I’d bought a few weeks before and, among the many gems available, was this movie. So I thought, yeah, I still wanted to catch up to this and, once I’d been around all the stalls at the show, I went back to make the purchase. I was further surprised when one of the directors of the movie, Mark Williams, was there to sign copies for people... which was great.

Now, I’ve seen a few of these small, independent low budget documentaries over the last few years, my favourites being the two epic docs on Video Nasties (reviewed by me here and here) and this is probably one of the lowest budgeted I’ve seen. The IMDB entry for VHS Forever lists it as costing approximately £1000 to make and, I have to say, for the small amount of money it cost, the writers/directors have come up with a very entertaining and fairly informative, depending on how much of this stuff you already know, little homage to the early days of VHS collecting.

Now it would probably be remiss of me not to point out that this particular documentary film is about a very specific aspect of early VHS collecting in this country and, sadly for me, it’s an aspect of the scene I missed out on as a teenager because I was more interested in World Cinema at the time than many of the movies covered here, although watching this film has made me realise I might have a couple of cardboard sleeved rarities sitting on a shelf somewhere which may bear further investigation. There’s not much of anything about the early days of UK collecting when the budget arm of the sell through market was established and tapes were coming down in price, for example. You won’t find The Video Collection label and their early hits like Bringing Up Baby and Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers being praised and lionised on here. But you do get another view of the world of the pre-certification, video nasty style horror market and the first hand stories of the people who used to buy these. This makes it very much a companion piece to the two Video Nasty documentaries I mentioned earlier and, although it won’t mean a heck of a lot to a certain section of the VHS buying market, to me this is essential viewing.

The film covers a little bit about the infamous banned list and the stories of the victimisation of the people who used to buy and sell these tapes and, once again, highlights how out of step the UK was, and still is, with the rest of the planet in regards to trying to conform and control what an individual should be allowed to watch on his or her TV set. Another thing which makes it valuable to me is the kind of people the crew interviews for this movie. Along with well known and well loved names like Norman J. Warren, Lloyd Kaufman, Caroline Munro and Kim Newman, they’ve also got some of those less well sung experts like Nigel Burrel who, perhaps, should be better known amongst lovers of film than they are right now. There were a fair few people talking, also, who have taken my money over the last few decades at shows like the Camden and Westminster Film Fairs and it was kinda nice to see them and, also, rewind them to catch what they said again when I realised the locations they were being shot in meant I had been concentrating more on the background to see if I saw either myself or one of my friends wandering around rather than paying attention to what was actually being said.

The film is not going to give you a thoroughly detailed account of the persecution and horror that people were up against at the time... I remember a lot of the kids in my old school playground used to swap copies of tapes that would have given Mary Whitehouse an absolute fit if she’d have known how easy these things were to get a hold of for teenagers or younger, some of which still wouldn’t be allowed in this country or many other countries due to various laws... but the film does give a lot of interesting stories and reminiscences by a few of the hardcore collectors of the time that are vastly entertaining and well worth the £10 I paid for this DVD. This includes stories about visiting the original Psychotronic Video store in Camden in the 1980s and its infamous ‘back room’, where certain highly prized and riskier titles might be purchased in illegal trade.

It also talks to some of the illustrators at the time who were responsible for the fantastic artwork on the sleeves of some of these things and, furthermore, interviews some of the modern poster and sleeve artists who were inspired by them... I now know why we still get the odd, fantastic exploitation sleeve like the one used for Hobo With A Shotgun, for instance (reviewed here). So, yeah, one of the things which sticks in my mind about this film... and it’s something I think I was half aware of before but this certainly drums it home... is that the lurid artwork of the sleeves themselves were as easily responsible, if not more so, for making some of these dubious pleasures targets of an increasingly watchful yet uncomprehending government body. And, yeah, I think it’s good that the filmmakers here have included the graphic design element of the original tapes and it also leads to two scenes where one of my favourite people of all time, the always lovely Caroline Munro, talks about the artwork on a couple of the VHS sleeves of movies she’s been in, namely Dracula AD 1972 and The Last Horror Show.

Now, one of the most noticeable aspects of this film is that the quality is questionable and this might possibly put some people off... however, it should also be pretty obvious to a lot of people who spent a fair amount of the 1980s watching VHS transfers that the footage has been deliberately shot like this, possibly even downgraded, to look a little fuzzy like an old VHS recording. It’s also shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio to emulate the horrible pan and scan look which was a feature of many of those early cassette tapes... and one of the reasons why I stopped buying this stuff until they started releasing widescreen editions. However, it works pretty well here regarding the subject matter and the kinds of people who are going to want this account of years gone by in their library are probably not going to have a problem with it... it’s certainly endearing.

All in all, I’d say this movie isn’t going to exactly appeal to a great amount of people but for individuals like myself, who were around during these days and remember having to go and approach dodgy looking people on the streets of Camden Town if we even wanted to be in with a chance of acquiring withdrawn movies like Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange... then there are a lot of memories, stories and judgement calls about those days which are quite appealing. Also, it’s edited pretty well and some of the transitions between segments of interviews leading onto other comments by people are intelligently done and their juxtaposition gives all the sides of the story on certain issues without clinging to a specific agenda... which is a good approach to take if you are trying to give an overall picture and capture a specific zeitgeist without trying to gloss over the inherent problems which were made manifest by this area of ‘the VHS scene’.

VHS Forever - Psychotronic People is a charming look at a time which people from younger generations won’t know much about but which is still relevant to the current issues of censorship and film trading going on now... I can’t remember how long ago since I last had to wait outside the Electric Ballroom until the police had finished raiding the Camden Film Fair and confiscating materials... but it can only have ben a couple of years ago at most and some of the questionable (and therefore often the most fun) things you can get at these kind of film oriented events are really not that different to what was going on 30 or so years ago. So this is definitely a film which a specific section of modern cineastes of a certain kind are going to want to get their teeth into, methinks. At any rate, it’s something I’m very pleased I bought and probably a movie I’ll be dipping into again and again for reference purposes over the coming years. So put this one on your list if this specific kind of home video subculture is something you either remember from the time or have an interest in... you should have a fun time with it.

VHS Forever - Psychotronic People is a limited edition but, at time of writing, it’s still available to purchase here... http://psychotronicstore.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5_29&products_id=3385

There is also a facebook group for the film, if that’s your kind o’ thing, here https://www.facebook.com/groups/784032254947602/ and the main website page for the film is here www.vhsforeverthemovie.com