Zombie Women of Satan 2

Directors: Warren Speed, Chris Greenwood
Writers: Warren Speed, Chris Greenwood
Producers: Warren Speed, Chris Greenwood
Cast: Warren Speed, Pete Bennett, Caroline Elyssia
Year of release: 2016
Country: UK
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.growlingclown.com

I am under no illusion – and I suspect Warren Speed and his colleagues are similarly unencumbered – that some people really didn’t like the first Zombie Women of Satan film. Some folk hated it for being puerile and childish; some found it offensive and vulgar; others decried its sexism and misogyny. If you are among that section of society, then I have some good news for you. If you really didn’t like the first Zombie Women of Satan, you’ll pigging hate the sequel.

It’s just as puerile, no less vulgar and equally sexist. I bloody loved it.

Just like its predecessor, Zombie Women of Satan 2 is a sort of three-way bastard stepchild of Rocky Horror, Dawn of the Dead and Viz comic. It takes no prisoners, doesn’t give a wet slap what people think, and has no truck with concepts such as good taste or restraint. But at the same time, it has well-drawn, sympathetic characters, a coherent and well-structured plot and a solid awareness of its own limitations and how to work within them.

I love the ZWoS films, me. And I really love Pervo the Clown, a magnificent and surprisingly subtly nuanced character fully inhabited by young Mr Speed. Pervo is vain, childish, bombastic, arrogant, selfish, over-confidant, naïve, dependent, loyal, disloyal. He actually reminds me a little of Zaphod Beeblebrox, and I’ll explain why.

In my previous life as the world’s leading authority on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (my book Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams is available from all good charity shops) I came across a quote from Adams describing part of the inspiration for Zaphod. It was a Cambridge room-mate named Johnny Simpson (no relation) who put a great deal of effort into appearing really relaxed and chilled. In Hitchhiker's Guide that aspect of Zaphod is perfectly encapsulated in the scene when he realises one of the people being led up to the Heart of Gold bridge by Marvin is his semi-cousin Ford Prefect. Looking around the room, Zaphod ponders out loud: “Which is the most nonchalant chair to be discovered in?” (This is also, incidentally, a beautiful example of the Wodehouse-ian transposed adjective.)

In a similar vein, Pervo has a deep, many-layered personality, most of which is put to use deliberately making himself appear as shallow as possible at all times. Pervo is a character played by Sydney Smallcock (played by Warren Speed). When he puts on the face-paint and the nose, he becomes Pervo. He never removes the face-paint (and you don’t touch the nose). Pervo is an artificial construct, created to mask Sydney’s existence, and below the surface Sydney’s metaphorical duck’s feet are paddling frantically to maintain the consistent illusion of the egotistical, sex-mad rock-star clown. He puts a lot of effort into giving the impression that he never lifts a finger. He cares passionately about convincing people that he doesn’t care. It’s entirely possible that Sydney Smallcock no longer actually exists. Peter Sellers sometimes admitted to interviewers that he had played so many characters, inhabiting them so fully and making them so real – from Bluebottle to Inspector Clouseau and beyond – that he was no longer certain who he, Peter Sellers, actually was. One of the early biographies of Sellers was called The Mask Behind the Mask. I see very definite parallels with Pervo the Clown.

So what is Pervo up to this time? After the events of the first film, he became something of a media celebrity, feted by the trashier tabloids for his part in rescuing people from a zombie massacre. There’s a nice bit of recursive intertextuality in comments about a film, called Zombie Women of Satan, which dramatised these events and in which Pervo played himself. Or with himself.

But the black-nosed one’s penchant for the baser things in life – drugs, booze, prostitutes, boozy prostitutes, snorting drugs off prostitutes who are drinking booze – has left him bankrupt. Between them his long-suffering PA Kat Meyer (Nadia Wilde: Mark Macready and the Archangel Murders) and his moustachioed bodyguard Boris Tinkler (“as himself” although the IMDb identifies him as this film’s stunt choreographer Ian Brown) keep Pervo’s life on approximately the right track. Kat is just a day away from ending her contract, while Boris is unaware that Pervo carries a bromantic, Brokeback torch for him. Actually Pervo is also unaware of this gay devotion, not because he’s repressing it but because his life is so chaotic and packed with sexual urges that one more just doesn’t register.

Salvation for Pervo comes in the form of Bertie Dumble, an eccentric millionaire nightclub owner who wants to throw our hero an enormous, boobs-filled party. Dumble is played with undisguised glee by Pete Bennett (credited as Pete Alexander Bennett) whom you may recall as that bloke on Big Brother who had Tourette’s and who is now a bona fide British horror regular. He’s in all three of John Williams’ features: The Slayers, The Mothertown and the forthcoming Crispy’s Curse. He’s in David VG Davies’ eagerly awaited zomcom Meet the Cadavers. And he’s in three Warren Speed gigs: this, Clown Syndrome and All Clowns Must Die (featured in a post-credits teaser here under its original title of Coulrophobia).

Anyway, what Pervo neither knows nor cares about is Bertie Dumble’s ulterior motive. Dumble is in a bizarre, fetishistic relationship with Octavia Zander (sometime ‘Satanic Slut’ Caroline Elyssia), surviving sister/daughter of the family who were killed in the first film. Out for revenge, she is working with mad Bertie, insane Cuthbert ‘Uncle’ Zander (Colin Cuthbert: Thugs, Mugs and Dogs) and pathetically loopy Florence ‘Mother’ Zander (Kathy Paul, reprising her role) who doesn’t want anyone to harm her “sexy clown man”. Octavia’s plan is to lure Pervo to the nightclub with the promise of a whole gaggle of ‘Pervettes’ then turn everyone into zombies with drugged punch. An anti-zombie spray will keep the Zander clan safe.

But that’s not the only danger facing Pervo. Fan-fave Dani Thompson (Banjo, Three’s a Shroud etc.) is Zara, leader of a squad of kick-ass, PVC-clad call-girls called the Bad Habits, hunting down a certain clown who owes them money for ‘services rendered’. It goes without saying that about halfway through, all hell is let loose – not to mention an entire coachload of sexy zombie women. The film does a grand job of whittling down the survivors in its action-packed second half, with people we care about and expect to survive falling prey to the topless gut-munchers.

ZWoS2 is a hoot, a sexy, silly, subversive panorama of blood, boobs and over-the-top acting that will have fans of the first film grinning from ear to ear. It’s technically well-made with cinematography by David Mordey (The Making of Soul Searcher) and editing by Ben Davison Cannings and Chris Greenwood who shares writing, directing and producing duties with Speed this time round, the first film’s co-director Steve O’Brien restricting himself to an executive producer role.

The cast includes Kookie Katana, Moon Blake and Laura Jayne Carson (‘Laura Pandora’ in the titles, ‘Laura Carson’ in the credits) as the other 75% of the Bad Habits. Katana and Carson are scheduled to reprise their roles (or at least, do something similar) in a picture called Katana being prepped by Action Film and Photo, the company who provided this movie’s weaponry. Tammy Nowell plays actress Dahlia Von Rose, part of Pervo’s entourage, while Ash Robertson is Pervo’s nemesis, rock star Dikki Lixx. Stuart Adams (Soldiers of the Damned) is a psychiatrist; ‘alternative horror-streaked glam punk’ band Spit Like This perform a song at the party; Martin Palmer in his drag persona as ‘Crystal Meth’ is a TV show host; and one of the 50 or so zombies is Faye Ormston from Flowerman.

The Mighty Boosh’s Mike ‘Not Noel’ Fielding has a bit part as a Satanic high priest. Despite what the IMDB claims, Victoria Broom and Victoria Hopkins from the first movie are not in this one, although they did film scenes for it (included in the DVD extras) and are listed among the thank-yous. Rebecca Hall (Dark Signal, Ibiza Undead, Cruel Summer) was lead make-up artist.

Originally shot (at various locations around the North-East) in July 2012, the initial cut of ZWoS2 was reworked with new scenes filmed in August 2013, plus some final pick-ups in January 2014. It was eventually released on DVD in October 2016, initially available exclusively from Speed’s Growling Clown Entertainment website, with a festival premiere in January 2017 at Horror-on-Sea. A US release through Chemical Burn Entertainment is scheduled for February 2017, retitled Female Zombie Riot. The first film was released in Japan and I'm sure they'll go for the sequel too.

In a world where so many zombie or slasher films seem to be cut from the same cloth, Speed/Pervo provides a welcome and distinctive respite. I thoroughly enjoyed this film, though I do appreciate that some people will hate it. Fuck ’em.

MJS rating: A-

A Girl

Director: Simon Black
Writer: Simon Black
Producer: Nigel Wingrove
Cast: Hannah Short, Mark Blackwell
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener

Are you sexually aroused by launderettes, Rubik’s cubes and Alphabetti Spaghetti? Then here is the film you’ve been waiting for. An avant-garde, black and white, surreal, arty, erotic horror about one young woman’s descent into madness. (Or something.)

There was a time, many years ago, when I might have poured scorn on such a film, calling it ‘pretentious’ and mocking individual elements. But we’re all more mature than we were, and though A Girl undoubtedly does exhibit pretentions I don’t think that makes it a bad thing or worthy of mockery. It’s trying to do something new, something different, something outside of the mainstream pablum that passes for entertainment, even within the field of indie horror cinema, and I think it’s achieving what it sets out to do. With an uncritical critical eye, one can certainly judge that director Simon Black knows what he’s doing. The cinematographic conceits – monochrome imagery, extreme close-ups, lengthy sequences of inaction – are deliberate choices. The man knows how to photograph an actor on a set and how to construct a feature-length picture from that photography – and he does it very well.

But, you know, don’t come here if you’re looking for a scary thrill ride. Or indeed, if you’re looking for sexy fun time.

A Girl is bleak, highly artistic, challenging and only ‘erotic’ if you have very specialised, unconventional tastes. So welcome back to Redemption Films and the extraordinary cinematic oeuvre of Mr Nigel Wingrove!

Redemption is of course best known as a distributor. Launched in 1993, the company’s VHS (and later, DVD) sleeves used arty, black and white photographs in place of traditional, lurid, exploitation artwork, instantly marking out Redemption as a cut above its competitors. (Many of those sleeve photos featured Wingrove’s then-girlfriend, Eileen Daly, and a couple of them are actually Emily Booth.)

Less well-known are the company’s (and Wingrove’s) forays into original production. Before launching Redemption, Nigel made three arty short films in the late 1980s: Axel, Visions of Ecstacy and Faustine. The first had a soundtrack by Danielle Dax and the other two featured music by sometime Banshee Steve Severin, who later scored Nature Morte and London Voodoo and is currently working on Borley Rectory for Ashley Thorpe.  Of course, it was Visions which achieved notoriety when the BBFC banned it on the unique grounds of ‘blasphemy’ (a move which has lately been rescinded).

Ten years later, with Redemption riding high as part of the Salvation Group of companies/labels, Wingrove had a crack at a proper, feature-length horror movie and the result was Sacred Flesh. No-one (who knows such things) could deny that the film is historically interesting, perhaps even important, but it would be a stretch to call it ‘good’ or even ‘watchable’. Nigel had plans for a whole slate of features (I deal with this in some detail in Urban Terrors) but none ever happened.

In the 21st century, Nigel Wingrove’s willingness to embrace the unconventional, avant-garde and ‘not obviously commercial’ has seen him distribute some of the most interesting films of the British horror revival, including Penetration Angst, Nature Morte and Dominator, as well as overseas titles like Aquarium and The Shunned House. In 2004, being an astute entrepreneur who knows his niche market, he came up with the idea of the ‘Satanic Sluts’, a loose collective of fetish models/performers who were featured in three subsequent videos and a coffee table book (a description I use in a purely objective sense to mean ‘large, and full of glossy photos’ as I suspect most of the book’s readers are not the sort of people who own coffee tables).

With the best will in the world, I really can’t include those three original Satanic Sluts videos in the master list of the BHR because they’re not really ‘films’ as such. The first, The Black Order Cometh, is (I understand – I haven’t watched these things, dear God!) a collection of performance vignettes interspersed with short interviews with the young ladies in question. This was followed by The Black Masses which was a documentary record of live performances given by the Sluts at some goth/fetish gathering.

Then, in October 2008, Wingrove had a stroke of luck when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand managed to get themselves into trouble by telling Andrew Sachs that Brand had fucked his grand-daughter. The tabloids pretty quickly discovered that said grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie, was also known as Voluptua, a member of the Satanic Sluts (which, let’s face it, was a brand name that could only ever have been invented with a view to baiting the tabloids anyway). Suddenly far, far more people had heard of the Sluts than could ever have been reached by Redemption’s own marketing.

(As an aside, I once met Andrew Sachs at a radio show recording. A thoroughly nice and decent bloke, who I think managed to come out of ‘Sachsgate’ with his dignity intact. The closest I have been to meeting Jonathan Ross was being at the British Comics Awards when he was host. I think the SFX crew went on stage at one point to receive or present something, but that part of the evening was being compered by Paul Gambaccini.  Ross is of course a huge comics fan (as indeed is Gambaccini) and a devotee of trashy horror films, even having his own British horror credit with a cameo in Pervirella. Plus his wife Jane Goldman wrote the hugely successful (and hugely awful) The Woman in Black for NuHammer. I’ve never been in the same room as Russell Brand, have never watched, heard or read anything he has done, have no particular desire to do so, and as far as I am concerned his only genuine contribution to the world was in briefly distracting Katy Perry from singing.)

Anyway, it’s an ill wind etc and Nigel Wingrove took advantage of the free publicity to release a third Satanic Sluts video, Scandalized. Like the first, it was a loose collection of goth/fetish/S&M vignettes, linked by the concept of Voluptua dreaming about media scandals. I’m sure it appealed to its target audience. For horror completists, one of the segments features “crazed vampire witches and weird Ouija games turning girls mad” – but that’s still not enough for me to consider it as a legitimate entry in the BHR.

Well, now the Satanic Sluts are back, and Redemption have a staggering list of 19 future titles in various stages of production/development, some of which have allegedly already been released in the Netherlands. The difference is that at least some of these ‘Satanic Sluts Second Generation’ DVDs are actual feature-length narrative movies, although on the basis of A Girl the term ‘narrative’ should be interpreted loosely. Wingrove is producing the films but not directing all of them.

Volumes 4 and 5 are going to be called Sexterminate and The Sluttification of Alice, with A Girl released first but numerically postdating them as vol.6. Simon Black is also working on vol.10, The Girl with the Orange Nails, about a witch who creates magic nail varnish that turns good girls into sex-crazed nymphos, also starring Hannah Short. Before that will arrive Red Kiss, She Comes in Colours and Dawn of the Slut (which is just a three-disc repackaging of the original vids). I don’t know anything yet about those other titles and I’m not expecting them to be horror films (although I suspect Sexterminate may have some sci-fi elements…). However, some of the later titles definitely will be horror (if they get made) including Ghoul Girls, The Black House (a loose adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher) and, seriously, I was a Frankenstein Nymphomaniac Girl.

Having watched A Girl (and it is curiously, compellingly watchable – feel free to put that on the sleeve, Nige!) I’m inclined to consider it a British horror film because the story, loose though that is, concerns a descent into madness and self-destruction. Combine that with the Redemption marketing and it’s enough to meet my personal criteria (though either factor alone wouldn’t necessarily be sufficient).

Hannah Short stars as ‘Pearl’ in what is almost a solo performance. We meet her in a launderette where she is washing a single, dark item of clothing. This sequence takes up a full ten per cent of the movie’s 75 minute running time but, as evidence of Black’s directorial skill, it is more interesting (certainly less tedious) than many other opening sequences of similar length films that don’t have this one’s artistic ambitions.

Pearl favours old-fashioned, demure dresses but has a pierced septum. All we can see at this stage is the nose ring, but we shall later discover further piercings and at least three large tattoos. Oh, these modern girls. (Although curiously she doesn’t wear ear-rings, not even studs.)

After returning to her sparsely furnished but scrupulously clean flat, Pearl calls her bank on the phone, one of the few pieces of dialogue in a soundtrack which mostly consists of discordant electronica and ‘found sound’ (generally pre-war recordings, intended to contrast with the visuals, including a couple of songs in the distinctive, fabulous tones of the great Sophie Tucker).

Well, google her and learn something.

Pearl is evidently on her uppers financially, although one can’t help thinking that if money is tight she shouldn’t be going to the launderette to wash a single item. Especially as we can see she has a washing machine at home. Maybe she gets off in a launderette atmosphere, although she doesn’t lean or sit on the washing machine and let’s face it, launderette machines tend to be well bolted down and so don’t provide the same vibratory thrill.

Pearl is a good girl, although not so good that she hasn’t had the piercings and tatts done. She has no obvious source of income (hence the financial straits in which she finds herself) although we do later find out that she has in the past written and painted. She’s in the middle of doing some washing up when a voice addresses her through a small radio, claiming to be Jesus. The voice encourages her to be more assertive, more sexual and ultimately more debased and degraded. And thus begins her descent into madness. Or erotica, depending on your own perspective.

We’re about halfway through this short feature before we get the first hint of anything even vaguely raunchy, a bath scene skilfully constructed by director Black using overlapping imagery. After which a freshly charged Pearl calls back the bank manager (Or does she? We have no way of knowing if there’s anyone on the other end of the line) and tells him what she thinks he wants to do to her. And I have to say here that, whether it was written by Black or improvised by Short, one of the very best lines of dialogue I have ever heard in a movie is this: “You want to fuck me like you fucked me with your overdraft charges.” Genius, I telya.

Later on we see Pearl, with lacy blouse, PVC corset and gloves, six-inch stilletos and nipple clamps, gyrating in front of a mirror. In contrast to this formal, starched and shiny attire, we also see her on a filthy mattress in a cellar, naked and smeared in blood as she cavorts with various raw meat products (including a jaw-dropping use of an uncooked chicken which I suspect may have required the poor sod at the BBFC who got this one to hit rewind and check what they had just seen). On the other hand, we also see her, again dressed in a prim and demure manner, strolling around a park after finding a briefcase on a bandstand. To avoid spoilers, I won’t tell you what eventually turns out to be inside it.

There’s a scene of Pearl writing obscenities on her face, backwards, so that they are readable in her bathroom mirror (contrasting with an earlier shot of her in the same place, washing her face and cleaning her teeth). There’s a quite lengthy sequence in which a middle-aged man (Mark Blackwell) comes to see Pearl, expressing concern at her reclusiveness. It wasn’t clear whether he was a friend or relative and it was only when the end credits rolled that I discovered Blackwell plays ‘The Neighbour’. (Short is credited as ‘The Girl’.) Later Pearl walks past a church and by the film’s end she’s acrobatically cavorting on her kitchen floor with a wooden cross.

Or, as the Redemption marketing blurb puts it: “Includes a number of disturbing and erotically charged scenes in which the diminutive Hannah Short uses her body and sexuality to challenge and arouse the viewer in equal measure.” Personally I felt more challenged than aroused but then I’m not the target audience, am I?

There clearly is a target audience for this sort of thing. For all his work releasing good quality, complete versions of old horror movies, Wingrove has built much of his career around creating and packaging product for, well, the sort of people who buy Satanic Sluts videos. Simon Black has previously made a bunch of shorts under the banner ‘Eat Cake and Worship Satan Films’ which even from this distance I can see are targeting the same sort of folk. (Realistically, all the Christian, Satanic, Nazi and sexual imagery in these films comes across as a wee bit infantile though, doesn’t it? It’s not making any sort of socio-political or cultural point, it’s just sticking its pierced tongue out behind someone’s back. Actually, that’s probably why I found A Girl relatively satisfying, in that its artistic pretentions compensated for, and to some extent provided a rationale for, the non-shocking ‘shocking’ imagery and themes.)

Simon Black does seem to have made one previous feature, The Vampire Controller, in which a black magician uses two sexy female vampires to seduce a priest (played by Mark Blackwell). This was self-distributed via his blog in a limited edition in July 2014; you may still be able to pick up a copy from the director (ecaws93) on eBay.

I can’t find out anything about Hannah Short, and I don’t know who provides the voice of Radio Jesus, though I assume it’s either Black or Wingrove. The only other name in the credits is David Palser, who created the titles.

Originally slated for November 2014 and bearing a 2014 copyright date, Redemption released A Girl on UK DVD in January 2015, passed uncut 18 by the Beeby-Efsy. The double-sided sleeve features either a still from the lace top/PVC gloves mirror dance sequence or a shot that’s not in the finished film of Short/Pearl in a lacy black top with a white Lord Fauntleroy collar, caressing a dildo. The disc includes a stills gallery and a Black/Short short film from 2014 entitled Tar Rot, which I haven’t seen.

One final point which needs to be made is that Hannah Short is very, very good in this film. Aside from the conversation with the neighbour, she carries the whole thing on her own, largely without dialogue, monologue, narration or even diegetic sound. Yet we get a real feel for Pearl as a person. Short never seems to be ‘going through the motions’ in either the sexual or non-sexual scenes. It’s a fine showcase for her talent… just not one that you could necessarily show to a casting director.

MJS rating: B+

Sacred Flesh

Director: Nigel Wingrove
Writer: Nigel Wingrove
Producer: Louise Bass
Cast: Sally Tremaine, Simon Hill, Moyna Cope
Country: UK
Year of release: 2000
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Redemption)

Once upon a time, Salvation/Redemption was the most important British label for horror videos. They released a mixture of Euro-sleaze (such as Lips of Blood), British horror (such as Virgin Witch) and old classics (such as The Vampire Bat). All the tapes came packaged in those black and white stylish covers, most of which had photos of Eileen Daly looking suitably gothic. You could spot a Redemption video at a hundred yards and the company had a reputation for caring about their product. Redemption developed a whole franchise around itself, even to the extent of having its own magazine, The Redeemer, about all things vampish and gothic.

And then Redemption sort of faded away. They repackaged old product at lower prices but there didn’t seem to be much new stuff emerging and the excitement of a new Redemption video became rarer. I don’t profess to know the business side of things but the impression given was that there were commercial as well as artistic factors involved. The UK cult video market has changed dramatically in recent years, with the advent of DVDs, a slew of new specialist labels, greater international availability and the emergence of the web requiring complete reinvention of sales and marketing techniques.

I’m not saying Redemption ever really went away, but they were quiet for a while. Well now here’s a couple of blood-spattered new releases landing on my doormat, requiring me to ensure that TF Simpson is sound asleep before I pop them into the DVD player. One disc is the first uncut UK release of Night of the Bloody Apes. The other is Sacred Flesh which is, I believe, Redemption’s only foray (so far) into actual film-making.

It’s British, it’s sleazy, it’s nunsploitation at its most nunsploitational. It’s sexy but, er, it’s pretty dull I’m afraid.

Let me be clear. If you’re Redemption’s ideal target customer - a corset-wearing goth with a library of vampire novels, a bathroom cabinet full of eye-liner and hairspray, an eye-watering collection of tattoos and piercings, a subscription to Skin Two magazine and far too many Gene Loves Jezebel albums (ie. one) - then you’ll love this. As for the rest of us...

The film revolves around a nunnery where the Mother Superior is having visions which cause her to describe the other nuns indulging in sexual shenanigans. The Abbess (Moyna Cope) calls in a local Abbot (Simon Hill) whose scarlet cassock and wide-brimmed hat is probably ecclesiastically and historically accurate but unfortunately can only make one think of Monty Python’s Cardinal Fang. With his servant Richard (Moses Rockman), a straight-talking, lusty peasant lad, the Abbot sets off from wherever he is (an abbey, I suppose) towards the nunnery.

I couldn’t help noticing that the Abbot tells Richard to pack his bags as they will set out first thing tomorrow but in the scenes of them travelling - one on horseback, one on foot - the only luggage is Richard’s tiny satchel which is far too small to contain the cooking pot that they use when they stop for a meal. (A peasant girl spies on them and then steals some of their food although this has no bearing on, or connection with, anything else and seems to have been added just to pad the running time.)

When they reach the nunnery, the film breaks up into a number of strands. One is simply the Abbess and the Abbot walking through the gardens, discussing the matter in hand and its bearing on Christian teachings. An adjunct to this is Richard chatting up Marion (Louise Linehan) a local girl who works at the nunnery. This sub-subplot is presumably supposed to show their healthy sexuality in contrast to the repressed lust of the nuns, which it does to some extent - but then Richard and Marion just disappear from the film.

The Mother Superior (Sally Tremaine) appears in three strands of the ‘plot’. On her own in her cell she talks to herself about what she believes the other nuns are doing. In another strand, in some sort of limbo, she debates religion and sex with Mary Magdalene (Kristina Bill: The Affair of the Necklace) who has a red-painted ‘succubus’ sitting beside her throne. This was evidently shot green-screen and the background is a constantly moving montage of medieval writing. Thirdly, the Mother Superior faces a skeletal nun (Rachel Taggart, who had a small role in Cronenberg’s Spider) who is credited as ‘Catechism’ and whose electronically treated voice is quite difficult to make out. Dear old Eileen Daly is also in these scenes as ‘Repression’. Clad in an extraordinary green rubber cape and an even weirder green rubber wig, she scampers around behind the skeleton, impishly spouting odd phrases and little poems.

I’m tempted to say, ”Christ alone knows what’s going on” - but He surely doesn’t watch stuff like this.

The final part of the film is the bit with the naughty young nuns getting up to all sorts of malarkey because they are so sexually repressed, do you see? There are four sex scenes, the first one being a full 25 minutes into this 73-minute film. First a single nun rubs one out, then two nuns go at each other. Then a nun is groped by two randy priests and finally there’s an odd three-(or possibly four-) way. A lesbian trio take revenge on a nun who reported one of them, ‘ambushing’ her and tying her to a wooden cross. The scene cuts between the three nuns having their way with each other and one of them having her way with the nun on the cross. Both these intercut sequences seem to follow on from the same scene but they can’t both be happening because that would require five nuns - and there’s only four. My head hurts.

All the nuns, by the way, look identical, with or without their clothes on. Fortunately none of them appear to have any piercings, tattoos or obviously fake breasts.

Eventually the film just ends. Oh, there’s some final weirdness about a lesbian nun groping a female Christ or something but that’s not really explained.

The sex scenes are nicely shot and yes, quite erotic. This is certainly several steps above the sort of lesbo antics that one finds in Surrender Cinema titles although it shares those films’ determination to show everything except actual sex. There’s nothing hardcore but the original release (on one or two cinema screens in London in 2000, then on DVD that same year) required about 19 seconds of genital close-ups to be replaced with less salubrious shots in accordance with the wishes of the BBFC.

But to get to this good stuff you have to sit through all that pontification by the Abbot and Abbess which just ladles up boring, sixth-form discussion of moral issues and Christian dogma. It’s like listening to two people reading out their essays. This film doesn’t just have infodumps, it has infodumps that are clearly labelled with big stickers that say ‘infodump’ and are easily found by following all the signs that say ‘infodump this way’. Dear God it’s boring.

I can’t see what this film is trying to do. Well, I can see the basics: it’s trying to criticise religious repression of sexuality and be as blasphemous as possible (although thankfully not quite as childishly as crap like Hellraiser III). But who wants to watch something like this, apart from British horror completists and those Salvation/Redemption fans so in thrall to the company/franchise that they spend their hard-earned money on postcards of ‘Satanic sluts’?

This is not well-written enough to be intellectually stimulating (in fact, let’s be honest, the script is lousy) but neither is it trashy enough to be entertaining. Granted, it’s arousing on a basic level: what sort of heterosexual man isn’t going to feel stirrings in the Y-fronts while watching two young women sixty-nining on a stone floor, clad only in stockings and wimples? But is it enjoyable? Not really.

The nuns include several actual porn actresses: Sarah McLean, who seems to specialise in ‘wet’ porno films (whatever they are - don’t tell me); Hannah Callow from Bosom Buddies 4 and 6; Majella Shepherd, who apparently starred in Barely Legal 18 when she was 22; Cindy Read and Amanda Dawkins, who were both in another indie horror feature, Sentinels of Darkness; and Michelle Thorne, who was in Cathula 2: Vampires of Sex and has also done voices for UK anime releases. Other nuns include producer Louise Ross (who was also in a certain Silence of the Lambs rip-off) and Swedish actress Anneka Svenska who was presenter ‘Eden’ on the first series of weird filmclips show outTHERE. (The role of Eden was subsequently taken by Emily Booth who has a non-speaking blink-and-you’ll-miss-her role as a peasant girl being groped by Richard when we first meet him.)

Christopher Adamson (The Last Horror Movie, Lighthouse, Evil Aliens) plays one of the randy priests while Nucleus Films’ Marc Morris is one of two red-robed inquisitors in a scene which features in the stills gallery but not the film. Marc’s business partner Jake West gets a credit for additional editing and for editing the blood-dripping title sequence. The rather nice cinematography is shared between Chris Herd, James MacDonald and Geoff Mills. Dena Costello (Razor Blade Smile, Warrior Sisters) designed the costumes which fall to the floor with alarming regularity.

There’s a couple of dozen photos (stills and behind-the-scenes shots) in the DVD extras - although it would have been nice to see them full-frame instead of cramped in a corner of the screen - plus a selection of storyboards, two trailers, a commentary and information on assorted Redemption merchandise. The sleeve blurb has three typos; I do wish Redemption would proof-read their sleeves before sending them to the printers. Why go to the trouble of designing a classy DVD package then not check which way round the accent goes on ‘exposé’?

Sacred Flesh is a soft porn film with pretensions but ultimately it’s still a porn film, in that a significant portion of its running time consists of sex scenes with no narrative purpose whatsoever. To be fair, the sex doesn’t drag on enough to become boring but it doesn’t need to because the dialogue scenes - between the Abbot and Abbess, between the Mother Superior and Mary Magdalene, and between the Mother Superior and the unintelligible skeleton nun - drag on more than enough to drag the film down, down, down. There’s no narrative here and certainly no characterisation. If you’re looking for a film that actually has a story and is about something, you’ve come to the wrong place I fear.

Watching Sacred Flesh is like listening to a staged debate on the nature of sexuality which is interrupted every five minutes to allow members of the audience to lick each other’s tits. It’s just thoroughly unsatisfying. Either give me a drama (preferably one with a much, much better script and less wooden acting) about psychosexual turmoil among medieval nuns - or give me 73 minutes of sexy lesbians. I don’t mind which.

MJS rating: C-

Review originally posted 14th March 2007

Lustful Desires

Director: Jason Impey
Writer: Jason Impey
Producer: Jason Impey
Cast: Wade Radford, Kaz B
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.jasonimpey.co.uk

Well-made, thoughtful, but very economical and deeply unpleasant. That’s Lustful Desires – and none of this should be a surprise when watching a Jason Impey film.

Impey is a maverick, a man whose body of work inspires endless discussion and fascination for the small number of really serious British Horror Revival fans out there. Starting out with a video camera when he was still at school, Impey’s IMDB page currently runs to 79 titles as director, many of them feature length. Although there are a number of zombie films on that list, young Impey has always had a prevarication for the extremes of human behaviour, and that’s very much the theme here.

Wade Radford, Impey’s regular leading man in intense sexual dramas like Twink and Boys Behind Bars, is Freddi. Porn actress Kaz B is ‘Lustful’, the prostitute he hires, whose card proclaims that she can supply ‘oral, anal, BDSM’. Though used to dealing with some seriously fucked-up people, Lustful has never come across anyone like Freddi, who seems more OCD than BDSM (she mustn’t sit on the sofa). Paid in advance, Lustful’s attempts to leave whenever Freddi crosses the line become increasingly half-hearted. But when one party is paying another for the right to do what he wants with her, where does that line stand?

Lustful Desires is 20 minutes of intense sexual psychodrama, shot in a single location – a nondescript house on a modern estate in Milton Keynes. It is absolutely not the sort of film that a neophyte director would make, but Impey has been pumping these things out for 20 years, teaching himself, learning on the job. His script is written to fit the two-actors-one-set limitations, his direction is assured and confident, his choice of actors adroit.

Radford does a great job of portraying a character with multiple aspects to his personality, none of them ones you would want to introduce to your mum. No mere cypher or cartoon, this. And for an adult performer who started out in a Fiona Cooper video (they still make those?) and has posed for a range of well-known top shelf art pamphlets, Kaz B is actually a very good actress, bringing internal conflict to a character who invokes both sympathy and scorn. (On her NSFW website she says she’s “fanatical about horror, vampires and zombies” so she may well make further appearances on this site in the future. For now her principal horror credit is as ‘Vampella’ in Zombie Driftwood under her other name, Karen Bridle.)

I couldn’t say I enjoyed Lustful Desires. One doesn’t normally ‘enjoy’ a Jason Impey film, but they are never less than interesting. Where other micro-budget film-makers are often content to simply aim for the lowest common denominator of gore’n’gags, Impey is way past that point, making pictures that explore human behaviour and psychosis. It would be extraordinarily easy to write off Lustful Desires as exploitative misogyny but those of us who have followed the director’s career can see past that shallow interpretation to the deeper ideas evident in his later work.

If there's a mis-step, it's a curious choice towards the end, when some serious wounds are inflicted (I won't say by whom on whom or in what manner or for what reason). The problem is that the instrument of choice is a safety razor, which simply wouldn't be up to the job of creating the incisions depicted. It's entirely possible to nick oneself with a safety razor. (Possible? It's almost mandatory. I reckon I'm single-handedly keeping the British toilet paper industry afloat.) But the whole point, as highlighted by the name, is that one cannot cause serious injury with the thing. It seems odd that Jason didn't use an actual razor blade which, quite apart from it's visual iconography, is cheap and easy to obtain, and can be easily blunted for safety reasons (or replaced with a silver-painted bit of plastic after a couple of close-ups). Still, that's the director's choice.

For those yet to sample the oeuvre of the Milton Keynes Maverick, Lustful Desires is as good an introduction as any to the world of Jason Impey.

MJS rating: B

Nocturnal Activity

Director: Georg E Lewis
Writer: Enzo McReady
Producer: Steve Lawson
Cast: Raven Lee, Jonathan Hansler, June Bladon
Country: UK
Year of release 2014
Reviewed from: Festival Screening (FFF 2014)

Relatively straightforward horror plot? Check. Plenty of nudity (“the cheapest special effect”)? Check. Long stretches of hot women sensually washing/exploring their bodies? Check. Absolutely minimal production design hidden behind lots of shot-reverse-shot close-ups? Check. Bit of blood and violence right at the end? Check. Agonisingly slow end credits? Check. Knows precisely who it’s aimed at and what those punters want? Check.

After watching the first (and probably only) festival screening of Nocturnal Activity, I turned to executive producer Steve Lawson and observed: “What you’ve got here… is a Fred Olen Ray film.” And he didn’t disagree.

Nocturnal Activity caters for a precise, well-defined – and in film-buying terms, pretty much insatiable – market. Fred knows that market. Steve knows that market. If you want something artistic, thought-provoking or meaningful, I fear you have entered the wrong house today, my friend.

Model Raven Lee stars as Annie, moving into a new apartment where she encounters poltergeist activity. A glass in the living room has moved and broken while she was having a bath. Well, honestly dear, you’ve got no-one to blame except yourself. If you didn’t spend five minutes painstakingly soaping and rinsing each boob individually, you might not have to spend so long in the tub and you could potentially catch that ghost red-handed.

Annie’s landlord is sleazy creep Fitz, played with superb gusto by Jonathan Hansler, a BHR regular whose other gigs include Axed, The Devil’s Business, After Death, Convention of the Dead, Patrol Men, Call of the Hunter and Nightmare Hunters. (On stage, Hansler has portrayed Gene Roddenberry, George Harrison, Peter Cook, George Orwell, Noel Coward and Scott of the Antarctic; in short films he has played Peter Cook, Josef Mengele and Boris Karloff!) Fitz is a completely amoral slimeball who rents his apartment to attractive women and then sells video footage of them (on, improbably, VHS cassettes) to a Russian gangster (whose telephone voice is also Hansler). The previous tenant, Lex (FHM ‘High Street Honey’ Toni Frost) disappeared under mysterious circumstances and Fitz needs to get someone else in there quickly.

Having towelled herself off, Annie hires paranormal investigator Evie Nightingale (June Bladon: Bicycle Day) to find out what’s going on in her flat. Evie discovers that it’s not poltergeist activity (or sort of is, I suppose) but is directly related to Annie. Meanwhile, Fitz has found some old surveillance footage tapes down the back of the sofa which reveal what really happened to Lex. The whole story is framed by a scene of Annie being interviewed by a Police Detective (Steve Dolton, who was in Zombie Undead, Devil’s Tower and a couple of Dave Lilley shorts).

Nocturnal Activity is the directorial debut of Georg E Lewis, who may be a hot new talent or may be an old hand using a judicious pseudonym to distinguish this from more, ahem, respectable motion pictures. Steve Lawson knows, I know, perhaps you know. I’m maintaining discretion on this one. That’s Steve Lawson the director of Insiders and Rites of Passage (now renamed Survival Instinct) by the way, not Steve Lawson the director of Dead Cert and Just for the Record.

Models Tylah Riot and Paige Antonia complete the cast, with ADR voices provided by Valerie Ping and Marilyn McDoon. The only credit I can be sure isn’t a pseudonym is American composer Kevin MacLeod who provides royalty-free music for precisely such low-budget projects as this. And it is low-budget, there’s no doubt about that. The budget was about £1,200 but Lawson and Lewis have spent that wisely, cutting every corner they can in order to put every penny on screen. It is abundantly clear that, a couple of lesbian flashbacks aside, none of the actors were ever in the same room as each other. On the other hand, they did all get paid.

If you’re looking for an erotic horror film with a British setting and cast - unpretentious, unambitious, professionally made, formulaic but not in a bad way - this is for you.

MJS rating: B-

Hell Hath No Fury

Director: ‘Nicholas Medina’
Writer: 'Henry Krinkle'
Producer: ‘Noble Henry’
Cast: Shauna O’Brien, Paul Michael Robinson, Jenna Bodnar
Country: USA
Year of release: 1996
Reviewed from: UK DVD

With a knife featured prominently on the sleeve and a still on the back showing someone lying in a pool of blood, it would be easy to mistake this DVD for a horror film. And indeed I did, assuming that this disc, its packaging devoid of any credit block or copyright date, was the 2006 anthology Hell Hath No Fury partially directed by Vince D’Amato of Vampires vs Zombies notoriety.

In fact this turns out to be a completely different Hell Hath No Fury (IMDB lists five features, six shorts and 29 TV episodes with that title), a retitling of Friend of the Family II, a 1996 in-name-only sequel to a 1995 feature. The only actual connection between the original (aka Elke) and this is the presence of Shauna O’Brien. Generically, this film has no real horror elements, instead it falls squarely into that most lowly and reviled of cinematic genres – the erotic thriller.

Who exactly watches straight-to-video erotic thrillers? What purpose do they serve? They’re not particularly thrilling. Sure, there’s some tension, duplicity and the threat at least of violence, but nothing to write home about. Granted they are intermittently sexy – certainly more erotic than all those terrible micro-budget spoofs from Surrender Cinema with ‘Erotic’ in the titles – but that sexiness is largely token and arbitrary. The plot simply stops for five minutes every so often so that two people can have a shag.

At least a porno serves a purpose, but who is actually satisfied (in any way) by watching an erotic thriller? That said, I’ve seen worse than this.

Paul Michael Robinson (a regular in Alain Siritzky’s 1990s run of Emanuelle in Space softcore silliness) stars as Alex Madison, a Californian businessman who hasn’t been getting any since the birth of his daughter six months earlier (and presumably for several months before that). On a business trip to New Orleans (identified through plenty of second unit footage of mardi gras), he befriends and rapidly beds Linda (O’Brien, a regular in Siritzky’s slightly later series Emanuelle 2000, albeit not as the title character). She falls in love with him and rejects her fiancé Marcel (Emmett Grennan: Zarkorr! The Invader). When Alex returns to LA, Linda is distraught but not as much as Marcel who blows his brains out and is discovered in a pool of blood, a suicide which gets mentioned once later on (when Linda confuses Alex by calling him a murderer) but otherwise has no effect on the story.

Linda somehow tracks down the Madison house and fortuitously arrives just as Alex’s wife Maddy (Jenna Bodnar: Huntress: Spirit of the Night) is interviewing prospective live-in nannies so she can return to work. Alex himself is away on a trip to New York (perhaps having another affair?) so knows nothing of this until he comes home and is introduced to the new nanny.

Blackmailing Alex, by virtue of still having the note he left her when he skedaddled, Linda forces him to rekindle their affair at night while Maddy is asleep; even while she and the mother of her charge are becoming new best buddies. Adding to complications is that Maddy’s virginal slacker brother Byron (Kevin Patrick Wallis: Blade, Scream) is staying for a couple of months and takes to watching the shapely Linda undress from the bushes outside her window. She begins a second affair with the very grateful Byron, telling him that his brother-in-law is forcing himself on her. She also shags Alex’s colleague Mark (Jeff Rector: Dr Hackenstein, Hellmaster, Terminal Force, Dinosaur Valley Girls, Dinocroc vs Supergator and many, many more) after hosting a dinner party for the boss (Arthur Roberts, who was in both the 1988 and 1995 versions of Not of This Earth as well as Chopping Mall, Mom’s Outta Sight plus many, many more) and a visiting Japanese client (Sam Hiona: Mom Can I Keep Her?, Phoenix 2, Cyclone) while Maddy is in hospital recovering from Linda-induced food poisoning.

It all eventually comes to a head with murder, a couple of cops and an interestingly bleak open-ended denouement. More interesting than the rest of the film, anyway. There are half a dozen or so sex scenes, all featuring Shauna O’Brien (who was Penthouse Pet of the Month in January 1992). There’s no denying that she’s got a fine body (if rather small tits at this stage of her career) and can reasonably simulate passionate ecstasy better than many. Robinson has a finely chiselled bod, although the other two gents don’t work out quite so much. Of course you don’t see anything because of camera angles or strategically placed hands. But the problem is that the sex scenes are just a bit too long and dull. Not the fault of this particular film; it’s a defining feature of the genre.

Yes, they are physically attractive people. Yes, they are reasonable actors. Yes, they are simulating copulation. We get it. Can we move on with the plot now please?

Ironically, Hell Hath No Fury proved considerably more watchable than many other films I’ve seen, probably because behind the directorial pseudonym ‘Nicholas Medina’ stands reliable film-factory Fred Olen Ray. Currently listing 134 directed features on his IMDB page, Ray made this the same year that he directed Night Shade and Over the Wire (also as Medina), Masseuse (as Peter Daniels), Star Hunter (as Sam Newfield) and Caged Fear/Fugitive Rage (as himself). And Invisible Mom. It is that facility to pump the pictures out, switching back and forth between genres, that has kept Ray at the top of the work-for-hire B-movie game for so long. His rival and friend Jim Wynorski was producer ‘Noble Henry’ on this movie which was made by Andrew Stevens’ company Royal Oaks.

Robinson later reteamed with Ray for Active Stealth/Shadow Force and Stranded/Black Horizon/Space Station (because no really good B-movie can have only one title) while O’Brien reteamed with Wynorski for his Bare Wench Project series of cheap-as-chips sexy horror films before retiring from acting in about 2008. Don Scribner (Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Alien Armageddon) is Alex’s client in New Orleans; Claire Polan (Angels’ Wild Women, Bikini Drive-In)  is a candidate for the nanny job; Steve Scionti (Megalodon, Mom Can I Keep Her?, Invisible Dad) is a waiter. I’m not sure who plays the cops at the end and I can’t be bothered to look it up, frankly.

Veteran cinematographer Gary Graver (too many titles to mention) handled the photography. He subsequently directed Masseuse 3 which was retitled Hell Hath No Fury 2 for some territories! Production designer David Blass subsequently moved on from B-movies to reality TV shows like Beauty and the Geek and America’s Next Top Model. Fred’s son Chris Ray was second AD. And composer Adam Berry progressed to scoring animation, working on shows like Kim Possible, The Penguins of Madagascar and even South Park!

The identity of writer 'Henry Krinkle' isn't clear, but here's something bizarre. 'Henry Krinkle' is of course a false name which Robert De Niro gives to the cops in Taxi Driver, but according to the IMDB it was also the name of a character in a 2010 TV series called The Renfield Syndrome. That character was played by Rob Carpenter, who wrote and directed a segment of the 2006 anthology... Hell Hath No Fury!

The nature of these sort of B-movies is that all this work results in an utterly forgettable film which will never be anything more than a title in long IMDB lists. This cheapo-cheapo British DVD, which boasts ‘special features’ of interactive menus, Dolby 2.0, aspect ratio 4:3 and scene access (so no special features at all then!) is so cut-price that it carries neither a copyright date nor even the name of the distributor (Third Millennium, apparently, but I had to go to the BBFC site to find that out). In some other territories the film was released as Passionate Revenge - I particularly like that Russian DVD cover.

Marginally better than I expected, but my sights were set low anyway, this will pass 85 minutes of your time but do little more.

MJS rating: C

Watch Out

Director: Steve Balderson
Writers: Steve Balderson, Joseph Suglia
Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Matt Riddlehoover
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

If you’ve read my review of Breathe Safely, the inarguable Worst British Film Ever Made, you may recall a phrase which I borrowed from a TV critic to describe director Paul Push - “a man who probably masturbates to videos of himself masturbating.” Little did I realise when I used that delightful turn of phrase that only a few months later I would be watching a film about a man who literally does masturbate to a video of himself masturbating.

Watch Out is a unique film. From Steve Balderson we would expect no less. Unlike Steve’s previous features, this one is adapted from a novel; author Joseph Suglia shares screen credit. I haven’t read the novel (never even heard of it, to tell the truth but I understand that it’s pretty famous) and I’ll wager that most of you haven’t either so I can only review this as a film in its own right.

Trying to explain what the movie is about... well, it’s easier to say who it’s about. Matt Riddlehoover gives an extraordinary, bravura performance as Jonathan Barrows: on-screen pretty much constantly and also providing a voice-over throughout much of the film. While narration is generally frowned upon in narrative cinema, it would be impossible to film this story without it because Barrows spends a considerable amount of time alone and it’s what he’s thinking as much as - possibly more than - what he’s doing which matters.

Because Jonathan Barrows is neither heterosexual nor homosexual, he is an autosexual: in love with, or at least physically attracted to, himself. In one of the movie’s most memorable scene - and frankly Watch Out is a movie consisting almost entirely of memorable scenes - Barrows has sex with a blow-up doll having first sellotaped a photo of himself over the doll’s face. Even when he shares a scene with other people, it’s Barrows’ internal monologue that drives the film although there are some excellent extended cameos along the way.

Plot-wise, very little happens. After black and white, 1920s-style opening titles the prologue see Mr and Mrs Barrows (Jon Niccum and Nancy Pujol) attempting to arrange their teenage son’s deflowerment, despite his very evident lack of interest in girls. Although the film as a whole is deliberately stilted and mannered, the mannerisms and, ah, stilting in this prologue are more over-the-top than throughout the rest of the picture. Watch Out as a whole reminded me of the work of John Waters, the differentiation being that most of it is like later John Waters stuff and this first sequence is more like his early work (though without the shit-eating or the overweight transvestites). Jonathan’s parents try to pair him off with the inbred girl next door and when that doesn’t work they hire a prostitute then sit and watch the attempted intercourse, armed with popcorn and palmcorder.

The bulk of the film sees Barrows, now grown-up but still a virgin (if one discounts blow-up dolls and his own right hand) on his way to a job interview at a small college in a small town in Michigan. He checks into a hotel staffed by a creepy, gay desk clerk who comes on to Barrows by assuring him that he’s not gay. At the college, the sassy receptionist has no knowledge of the interview and the professor who should be interviewing him only takes one class a week - so Barrows is forced to stay in the little town for a few days.

And that’s about it, plotwise. Barrows has a series of nonsexual, sex-related encounters with men, women and couples, most of whom come on to him and all of whom he rejects with a sneer. Eventually he manages to track down the elusive Dr Mendoza by - and I’m sure this is not coincidental - hiding in a closet.

Watch Out sits somewhere between intense character study and black comedy; there are some laugh-out-loud moments but really it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Barrows’ brooding, supercilious view of humanity as something which has reached its pinnacle in him reminded me in small parts of Fight Club (referenced on a character’s T-shirt). He really is a loathsome character - literally a pretentious wanker - and yet fascinating because everyone who has ever felt an outsider or imagined that no-one understands them can relate to his situation and think, there but for the grace of God...

Barrows is absolutely convinced that he is better than everyone else: smarter, socially superior and certainly better-looking. Rather than furtively having one off the wrist, he really does have sex with himself. Not literally (he’s not that talented or well-hung!) but as near as damn it. In one scene he rolls around on his bed taking Polaroid photos of his dick, in another he leaves his table in a restaurant to nip into the gents with a couple of little tubs of margarine for an exhilarating sherman.

While my non-British readers get to grips with phrases like “an exhilarating sherman”, it’s worth noting that Watch Out is devoid of euphemisms, slang or obscenities (apart from the ‘coming soon’ gag in the publicity). Barrows’ detached view of sexuality is emphasised by his unflinching use of the terms ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ (along with ‘labia’, ‘glans’ - it’s like a medical textbook in places). Visually the film is just as explicit. We never see a cum-shot and I think I’m right in saying that we never actually see Barrows/Riddlehoover with a full erection. But there is plenty of full-frontal nudity and Matt Riddlehoover’s devotion to duty is nothing short of exemplary. Many actors would have blanched at some of the things he has to do.

Then, after he has tracked down Dr Mendoza - and berated him for his polemic about the importance of marriage and community in a scene which never shows us any students, raising the question of whether Mendoza is talking to himself - suddenly everything changes and Watch Out becomes a different film. A horror film.

Twenty minutes from the end, a caption announces ‘Act Two’ which caught me by surprise because I had completely forgotten the ‘Act One’ caption seventy minutes earlier. In this much shorter second part we’re back in Barrows’ home town including a fairly lengthy sequence about his teenage babysitter and her boyfriend who become two of several victims of gory, sick violence at the hands of her thirteen-year-old charge. Most of the victims are known to Barrows personally but one is a mega-selling pop singer whom he kidnaps before chopping off her toes one by one. She is called Margaret but let’s face it, she’s Britney.

And then the film ends... and the reviewer is left to work out what it all means.

Watch Out is an easy film to like, if you’re not put off by things like vomit, masturbation and graphic, anatomical descriptions of sex acts. Or a man forced to eat his own severed penis. It’s fascinating, that’s what it is and that’s what all Steve Balderson features (with the exception of the work-for-hire documentary Underbelly) are. While it doesn’t have the opulence or grandeur of Steve’s masterpiece Firecracker, Watch Out is a step up (and a natural progression) from Pep Squad, sharing that film’s hyper-real dialogue, characterisation and cinematography.

But that’s what it’s like, not what it’s about. I’m prevaricating because I don’t know what Watch Out is about. It’s about Jonathan Barrows and his love affair with himself, that’s the best I can offer you. I suspect that the novel is one of those unique literary beasts like American Psycho or The Dice Man that digs deep into the disturbed yet strangely sane psyche of an individual who not only believes himself to be great but actually knows it. If it is, then there is no doubt that Steve has done a magnificent job of translating it to cinema.

Because this is indubitably and very recognisably a Steve Balderson film - which means that it is visually astounding and it takes chances that no other film-maker’s work would, not just for shock value but as part of a cohesive whole. Watching one of Steve’s films one always feels like a participant rather than an audience, as if the director is sitting in the next seat, occasionally whispering, “Ooh, there’s a good bit coming up here,” and sometimes as genuinely eager to find out what happens next as the rest of us. For example there is a scene in a restaurant where Barrows orders oysters and then waits for them to be served: an unblinking, locked-off shot of a man sitting at a table while muzak plays and other diners can be seen in the background. I didn’t time it but this seems to go on for three or four minutes - it’s probably less but with something like this it’s how long it feels, not how long it is.

Oo-er. Sorry

The point is that this is a very long, uncut shot of a man doing nothing except waiting and most directors would not have the balls to show this. Somehow the combination of Steve’s direction and Riddlehoover’s performance justifies this. It’s masterful film-making. It leaves you in awe.

What confuses me about Watch Out is its two-act structure and especially the imbalance of it. The impression I got - rightly or wrongly - was that this was two parallel timelines, showing us what would happen if Jonathan Barrows kept his psychosexual angst bottled up inside him (Act One) or released it through sadistic violence (Act Two). That may be completely wide of the mark but I can only report what I saw and speculate on its meaning. I’m not even entirely sure that everything we see is real and really happening, harking back to that Fight Club riff.

There is no doubt that Watch Out has the potential to be one of the great cult films of all time, probably more so than Firecracker because of its outré images and themes (and the existing fanbase for the source novel). I’m the first person to review this but already I can imagine the conflicting comments on the IMDB: some people will lambast this as a load of pretentious arthouse crap that just tries to shock. That’s because some people are very, very good at missing the point. Other folk will watch this then pick their jaws off the floor and rush to tell all their friends that they must watch it too. Steve considers this his best film to date and, ironically for such an obtuse story, it probably is his most direct and personal feature.

As usual, he has assembled an eclectic cast of remarkable performers including Peter Stickles from Fred Olen Ray-directed vampire TV series The Lair, prolific B-movie actor Jeff Dylan Graham (Cremains, Dead and Rotting, Dead Clowns, Dorm of the Dead), Starina Johnson (who was in Riddlehoover’s MySpace sensation film To a Tee) and BBW performance poet/burlesque dancer Lady Monster. Betti O, who played Miss Nelson in Pep Squad and Rosemary in Firecracker, is terrific as the sassy college receptionist and the very wonderful Amy Kelly, who was Susie in Firecracker and the unforgettable Terra in Pep Squad is superb as a forward woman in a bar who tries to pick up Barrows by drawing attention to her breasts. Why isn’t this woman a big star yet?

The crew was small, with Steve doing his own cinematography. Rob Kleiner, variously of such underground beat combos as Tub Ring, Mindless Self Indulgence, Super 8 Bit Brothers and The Baltimores, provides a masterful score that is almost worth the price of admission on its own. The film's website includes several 'video blogs' and the whole creative process is being chronicled in the third of Steve's feature-length documentaries, Wamego: Ultimatum. Also worth noting and praising is the way that Steve has made all the publicity shots for Watch Out look like proper old-fashioned 8x10 stills with captions. Nicely retro!

Do I understand Watch Out? Not completely. If you want straightforward narrative, Pep Squad remains Steve’s most accessible film. But Watch Out is not a film about storytelling, it’s a film about characterisation. It’s about sex, non-sex, psychology, society and a psychopathic sociopath. It’s extraordinary, a film which settles down into your consciousness and is still there days later, images and ideas flashing in and out of the viewer’s brain.

It is exactly the sort of film which those of us who have discovered American independent cinema’s best-kept secret expect from young Mr Balderson. Steve B has done it again.

MJS rating: A

Thundercrack!

Director: Curt McDowell
Writer: George Kuchar
Producer: John Thomas, Charles Thomas
Cast: Marion Eaton, Ken Scudder, Melinda McDowell, Mookie Blodgett
Year of release: 1975
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (Far Out 2002)

This riotously funny, black and white, ‘old dark house’, hardcore sex comedy used to play regularly at the Scala in London. It has never been given a BBFC certificate but occasionally local councils are broadminded enough to allow a screening - so kudos to Leicester CC for giving Phoenix Arts permission to show a 16mm print imported from Denmark.

On a terrible, stormy night, three men and three women seek shelter at the isolated home of batty Mrs Gert Hammond, a faded Southern belle with too much make-up and a dead husband buried in the wine cellar. They change out of their soaking clothes and indulge in various sexual activities with each other or alone, while discussing where they’re going and how they might get there. Then a fourth man (writer Kuchar, who scripted only one other film but directed more than 60 from 1957 to 1986) arrives, who was transporting a horny female gorilla for a local zoo - the beast has escaped and is very dangerous unless placated with bananas.

A simple synopsis like that doesn’t begin to do justice to this unique film. It is a hardcore porn flick, yet would be just as entertaining without the hardcore shots (well, almost!). Extraordinarily, it includes not only straight sex and lesbianism, but man-on-man buggery as well, along with both male and female masturbation. One chap uses an odd-looking device which, in a post-Austin Powers world can only be described as a Swedish-made penis enlarger, and another shags a blow-up doll while sticking a dildo up his arse. What sort of audience was this aimed at?

Throughout it all there is the clearly demented Mrs Gert Hammond (Marion Eaton - also in Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat), a sort of Miss Faversham of the Southern States who clearly hasn’t spoken with another soul for years, and who constantly stresses that her husband is dead but her son “no longer exists.” She gets off on watching both men and women undress, spying on them through peepholes in a portrait of George Washington. One of the men (it’s difficult to tell which one as all display the obligatory 1970s porno hairstyle and moustache) is going to burn down his father-in-law’s corset factory; his wife died when her rubber foundation garment caught fire at a party, and he has turned to men ever since.

When Medusa the gorilla appears, it is (understandably) a man in a hairy suit, and an elephant is represented by a silhouette at the kitchen window. This is not a big budget production, something evidenced by the opening titles’ ability to spell ‘Original score’ with three ‘i’s. Several other names in the credits raise amusement among modern audiences, notably producer ‘John Thomas’, which probably means nothing to American (or Danish) audiences!

The storm and the gorilla-as-monster keep this just on the border of the horror genre - but the eventual unlocking of a mysterious door and the revelation of who/what is inside (a brief but unforgettable shot) tips it over into real Edgar Allan Poe territory. It also has some remarkable monochrome cinematography, some accomplished editing (especially of the flashbacks, some of which are shown split-screen) - both credited to director McDowell - and a fantastic ‘originial score’ which really adds to the comedy. The version shown at Far Out ran two hours; there are also 110 minute and 152 minute versions, apparently.

I can certainly see why this has such a reputation and cult following - there really is no other film even remotely like it (though comparisons can be made to Walters, Warhol and Wood). See this if you ever get the chance - but do be prepared for close-up shots of men and women enjoying themselves...

MJS rating: B+