GBH / Grevious Bodily Harm

Club own Murray is in trouble. Gangster Keller wants a cut of his profits in return for protection, said protection being from Keller’s thugs. Murray, however, is not one to back down and so recruits his old doorman and troubleshooter Donovan, who is just about to be released from prison after serving a six month sentence, a sentence that stemmed from the last time Donovan helped Murray...

A Double bill with Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts?

Of course if Donovan had simply said no and walked away we would either not have a film or at least a very different one. So, much like the relationship between Terry McCann and Arthur Daley in Minder, Donovan is soon back to working for Murray.

My reference to Minder is not accidental, given that it was one of the highest rated series on British television at the time GBH and that lead – one hesitates to say star – Cliff Twemlow seems something of a McCann character in real life, having worked as a Manchester nightclub doorman for many years.

In part it is the choice of milieu that makes GBH work, since it is clear that the film-makers actually know about the world they are depicting on screen. More important than this, however, is their fundamental belief in what they doing.

For GBH could otherwise be compared to the various David Sullivan and Paul Raymond films of the era, such as Queen of the Blues, Emanuelle in Soho and Paul Raymond’s Erotica – except for the sense that co-writer, producer, composer (under the pseudonym John Agar) and lead Twemlow and his coterie of friends were intent upon doing the best they could rather than just the minimum required.

Yes, the narrative and characterisation are cliché. Yes, the writing and performances are frequently awkward. Yes, it was shot on video rather than film. Yes, there are basically two car door slamming type sound effects used for punches and kicks. Yes...

... but director David Kent-Watson also throws in some Dutch angles, slow motion and so on that he did not have to and also handles the action scenes well. Many of the exchanges written by Kent-Watson and Twemlow are also, in their own way, quite brilliant:

Donovan: Didn’t know this was a gay bar.
Barman: It isn’t.
Donovan: What about those two poofs over there?
[Fight ensues]

Tracy: The big hard type?
Donovan: Didn’t know I was showing.

Death Shock

After their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere – this seeming to entail a confusion between the urban Norwich and rural Norfolk – six horny young men and women, two heterosexual couples and one lesbian, flag down an old-fashioned car driven by a man wearing a dog collar.

The youngsters ask for a lift to the nearest petrol station, but the man tells them it is 12 miles away – too far out of his way. Fortunately there is a manor house, the Grange, about a mile away and the man/vicar agrees to drive them to it.

The owner of the Grange seems surprisingly welcoming and prepared (perhaps in the manner of Dracula’s servant Klove in Dracula Prince of Darkness, if we can accept promotional descriptions of the film as spoofing Hammer) and the group are encouraged to have a meal and stay the night. Said meal later turns out to have been laced with substantial quantities of aphrodisiac.

This affects the two heterosexual couples most strongly, insofar as one of the two lesbians professes to be ‘not in the mood’ when her partner goes to use a dildo on her – albeit with said partner then going to join one of the heterosexual couples for a threesome (“come and join us”).

Eventually it is revealed that the apparent vicar and the denizens of the Grange are Satanists and that the younger lesbian, the one not in the mood, is “a virgin of 16 summers” and thus the perfect material for an unholy rite; never mind that she looks, and indeed undoubtedly was, for legal reasons, older.

Death Shock is an example of the lowest common denominator of the British sex film in the late 1970s and early 1980s, others being Mary Millington’s Striptease Extravaganza and Queen of the Blues.

Anyone want to do an auteurist analysis of these guys? In time it will probably happen...

Running barely three quarters of an hour the majority of Death Shock’s running time is filled with unconvincing sex scenes, the kind where the filmmakers had to be careful about avoiding anything that could fall foul of the censors -- penetration, ejaculation, erect penises, spread vaginas etc.

Even at this length the film is padded out.

First there is an opening scene in which a young woman hears chanting, gets off her bike to investigate, discovers some cultists, and is then pursued (conveniently catching her skirt on a raised nail), caught and sacrificed.

Then, as the main characters drive on, there is a minute or two of long shots of their car while the inane dialogue is done in voice-off.

The writing is such that the name of the younger lesbian is not mentioned until the final scene – “where’s [Susan|Sarah]?” “He I am!” – hence my inability to remember the character’s name.

Of those involved three have names of note, at least within their specific generic area, namely Lindsay Honey/Steve Perry, Linzi Drew, and Bill Wright. Honey, better known as Ben Dover, and Wright, better known as Frank Thring, independently appeared in and directed hundreds of porn films during the 1990s and early 2000s. Drew’s fame was more immediate in terms of being a regular in certain “men’s magazines” (read softcore porn) of the time. She was/is Honey’s partner.

The direction is perfunctory, albeit with at least one moment of vague visual imagination when a mirrored shot pulls back to reveal the actual image.




Thankfully this never happened, unlike the Fantom Killer series

The most intriguing aspect of the film, for me, was how it again highlighted a major distinction between UK softcore and US/Continental European hardcore of the time: In the UK film was the ability of the male performers to not get an unwanted erection valued in a comparable way to the ability of those elsewhere to achieve a wanted one?

Queen of the Blues

Even by the low standards of the 1970s British sex film this is a bottom of the barrel production. Bankrolled by porn magnate David Sullivan as a star vehicle for Mary Millington, who plays the title role, it was produced and directed by Willy Roe.

It's a sixty-minute piece that’s too long to work as a short, yet is too short to be a feature.

Rather than presenting a narrative punctuated with strip and comedy routines, it's more strip and comedy routines punctuated by a narrative, one that doesn’t really develop before abruptly ending with a deus ex machina.

Basically gangster Roscoe sends two of his heavies (one played by the inimitable Milton Reid, the other by future Hi-De-Hi fixture Felix Bowness) to extort protection money from the Blues club, not realising that it is owned by another gangster (Fawlty Towers' Ballard Berkeley) who duly makes this known.


Reid and Bowness

Another subplot, invoking a ghost haunting the place, is even less developed.

We get eight or so minutes of backstage chatter and strip routines before the first couple of minutes of plot. Then we get another couple of minutes of stripping, followed by John M. East doing a Max Miller impersonation as the club’s compere, followed by Millington doing her first number, admittedly intercut with the first proper exchange between the compere and the would-be extortionists, followed by some more routines.


Can't act, can't dance, can't sing about sums it up

25 minutes have elapsed by this point and the total story content is probably about four minutes tops.

There are some points of interest nonetheless: The strip routines make the connection to the cinema of attractions clear, as do the constant cutaways to the diegetic audience (curiously the same despite the action supposedly taking place on different nights) and the Music Hall nature of East's routines (see also Come Play with Me).


East does Max Miller

The strippers' remarks backstage are also oddly at odds with the illusion of glamour: “What’s the fascination? Surely when you’ve seen one set of tits you’ve seen them all?!”

Argento fans may also care to note that Geraldine Hooper, who plays Massimo Ricci in Deep Red, is credited as the club’s receptionist.

The pressbook for the film, distributed by Tigon, describes scenes that are not actually present and, one suspects, were never filmed either.

Take an Easy Ride

One definition of surrealism is “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”

Based on this, Take an Easy Ride could almost be classed as an inadvertently surrealist film on account of the way in which it brings together two seemingly incongruous paracinematic genres.

The first is the public information or service film – i.e. a non-profit film, usually made by official bodies, with the goal of modifying behaviour for the good of individuals and/or the collective.

The second is the exploitation film – i.e. a film made by private entrepreneurs with the intention of making money.

How the two came to be incorporated into the one film is reminiscent of a scenario out of Eskimo Nell. It seems that producer, director and editor Kenneth Rowles initially set out to make a serious film about the dangers of hitch-hiking. Then notorious porn/sexploitation mogul David Hamilton Grant, encouraged Rowles to spice things up with some extra sex and violence so the film could also be played on his sex film circuit.

The serious side of things is most evident in the voice-off and on-camera interviews with what seem like genuine members of the public for the most part.

The exploitation side is more to the fore in the three vignettes that make up the bulk of the 40 or so minute running time, which include voyeuristic low angle shots of mini-skirted women climbing into lorries; footage of Soho sex shops, strip clubs and cinema clubs and a selection of mostly inappropriate stock music cues.


The camera actually moves to get a better view here


Probably illegal now...

One of vignette actually blurs the distinction by beginning as an interview and then segueing into a flashback based reconstruction in which a young woman relates how she was picked up by a couple who took her back to their house, plied her with drink, and ultimately forced her into a porno rape styled no-means-yes threesome...


“I decided to take a bath... I was very surprised when I was joined by Margaret...”

The other two vignettes are more straightforward. One presents a cut-down version of Last House on the Left as a couple of young women hitch-hiking to a rock festival are picked up by a black-glove wearing, porn-magazine reading maniac intent on rape and murder...


Black gloves


Some slow motion here

The other presents something of a reversal of this, as another two young women go on a miniature crime-spree that culminates in their turning on one of the men who gives them a lift, almost like a prototype for a Baise moi or Butterfly Kiss...

Crudely made, unpleasant in that way that it often seems only 1970s exploitation can be and absolutely fascinating in that what-the-hell-were-they-thinking way.

Love Thy Neighbour

If you ever want to annoy a Hammer fan, one of the surest ways to do so is draw attention to their comedy product from the early 1970s and the fact that it was these films, more than the better known Gothics, which sustained the company for a few more years thanks to their box office success.


The horror, the horror...

This, moreover, was despite attracting absolutely no positive critical attention and an inherently smaller market due to UK television sitcom spin-offs having absolutely no prospect of US distribution.

Seen today, however, there is an obvious difference between Hammer’s horror output, especially in the Bray Studios period, and their comedy work. For while the best of the horror films manage to be both aesthetic and sociologically interesting, the comedies are only worth looking at symptomatically for what they reveal about British culture and society of the time. They are visually flat and largely devoid of style. As 90 minute films based on 30 minute sitcoms they also tend to be quite weak at the structural and narrative levels.

The themes of gender, class, race, and sexuality are however much the same across the generic divide, although the specifics obviously vary film by film. In this instance race is primary and class secondary with the other two hardly featuring at all.

This is a reflection of the source material. For the situation in Love thy Neighbour is one of two couples, one black and the other white, living next door to one another. While the two women, Barbie and Joan, get on well enough, their respective husbands, Bill and Eddie, are at loggerheads.

What makes things interesting here, however, is the way in which race and class intersect. Bill is more (aspiring to become) middle class and a Conservative supporter, while Eddie is working class and a Labour supporter. From a present-day perspective, however, his politics, as expressed in language – lots of use of racist epithets like Sambo and Nig-Nog – and deeds – including painting racist graffiti on Bill and Barbie’s front door and windows – seem more like the things an extreme right-winger would get up to.

Simultaneously, however, the film also significantly indicates that racial prejudice is not exclusively confined to whites, albeit generally with Bill responding to Eddie rather than initiating things. The film also clearly raises the subject in order to attempt at least some sort of critique, however unsatisfactory it may be to today’s sensibilities. In this regard it’s also worth noting that Eddie clearly has designs on Barbie. Love – or at least lust – see no colour, indeed.


The male gaze #271

Given all of this, the most awkward aspect of Love thy Neighbour is probably one of the incidental details, in the form of a white man in brownface wearing a towel-type turban and affecting an 'Indian' accent.


It ain't half racist mum

Fans of Hammer’s horror output might just about justify a viewing on the basis of a scene in which Bill and some of the other black workers make it look like they are going to cook and eat Eddie.




What's cooking?