Corruption / Laser Killer

[Note that this review contains spoilers]

After his fiance Linda Nolan (Sue Lloyd), a model, suffers horrible facial burns in an accident, respected surgeon Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) vows to restore her beauty.


The generation gap

This leads him to study Ancient Egyptian texts, which he uses in conjunction with pituitary glands and a laser to effect a remarkable transformation.


Linda after the accident, but before the operation

Its effectiveness proves transitory, however, prompting John into a succession of murders in a bid to meet Linda’s ever more desperate demands...

Scripted by John and Derek Ford and directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, this 1968 British horror obscurity is best known today for presenting Peter Cushing in some of the most extreme situations of his career.

But unlike Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, where Cushing, co-star Veronica Carlson and director Terence Fisher were taken by surprise by Hammer boss James Carreras’s demand they film a rape scene to spice the film up, we may surmise that Cushing knew from the outset what he was letting himself in for.

The script, after all, was by Donald and Derek Ford. Admittedly, the latter hadn’t yet sunk to the levels of the likes of the softcore Sexplorer and hardcore Sex Express AKA Diversions. Nonetheless, a filmography that had already included the likes of Primitive London and The Yellow Teddy Bears hardly pointed to the likelihood of Corruption being restrained, tasteful, well-made horror in the by then classic (if also thereby arguably aging) Fisher manner.

Moreover, the writers obvious source of inspiration was Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, a film whose unflinchingly rendered real life surgical horrors made the Hammer Frankenstein films look tame by comparison.

As such, I’m tempted to think that there is a hint of Cushing’s wariness coming through in the scene in which Sir John wanders through Soho at night looking for a likely victim. For, rather than being shown on location, we get what look like studio shots of Cushing superimposed over stock or second unit footage.




Cushing superimposed over Nudist Paradise at the Jacey

An uncut version of the film, which included Sir John’s picking up and killing a prostitute, whose head he takes, would probably help clear things up here.

The superimposition is also, however, very much of a piece with Robert Hartford-Davis’s showy direction, in which rack focus, hand-held camera, distorting lenses, shock zooms and rapid-fire editing are the order of the day in a Repulsion / Blow-Up / The Sorcerers type manner.


Cushing in full-on maniac mode

As the synopsis suggest, the story is replete with non-sequiturs: Where did the Egyptians learn about laser beams and the endocrine system, exactly?!

It also suffers from inconsistent characterisation: One minute Linda is expressing horror that John has experimented upon a guinea pig, the next encouraging him to cold-bloodedly murder the seeming innocent who has wandered into their orbit.

In retrospect, however, it all makes sense. The clue here is in the ending, in which it is suggested that most of what we have just seen, from the point of Linda’s injury onwards, has taken place in Sir John’s head.

Yes, it’s a projection of his subconscious...

If this seems fanciful, an excuse for weak writing, consider the aforementioned Diversions: While that film explicitly presents its vignettes as (sexual) fantasies, we are surprised at the end to learn that, rather than being a convicted prisoner she is in fact one of the police officers escorting the prisoner.

Put another way, there is a consistency of theme here, of Derek Ford looking to challenge middle-class respectability in his images.

More coincidentally, there are also thematic links to Fisher’s pre-Frankenstein film The Stolen Face, in which a surgeon believes a young woman’s malignancy is down to her facial deformity, cures her and then discovers that her ugliness was more a manifestation of an evil soul, with this in turn prefiguring Frankenstein Created Woman’s Christina.

All told, then, Corruption is not a good film in and of itself, but it is one that is certainly of interest to the British trash fan for various reasons.

Commuter Husbands

This British sex film entry from Derek Ford is not so much a comedy as a drama-documentary. Hosted by Gabrielle Drake’s sexology researcher, Carol, it presents six short vignettes purporting to explore the sexual mores of suburban Londoners in the early 1970s.


I went to drama school for this?

The first sees a husband phone his wife to tell her that he will be away on business for the weekend. In reality, however, he is planning a weekend away with his mistress. As the camera tracks back from the wife we get the first reversal in that she is in bed with her lover and happily takes this news as a chance for them to likewise have a weekend away.

Both couples then unwittingly book into the same hotel, one that is special to both the husband and wife. Things work out very civilly, however, as they go off to talk and come to the conclusion that they are best off together. Reaching a similar conclusion, their opposite numbers have paired off in the meantime...

The next segment plays on the tradesman fantasies so often found in British sex films as a plumber is summoned to a penthouse suite to do some work by a French actress (Claire Gordon) and finds a swingers party in full flow. The route from one set of plumbing to the other is, however, not a smooth and easy one...


Oh yes, not

The most interesting of the segments is also the most fantastical as a slightly long-haired but otherwise eminently respectable looking suited and bowler hatted type imagines himself as a Hells Angel type having his brutal way with any woman that tickles his fancy (innuendo deliberate).




Psychomania Rising

As one IMDB reviewer perceptively remarks, it’s a bit like a heterosexual (and thereby inherently less transgressive) reinterpretation of Kenneth Anger’s gay underground classic Scorpio Rising.


Voyeurism

The next segment is about a middle-aged businessman who regularly visits a brothel in order that he can watch others having sex. Besides the obvious voyeurism theme – us watching him, watching them, but without consequence – the relationship between the madame and the businessman is interesting for its reversals. It reminded me a bit of the sequence in Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty in which going to the toilet is a public activity while eating is something shameful to be done in private.

Ford looks to have used a working trip abroad as the basis for an Amsterdam set segment in which another hapless, hopeless male, on another business trip, tries to attract the attentions of his tour guide and blunders into a sex shop in the process...

The final segment features Drake herself and is introduced, with a nod to De Sade, as “the misfortunes of virtue”. It sees her husband being given the responsibility for entertaining an Italian businessman, with entertaining meaning call girls. Knowing that she has a friend who’s up for most things sexually, he wonders if Drake and said friend might pose as the call girls. They can pair off, as can the Italian and the friend. Needless to say it doesn’t quite go according to plan...

None of the sex scenes featured in the film are of the hardcore type, at least in the version I saw. Nevertheless, they appear pretty close to the limits of acceptability for a British film of this time and have the definite look of material that could be tailored to the demands of a particular market and/or the censors. There is a distinction evident here between the legitimate actors and the porn extras, with the former not called upon to do much except bare some flesh sex-wise, and the latter not being called upon to do dialogue, act and react and so on.


Piccadilly Circus

The opening scenes of the film, presenting a drive round Soho – something also seen in Diversions – have the usual inadvertent documentary interest.

It goes without saying that the film’s own value is similarly sociological rather than aesthetic – or, for that matter, erotic.

Diversions

[Note that this review contains spoilers]

Imagine, if you will, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors being remade as a hardcore porn film and you begin to get an idea of what Diversions is like.

For this 1975 entry from British sex film auteur Derek Ford, understandably only released at the time in the UK in a severely truncated form, uses the same device of a group of passengers in a train compartment as the means for framing and connecting a series of short stories.

The Amicus connection is further enhanced by the fact that one of the five stories features a magic camera purchased from an antiques shop that could easily have been From Beyond the Grave’s Temptations Limited. Another presents a decidedly E.C. Comics-like punchline to a scenario inspired by a Vampirella comic; presumably the film either flew under the radar of Vampirella publishers Warren or they were understandably disinclined to draw wider attention to its existence.

Not, however, that Amicus’s Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky would ever have dreamt of making a film with hardcore sex, let alone sex and violence together in two of the segments.

The film manages to just about get away with their combination thanks to their clear framing as fantasy rather than reality, although there is also the inevitable sense of purportedly female fantasies being presented from a male perspective for a presumed male viewer.

We begin with a voice off establishing the fact that a female prisoner, identified only as Brown, is being transported by two officers, one male and one female, to begin a five year sentence for assault.

As the train gets underway we become party to thoughts of the prisoner – or more precisely the woman we are invited to presume is the prisoner – played by Heather Deeley.


Deeley

First, the man opposite offers her an apple – the symbolism is obvious – prompting a recollection of an early sexual encounter on a farm.

Next, the sight of the creepy looking man opposite reading Vampirella leads to a fantasy sequence in which the woman imagines killing and castrating a man in revenge for his having been one of a group of soldiers who gang raped her when she was serving as a nurse in a war. (Though Vampirella is shown, aspects of the scenario and mise-en-scene here seem more like Guido Crepax's Valentina, particularly as filmed in Corrado Farina's Baba Yaga.)

After writing around in bloody ecstasy whilst playing with the severed penis/phallus, the woman cleans herself up and goes to Soho in search of a new victim. She finds an opera-cloaked young man, takes him back to her place and, mid coitus, brings out her concealed knife. This time, however, the blade refuses to sink into his flesh. It is not that its nature as a theatrical prop is now evident – though this could certainly have been the case, given the nightmare logic – but rather that, as his opera cloak get up had earlier hinted at, he is in fact a vampire.




The vampire lovers

Sex, death, penetrating and being penetrated in more ways than one. This is heavy stuff...

Following this, a newspaper advertisement leads into scenario in which the woman imagines moving into an apartment formerly occupied by a call girl and, after getting annoyed about callers inquiring about Miss Whiplash’s large chest for sale, encouraging an apparent misunderstanding with the attractive looking young man who comes to the door.

We then move back into sex and violence territory as the arrival of the ticket collector prompts the woman’s fantasy of torture at the hands of a mixed gender trio of secret police types from an unidenfitied totalitarian state.

The final scenario is considerably lighter. The aforementioned antique camera transports the woman back into to Victorian times where she enjoys a three-way romp with a moustache-twirling villain type and a maid.


Some of those 'Other Victorians'

As the train reaches its destination and the prisoner is transferred there is a nice reversal of expectation as it is revealed the woman whose fantasies we have been party to is not the prisoner but the police officer escorting her. It adds a little extra frisson and ends the film on a nice note, with something extra for us to think about if we are so inclined. (It's also a riff on The Narrow Margin, admittedly.)

Though not entirely successful, within its two sex and violence sequences Diversions achieves an intensity rare, perhaps even unique, within British sex-horror-fantasy cinema. It stands comparison with the kind of thing Jesus Franco and Alberto Cavallone were doing around the same time on the continent with the likes of Doriana Grey and L'uomo la donna e la bestia respectively.

You can take that as a recommendation ;-)

Keep it up Jack

One reason the British sex comedy was never particularly well regarded by critics is, at base, social class: Middle class critics were looking at a working class form that drew more from music hall than modernist theatre and whose pleasures were thereby fundamentally alien to them.


Available to buy from Movie Poster Mem; another design is here http://www.wrongsideoftheart.com/2009/10/keep-it-up-jack-1973-uk/

The correlations are immediately made in this 1973 entry from Derek Ford in that it opens on a pier-front theatre where protagonist Jack James (Mark Jones) is performing his one-man version of Oliver Twist, then develops into a bawdier version of the Victorian-era farce Charley's Aunt.


All that's needed here is the Donald McGill postcard as well

Unfortunately for Jack times are not what they were and the theatre's owner soon decides that his act – which had been performed by his father and grandfather before him – is not what is needed to draw in the punters these days.

At this point Jack has a stroke of luck as he inherits a property following the death of his aunt. It turns out that the place is a brothel where she was the madam. Or, rather it was a brothel, seeing as only one of the girls working there, the ironically named Virginia (Sue Longhurst) remains on site.

Taking a fancy to Virginia, Jack starts posing as his aunt and re-opens the place for business.

He soon learns that Virginia has distinctly amorous intentions towards Auntie. But rather than coming clean about things (oo er!) Jack continues to keep it up (fnaar fnaar!) and impersonate all manner of the brothel's clients, each with their own preferences and pecadilloes amongst the seven women now working there...

The set up gives plenty scope for Jones and Longhurst to demonstrate their talents.

Jones’s various personas are particular highlight – even if his Japanese visitor is, inevitably, the kind of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s style caricature unacceptable today. Interestingly earlier in his career Jones had worked with avant garde theatre director Peter Brook, suggesting that just because something appealed to the critics this didn't necessarily mean it provided a decent wage for the actor.

Longhurst, meanwhile, comes across (oo er!) as something of a British version of Edwige Fenech: Sexy, uninhibited and a whole lot better actress than many would probably give her credit for.

Though the version I saw was strictly softcore Ford apparently also shot alternative hardcore scenes for the export market. As it is there are some scenes which push the envelope a bit, such as Longhurst's memorable first appearance, lying naked on a bed pleasuring herself, and a pseudo-lesbian threesome.


Sue Longhurst goes exploring

There are also some amusing in-jokes: One of the prostitutes, who specialises in playing an infantile role, is played by On the Buses's Linda Regan. When the place is threatened with closure she remarks that she may have to go back “on the buses”...

The Wife Swappers

Although the mondo film was, as its name suggests, an Italian invention, its pseudo-documentary exploitation format was one which was readily exportable to other countries and imitable by their film-makers.

Thus West Germany gave us the Schoolgirl Report series and the US entries like the Italian sounding Mondo Oscenita and the more overtly homegrown Mondo Mod, Mondo Teeno and Mondo Topless.

British film-makers, however, tended to avoid the mondo label, instead preferring the likes of raw and primitive, usually deployed in some combination with London.

One of the key British players here was Stanley Long, a writer, producer, director, cinematographer and general go-to-man who worked on numerous British exploitation films in a variety of capacities over the course of the 1960s.

Another, working in a similarly broad range of capacities was Derek Ford.

The two men pooled their talents at the end of the decade, with the result being this film, an expose of the then-hot phenomenon of Wife Swapping.

The film's hypocritical mixture of voyeurism and condemnation is evident from the opening voice-off atop scene-setting images of London:

“Within the urban sprawl of any great city there is almost an infinite number of variations in human behaviour, millions upon millions of people going about their everyday business. Unfortunately we shall also find gambling alcoholism, drug addiction, pornography and every conceivable kind of sexual licentiousness.”

Needless to say, without these vices and licentiousness, along with a desire amongst a certain portion of the public to partake in them via film – I'm talking about you and me – the film-makers obviously wouldn't have had anything to work with.

But if their moral claims must be taken with a more than the recommended daily amount of salt, this can also be explained by the need for the film to have some sort of educational or social value.

Or, to be more exacting, particular kinds of these values. The nature of the BBFC at the time was, after all, such that no film without suitable pedigree – i.e. not a Stanley Long production – could ever really be neutral about wife swapping or sexual licentiousness. The terms couldn't be placed up for discussion, but rather had to be taken at face value. The established order of things, or things as they had existed before the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, had to be reasserted.

This reactionary aspect first becomes manifest about a third of the way into the film with the appearance of a psychoanalyst whose role is to proffering purportedly informed, objective and scientific commentary upon the reconstructions cum case studies presented for our entertainment and edification.

The message seems to be that unless your sex life is confined to the missionary position for the purposes of dutiful procreation then you will come to a nasty end: “The logic of all S&M relationships is the seeking of total destruction,” with the jaded thrill-seeker going to greater and greater lengths in pursuit of a newer, harder, kick.

If this puritanical attitude prevents the film from being as much fun as it might otherwise be it also heightens its value as a cultural artefact beyond the usual incidentals of fashions, hairstyles and so on.

This is important in that there's actually previous little to get excited about in terms of nudity and sex, while the balance of the material within the film is heavily skewed towards the imagined and reconstructed, with little that comes across as genuine – and this with other mondo films as a baseline.

This is most evident in a sequence which warns against the danger of wife swapping meetings being used as a front for garnering blackmail material. The blackmailers use special cameras which do not require as much light as their normal counterparts, but for this to be made visible to the filmmakers' camera everything obviously has to be lit conventionally.

A sequence featuring a publisher of contact magazines is better, with the man's discussion of how he first got into the business and of its risks coming across as having been drawn from life and the experiences of the film-makers' themselves or others within their circle. Again, however, one can't help feeling it would have been better had a real-life pornographer been present on camera rather than an actor playing one.

Another point of note is the film's title. In the US the film was released as The Swappers rather than The Wife Swappers. It may seem a minor alteration but is in fact one which suggests an important shift in meaning: Wife Swapping implies a male prerogative, that the woman is a piece of property to be exchanged with another man without her having much say in the matter, swapping a somewhat more egalitarian arrangement.

Perhaps the greatest irony about the film's approach is in relation to the life of director Ford. According to fellow-filmmaker Ray Selfe, Ford was something of a male nymphomaniac – or satyr. While not wishing to commit the intentional fallacy, of drawing direct comparisons between author and text, or engage in amateur psychoanalysis of the sort found within the diegesis, there does seem to be something inadvertently revealing about The Wife Swappers' approach.

The film's opposition between public virtue and private vice is also one that Ford himself seems to have followed, publicly professing to be a somewhat reluctant maker of softcore sex films whilst privately shooting hardcore inserts and versions after hours.

In this he contrasts with another figure associated with the production, stills photographer John Lindsay, who is inadvertently caught on camera in this capacity in the opening scene. Lindsay never made any secret of shooting hardcore, nor that it was just business, nothing personal.

In sum, neither the best nor the worst of its type – such positions necessarily being relative ones – but worth a look for the British trash fan.

The Sexplorer / The Girl From Starship Venus

This is apparently Quentin Tarantino's favourite British sexploitation film, one that he saw on its initial US release at a drive-in in the mid 1970s; it's also a film that he liked enough to acquire his own print of, which he has screened in some of his Grindhouse type events.

While Tarantino's endorsement is undoubtedly useful for attracting curious audiences to The Sexplorer, the truth is that it's such a fun little film it's hard to see anyone not being won over by, which knows it strengths and weaknesses and plays to them, encouraging you to laugh along.


An innuendo laden US poster for the film, under its Girl From Starship Venus title

We open with a cheesy sci-fi theme - one of several - and a mock-portentous voice over, as the Starship Venus prepares to land on the planet Dom, the Purple Planet, to investigate its inhabitants. The spaceship, which proves to be the size of a ball bearing, lands in what is described as an uncharted sea. But it is actually a puddle in the middle of Picadilly circus, London.

Having extricated itself, the tiny spaceship discharges one of its crew, the surveyor, who then takes the form of a Dom, or human. The surveyor's cover is that, if anyone asks, they are the author Mark Twain.

Never mind that Twain is 170 years old, nor that 'he' has the form of a female, more specifically German-born nude model and sexploitation actress Monika Ringwald, nor that looking down at her naked, "ugly" form for Twain's moustache, described by the spaceship's data bank as a patch of superfluous hair, the surveyor identifies it with her pubic hair.

Given the potential for misunderstandings in all this, it's fortunate that the first place the surveyor happens to investigate is a sauna, where most of those present are also nude. Thinking that she has been robbed, the staff kit her out with a dress and send her on her way.

Having made the discovery of "another Dom of differing configuration," "some sort of mutation," flatter and with their moustache spreading further up, the surveyor next ventures into an adult bookstore, followed by a gents, together allowing for some initial observations: The "canopies," the tribe of her assumed form, seem happier and the norm, while the "tubulars," the other, perhaps dangerous, mutant tribe, seem overly anxious.

By this time another pattern also begins to in the Surveyor's interactions with the tubulars: When they aren't running away, they are keen to take advantage of her. The bookstore manager tries to interest her in a photo shoot and telling the photographer on the phone that his new find is "a bit dim but well stacked - just the right combination." Then, in a porn theatre, another patron tries to "refuel" her with his "probe" in the manner that the tubulars on the "holoplay" screen have just attended to the canopies.

Significantly, the film-makers use these misunderstandings in a self-deprecating manner, with the theatre manager throwing the Surveyor out and remarking that they deal strictly in fantasy, not reality. His bookstore counterpart, meanwhile, was played by Ringwald's real-life manager, Alan Selwyn.

Though it would be stretching the point to call the film feminist, there's nevertheless a definite something to Sexplorer's mocking of its primary male audience, even as it gives them the T&A that they've come for.

Indeed, given the way in which the men often respond to the surveyor's tendency towards silence, I was reminded at times of the dynamics of Abel Ferrara's Ms .45 and Zoe Tamerlis's mute heroine, perhaps as hybridised with John Sayles's Brother from Another Planet, as a film with alien whose 'just happening' to look like an African-American also leads to all sorts of misunderstandings.

There's also perhaps a hint of a vegetarian subtext as the Surveyor later passes a diner and wonders about the Dom's putting pieces of scorched bird into their bodies, as a "ritual" she describes as being "primitive" in a manner recalling an early, unreflexive, 20th century colonialist anthropologist.

Although The Sexplorer isn't what you would call imaginatively or particularly well directed, it doesn't need to be. The voice-off dialogue between the surveyor and the crew back on the ship and the survey and the Doms she encounters are witty, while Ringwald herself is attractive to look at and suitably unconscious about showing us her goods. More generally, her foreignness appears a help rather than a hindrance, precisely because not knowing how to act, react or speak like a member of the culture is what the film is all about.

Being a Derek Ford production, The Sexplorer was also released in a different version to that reviewed here, one incorporating hardcore inserts. Whether these feature Ringwald or an other female performer I don't know.

To finish with the obvious pun: Anyone out there come upon this hardcore version?

[See http://templeofschlock.blogspot.com/2009/01/girl-from-starship-venus-1975.html for another review of the film]