Slasher Sleaze

SCHIZO (1976)
THE COMEBACK (1978)

The Daily Mail described SCHIZO as "polished, pernicious cods wallop."

IN the 1970s, Pete Walker made a series of films more sophisticated than the exploitative titles implied. SCHIZO is an under appreciated slasher given added cult status by the fact that the leading lady is Lynne Frederick, who was married to Peter Sellers and died of substance abuse at the age of 39. The film opens with night shift worker William Haskin (Jack Watson) reading in a newspaper that ice-skating star Samantha Gray (Frederick) is to marry wealthy manufacturer Alan Falconer (has-been pop star John Leyton). Haskin starts to stalk Gray, who looks for reassurance to her psychiatrist Leonard Hawthorne (John Fraser), lover of her best friend Beth (Stephanie Beacham). Gray tells Hawthorne that when she was a young girl, she witnessed Haskin stab her mother during a lover's quarrel. After serving sentence he now is after Samantha; or is there a different connotation?

Walker has always heralded the twist ending as something fresh and unique, but the climax is more of a contrived confirmation than a revelation. Screenwriter David McGillivray struggled to add meat to Walker's bones of a story - delivering a first draft allegedly only 42 pages long - and there is evidence here that the Walker-McGillivray partnership was going through the motions. Yet there are several effective shock sequences to hold interest - including death by hammer and knitting needle - and a mixture of roving camera and close-ups are used to generate tension and menace. The casting of Watson is a big plus, an actor able to suggest a lot by doing seemingly very little, whose worn facade and controlled stares makes his character genuinely unsettling. As Steve Chibnall points out in Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker, the main difference with SCHIZO when compared to the film maker's more famous canon of work - HOUSE OF WHIPCORD, FRIGHTMARE et al - is that previously Walker explored contrasts between aged killers and youth culture; here we have the victimisation of common man.

Redemption's remastered US import Blue-ray of THE COMEBACK, released in February.

Quitting school at 15, Frederick appeared in a number of supporting roles in the early 70s, including Dora Mueller in VAMPIRE CIRCUS. As Julian Upton acutely states in Fallen Stars: Tragic Lives and Lost Careers, the actress "went from appearing in SCHIZO to marrying one" when she tied the knot with Sellers. Within weeks, Frederick's emotional destruction began, amid violent attacks, the actor's increasing heart problems, and Sellers' plummeting box office appeal. After Sellers' death, his widow binged on drink and drugs; in his hastily revised will, Frederick was left almost everything, while his three children were left an insultingly token sum. Frederick subsequently married David Frost then LA heart specialist Barry Unger, filling the Unger marital home with photographs of Sellers and even devoting a room to his memory. In summary, Sellers biographer Roger Lewis describes Lynne as Seller's "supernatural double or fellow lost soul; except she acquired his insanities without the compensations of his genius."

Walker followed SCHIZO with THE COMEBACK, the last of his 70s terror output, and in an attempt to appeal to an American market in the wake of the crippled British film industry, the most conventional. Gone are the low-key locale of Walker's earlier triumphs; now the viewer sees locations for the rich and famous. Reuniting the director with the scriptwriter of DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE, Murray Smith, the picture sees crooner Jack Jones cast as Nick Cooper, a faded singer returning to England from America to make a comeback album. His ex-wife has been murdered in their docklands penthouse, a fact unknown to him as he is staying in a country mansion maintained by Mr and Mrs B (Bill Owen and Sheila Keith). Increasingly disturbed by nocturnal sounds, and driven to a breakdown by the discovery of a rotting corpse then a head in a hatbox, Cooper discovers that Mr and Mrs B are exacting revenge for the suicide of their daughter, an obsessive fan who could not accept his marriage. Both a psychological thriller and a violent murder mystery, THE COMEBACK consequently never quite gels, but Walker manages a memorable conclusion when our nominal hero confronts the dastardly duo.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Carnage and Carnality

THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW (1972)

"If it wasn't so tragic and horrible, it would almost make a movie script."

THE bluntly independent horror output of Pete Walker often depicted society itself as the monster, a clinically cold England that tries to cast off the shackles of the past, only to be smothered by a tide of permissiveness after generations of repression. Unlike Hammer or Amicus, Walker's monsters are not based in the supernatural, rather symbolically drawn from a bygone age. Scripted by Alfred Shaughnessy, Walker's first venture into horror, THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW, tells of a young acting troupe led by Mike (Ray Brooks) residing in an abandoned seaside theatre. The group - which includes Julia (Jenny Hanley), Carol (Luan Peters), Simon (Robin Askwith) and Sarah (Candace Glendenning) - are engaged by a mysterious agent to produce a musical review. When the aspiring thespians are picked off by a hooded prowler, the killer is revealed to be distinguished actor Sir Arnold Gates (Patrick Barr), who previously entombed his wife and her lover alive during a production of Othello.

THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW explores the relationship between life and illusion and the connection between acting and promiscuity in a collectively complex dictum. Gates' outburst - "They're all the same, young actors, filthy and degenerate lechers, all of them. And the females, flaunting their bodies, offering their thighs and their breasts. Scum! Excrement!" - subscribes to a world where performance is being eroded away by the use of the body. Sir Arnold's views reflect those of Walker himself, whose contempt for the acting profession is illustrated by him saying "If I could make films without actors, I would rather do it," a standing that has also been noted by many of his scriptwriters, particularly David McGillivray, who quotes the director as describing actors as "egotistical poofs" and actresses "pompous prostitutes." Not content to having his dramatis personae reduced to ciphers and sex-crazed starlets, Walker obliged the scantily-clad performers to suffer for their art by shooting THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW in February. 

Best remembered for presenting MAGPIE, Jenny Hanley was briefly a Bond girl in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and survived the SCARS OF DRACULA.

Using the concept of Ten Little Indians, THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW is a rich British giallo similar to the Britsploitation classic TOWER OF EVIL. Both these features include the staples of the slasher film before this much-maligned sub-genre really existed. It is also interesting to note how the film sows the seeds of Walker's stabs on the establishment that would flow freely in his more famous output. The small town where the picture plays out feels creepy enough on its own even without the aid of the maniac on the loose, but THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW's major fault is its incredibly murky photography. Also to the production's detriment is its use of an experimental 3-D process - seen only in a flashback to the wartime Othello production - which appears so late in the proceeding to lose any real shock value.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Curse of Kah-to-Bey

THE MUMMY'S SHROUD (1967)

South African non-actress Maggie Kimberly escapes the clutches of Eddie Powell in Hammer's third Mummy picture. 

MEZZERA, Egypt, 1920: a British archaeological expedition financed by businessman Stanley Preston (John Phillips) - comprising of Sir Basil Walden (Andre Morrell), Preston's son Paul (a stilted David Buck), photographer Harry Newton (Tim Barrett) and psychic linguist Claire de Sangre (Maggie Kimberly) - discover the tomb of Kah-to-Bey, a child prince. Members of the find are soon being murdered by the Mummy of Prem (played by Hammer's regular stuntman and Christopher Lee double Eddie Powell), Kah-to-Bey's devoted servant, who can be revived by reading the words off the Prince's burial shroud.

Following Terence Fisher's magisterial THE MUMMY of 1959 and Michael Carreras' disposable 1964 THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, THE MUMMY'S SHROUD ("Beware the Beat of the Cloth-wrapped feet!") is a formulaic affair, and the last movie shot at Bray. Written and directed by John Gilling, the film starts with a painfully dull and micro-budgeted ancient Egyptian prologue - which includes Dickie Owen, the titular fiend from THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, as the living Prem - and viewers will also be disappointed by the lack of cleavage, especially as so much is on offer from Kimberly's promotional poses. Unusually for Hammer, the glamour girl role is a character with a narrative function (the somnambulist Claire has the ability to read the "words of death"), but unfortunately Kimberly - who had just appeared in Gilling's secret agent spoof WHERE THE BULLETS FLY - is the worst actress in the Classic Hammer canon.

Studio Canal's Blu-ray/DVD was released in October 2012, containing two standout documentaries: an informative making-of and a touching tribute by Madeline Smith for husband David Buck.

As Jonathan Rigby points out in English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, a telling sign of the relegated stature of Hammer's Mummy sequels is that stunt men were cast as the monster, following Christopher Lee's barnstorming performance in Fisher's original. The real monster of THE MUMMY'S SHROUD is Preston, expertly portrayed by Phillips as an arrogant coward: quick to enjoy the spoils, even quicker to escape when the curse starts to take hold. Elizabeth Sellars, as his wife Barbara, makes an excellent foil, and it is good to see Michael Ripper in a prolonged role as Preston's long-suffering valet, the myopic Longbarrow. Completing the cast are Catherine Lacey and Roger Delgado's scene-stealing turns as the mother-and-son team whose family have barred the entrance to Kah-to-Bey's tomb for centuries. In fact Lacey's role as fortune-teller Haiti, together with Barbara and Claire, form a trio of female characters with second sight, while the male protagonists are lambs to the slaughter. 

The Mummy itself has always been the slightest of movie monsters. Covered in bandages that barely conceal the decay beneath, and often reduced to stalk-and-slash with a mystical backdrop, the Mummy started life on film as a device for camera trickery; in both Melies' 1899 CLEOPATRA and Walter Booth's 1901 HAUNTED CURIOSITY SHOP, the creature was an object to illustrate the joys of celluloid illusion. Unlike the heralded literary origins of Dracula and Frankenstein, the springboard for the Mummy as a potential movie monster was enhanced by real life: the myths surrounding Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon's 1924 expedition to uncover the tomb of Tutankhamen. In Hammer's fourth and final excursion into this sub-genre - 1971's BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB - the studio side-stepped including the bandaged menace altogether. Yet unlike Universal's arthritic Mummy movies, at least Hammer's ancient terrors were brutal threats.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Beast of Burden

AGAINST THE CROWD - MURRAIN (1975)
BEASTS (1976)

The thing in the wall: Jo (Jane Wymark) increasingly feels that she and her unborn child are in danger, in the BEASTS episode Baby.

MADE for the ATV anthology series AGAINST THE CROWD - a set of self-contained dramas focusing on outsiders - the Nigel Kneale-penned Murrain acted as an impromptu pilot for BEASTS, produced for the same ITV studio a year later. Murrain is the story of young vet Alan Crich (David Simeon), who discovers that a stretch of farmland may be hexed by Mrs Clemson (Una Brandon-Jones). Crich attempts to mediate between the alleged witch and the disgruntled local farmers, led by Mr Mably (Bernard Lee). Featuring Kneale's preoccupation of the clash between the supernatural and the rational, the play is also influenced by the writer's own superstitious locale growing up on the Isle of Man. There are no real scares in the programme, rather it is a character-and-mood piece where the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions.

Kneale's six stories for BEASTS would detail another of his favourite themes, that of the primal instincts that exist within civilised man, and the effects when repressed feelings are set free. Baby sees the mummified remains of a strange creature found in a country cottage; Buddyboy features a haunted dolphinarium; The Dummy has an actor taken over by his monster suit; Special Offer tells of a gremlin loose in a mini-supermarket; What Big Eyes shows an amateur scientist carrying out experiments to turn himself into a wolf; and rats are on the rampage in During Barty's Party.

Set in North Cornwall, the farmers of the AGAINST THE CROWD play Murrain believe a witch is responsible for the plight of their pig stock and the illness of a local boy.

Kneale was always an "ideas" man, but BEASTS shows a developing flair for character and dialogue. Thankfully then that the series features a number of stoic performances from fresh faces and seasoned veterans - including Simon MacCorkindale, T.P. McKenna, Martin Shaw, Clive Swift, Thorley Walters, Pauline Quirke and Elizabeth Sellars. Particularly effective are the verbal battles between Michael Kitchen's RSPCA officer and Patrick Magee's eccentric pet-shop owner in What Big Eyes. For a such a character-driven series, the misses are uniform to a handful of weaker performances. Quirke is fine in Special Offer, but her co-workers seem staid in what is in itself the silliest and most repetitive episode. Buddyboy is the oddest of the tales, and the fusion of Shaw as a porn theatre owner taking over a disused dolphin pool never quite gels in story or execution. The actor is suitably bullish, put the performance of Pamela Moiseiwitsch as a girl who has an umbilical connection with the ghost of the star dolphin is overtly glacial.

As BEASTS is made up of six totally unrelated entries, the quality ultimately dips, despite Kneale's impressive scope of imagination. The doom-laden Baby is almost a companion piece to Murrain, as it features another vet at odds with a superstitious rural community. It is widely considered to be the best - and certainly the most chilling - of the series, and as Andy Murray points out in his programme notes to the Network BEASTS DVD, Baby also has connections to QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, with builders unearthing "a sinister, ancient capsule which turns out to contain ... something." The Dummy is also a highlight, and a real joy for Hammer fans, as Kneale draws on his underwhelming experiences working for the production house. There is little doubt that with the casting of Walters and the feature being made by a fictional British company - REVENGE OF THE DUMMY - are thinly veiled snipes at his time with the famous studio.
~ Stephen C. Jilks 

Attack the Block

Action (1976)
DREDD (2012)

Carl Urban as Judge Dredd. A fusion of Dirty Harry and Desperate Dan, the super fascist was named the seventh greatest comic book character by Empire in 2011, beaten only by Superman, Batman, John Constantine, Wolverine, Spider-Man and The Sandman.

THE British comics scene of the mid to late seventies mirrored the changing social and political environment. Publications such as Warlord had started a more grittier trend away from the Beano/Dandy norm, and within the rise of radical trade unionism and an increasing punk ethic, the antihero became a leading light. This shift was typified by Action comic: 'Hellman of Hammer Force', the story of a German Panzer major, and the JAWS cash-in 'Hook Jaw', established a pattern for unconventional or unsympathetic characters, while 'Look Out for Lefty' was a football strip which openly depicted hooliganism on the terraces. Within weeks of the first issue the media had picked up on the title's violent content, with The Sun dubbing Action "the seven penny nightmare." Following its withdrawal Action's co-founder Pat Mills unleashed the science-fiction themed 2000AD in 1977, essentially Action in space. Early strips were particularly honed to the forerunner's expertise, with 'Flesh' a bloodthirsty time-travel story involving dinosaurs, and 'Shako' essentially 'Hook Jaw' with a polar bear.

Futuristic law enforcer Judge Dredd first appeared in the second "prog" of 2000AD. Britain's best-known strip character of the past thirty-five years was in fact created by Canadian-born writer John Wagner and Spanish artist Carlos Ezquerra; Dredd is the most notorious of a group of super cops, religiously disgusted yet righteously determined to fight crime in the post-apocalyptic milieu that is Mega-City One. An encapsulation of Eastern American cities with a population of four-hundred million crammed into Dickensian tower blocks, this megalopolis houses The Hall of Justice (at once judge, jury and executioners). Sporting a fetishist black leather uniform, straddling an armour-plated patrol bike, living by his stock phrase "I am the Law," and always donning his visored-helmet, Dredd fights more and more outlandish adversaries within the Mega-City One walls and in the wastelands beyond, affectionately labelled The Cursed Earth. His most grotesque foe for example - Judge Death - is a skeletal inter-dimensional tyrant who considers life itself a crime.

The cover that got Action banned. An unfortunate colouring decision - making a police helmet the same shade as a fallen member of the public - was the final straw for the comic.

The strip was originally informed by the cinematic landscape of the 1970s - vigilantes, out-of-control cops, dystopian futures - and Wagner even suggested to Ezquerra that he used David Carradine's character from DEATH RACE 200 for his main visualisation of Dredd. This British/South African co-production - directed by Pete Travis and written by Alex Garland - at last brings a faithful version of the character to the screen, following Sylvester Stallone's version of 1995. With DREDD, it is refreshing to see a comic book movie that strikes at the core of an iconic character without overt allegory, bloated posturing or need of an origin story. Here its just another day at the office as Dredd (Karl Urban), partnered by psychic rookie Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), investigate a triple homicide at the 200-storey Peach Trees block. The Judges discover that a criminal gang - led by Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) - have taken over the building and are using it as a base to market the designer Slo-Mo drug, which slows reality for its users to a fraction of normal time.

Either viewed in 3D or 2D, DREDD is a robust, action-based entertainment given a distinctive visual motif with its slow-motion sequences: everything from bath water to blood spray are given a hallucinogenic twist, with Slo-Mo a much-need excursion to slow chaos down around the user and the viewer. There is never any great hope in Garland's fantasy screenplays - 28 DAYS LATER... saw most of Britain wiped out by the infected, and SUNSHINE revolves around a suicide mission to the stars - but here the writer manages to evoke a tangible futurism: the inward-looking sets are impressive, and offset only by fleeting exterior CGI of Johannesburg. Consequently it is a rounded illustration of the comic strip world, and in a pretty thankless role, Urban's square jaw is fine. It is, however, Thirlby that excels in such a daunting baptism of fire.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Worlds of the Dead

THE ZOMBIE DAIRIES 2: WORLD OF THE DEAD (2011)
OUTPOST II: BLACK SUN (2012)
COCKNEYS VS ZOMBIES (2012)

ZOMBIE DAIRIES 2's decontamination suites recall images from George A. Romero's original CRAZIES. The cut-away scenes of the white figures rounding up civilians like cattle to shoot then burn them is detrimental to the "race against time" narrative.

RETURNING to the world created in their 2007 hit THE ZOMBIE DAIRIES, Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates use the same lead character Leeann (Alix Wilton Regan, replacing Victoria Nalder) and predatory villains Goke (Russell Jones) and Manny (Hiram Bleetman) for the pro-military sequel THE ZOMBIE DAIRIES 2: WORLD OF THE DEAD. Found by a squad of T.A. reservists - with their own documenting cameraman - traumatised Leeann journeys with them across zombie-infested Hertfordshire towards Hope’s Point, where rescue ships are due in two days. As the group head towards this destination, civilians are as much a threat as the ghouls. Starting effectively with an intimate family birthday gone to hell, ZOMBIE DAIRIES 2 is more polished than the original, but doesn't bring anything new to the table. Its relentlessly grim facade rejoices in three rape scenes, the most self-defeating filmed in gloating close-up; and it is ironic that the most memorable aspect was produced by a fortuitous cold-snap during production, with snow adding to the struggle and providing an edge to the midnight dash through a graveyard.

Released four years after their claustrophobic and testosterone-fuelled OUTPOST, director Steve Barker and writer Rae Brunton widen the scope - and shift the tone - for the horror adventure OUTPOST II: BLACK SUN. In the present day, a NATO force is sent to Eastern Europe, where a sinister enemy appears to be killing everything in its path. Following in the footsteps of her late father, Lena (Catherine Steadman), an investigator on the trail of the notorious German scientist Klausener (David Grant), learns that the war crimes of the man she is looking for goes far beyond the blasphemy of extermination camps. Together with former colleague Wallace (Richard Coyle), a physicist who has been chasing Nazi secrets for years, they team up with the NATO force to prevent the rise of a zombie 4th Reich.

The depiction of the Nazi undead is the highlight of OUTPOST II: BLACK SUN; relentlessly brutal, the zombies either club their prey or stab them repeatedly, with the visuals presented in an effectively dirty brown-and-grey colour palette.

Despite a promising opening salvo with an aged SS officer, Steadman becomes yet another ineffectual female lead and largely unable to look after herself, despite being a seasoned Nazi hunter. As usual, it is up to the military grunts to protect her, who are portrayed as the usual stereotypes: the ruthless one, the compassionate one, the belligerent one, and the wise-cracking one. In fact, the history of the Black Sun and its adaptations into popular culture are more interesting than anything in Barker's film. This motif may have originated from the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky's Central Sun, an invisible or burnt out star which symbolises an opposing force or pole, and it was former SS member Wilhelm Landig who coined the idea of a mystical source capable of regenerating the Aryan race. Pop culture references include Grant Morrison's comic strip Zenith, which makes a Black Sun cult a combination of Nazi and Lovecraftian ideas; in the novel Satan's Seed by Mark Ellis, the Brotherhood of the Black Sun and Aleister Crowley use geomancy to travel through time; and in the computer game Wolfenstein, the Black Sun was actually another dimension altogether.

The feature directing debut of German Matthias Hoene - who rebooted Hammer for the 2008 online serial BEYOND THE RAVE - and co-written by James Moran - who penned SEVERANCE - the zombie-gangster-comedy COCKNEYS VS ZOMBIES does everything it says on the tin, but isn't as wily as it thinks it is. A proposed building development threatens the Bow Bells Care Home with closure, and to secure the well being of their war-hero grandfather Ray (Alan Ford), chancer brothers Terry (Rasmus Hardiker) and Andy (Harry Treadaway) ineptly rob a bank with the aid of spunky cousin Katy (Michelle Ryan), friend Davey (Jack Doolan) and psychopathic weapons-specialist "Mental" Mickey (Ashley Thomas). But the East End of London has more pressing matters; workers at the development site have excavated into a plague pit sealed by Charles II in 1666, unleashing a mutated infection that transforms humans into shambling zombies.

"The Undead are Brown Bread." Former EASTENDER Michelle Ryan is effortlessly strong and sexy in the otherwise irksome COCKNEYS VS ZOMBIES.

Overtly formulaic and a SHAUN OF THE DEAD facsimile, COCKNEYS VS ZOMBIES suffers from muted action scenes, no real tension, and cockney rhyming slang jokes that wear thin pretty fast. Consequently, it's not funny enough to be a memorable comedy, and not scary enough for hardcore zombie enthusiasts. The film works best when it depicts the potential abandonment of the elderly. In the stand-out sequence, deaf Hamish (Richard Briers) hobbles along on his zimmer at the same pace as a ghoul eager for his flesh, and it is this old guard of performers - Ford, Briers, Honor Blackman, Dudley Sutton, Tony Selby, Georgina Hale - that provide the production with ballast.

~ Stephen C. Jilks

"You'll get your thirty pieces of silver"

FRIDAY NIGHT, SATURDAY MORNING: LIFE OF BRIAN (1979)
HOLY FLYING CIRCUS (2011)

MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN director Terry Jones as Mandy Cohen, mother of Brian, in the comedy troupe's satire of organised religion. The film stands as one of the few that warrants book-length studies on each of its pre-production, making, and aftermath.

THE release of MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN caused religious outrage around the world. Against this backdrop, John Cleese and Michael Palin found themselves facing prominent society figures on a television debate in front of a live studio audience. HOLY FLYING CIRCUS - Tony Roche's one-shot BBC4 re-imagining of the controversy - uses at its core the discussion between Cleese/Palin and Mervyn Stockwood/Malcolm Muggeridge, which appeared on BBC2 chat show FRIDAY NIGHT, SATURDAY MORNING. While the build-up to this debate acts as the only real plot strand in the drama, the surrounding scenes are more playful, particularly Darren Boyd's portrayal of Cleese - “a fictional representation of me based loosely on my Basil Fawlty persona" - and an uncanny turn by Charles Edwards as Palin. Consequently there is little consistency to HOLY FLYING CIRCUS, but there are odd flashes of brilliance: after the BBC’s Head of Talks is shown taking cocaine, Cleese and Palin are suddenly turned into puppets manipulated by the other Pythons, sweeping the viewer into an alternate reality. But ultimately HOLY FLYING CIRCUS portrays the discussion with a misguided gravitas akin to David Frost's entanglement with Richard Nixon.

Hosted by Tim Rice, it was the 9th November 1979 FRIDAY NIGHT, SATURDAY MORNING were the actual barnstorming was played out. To argue in favour of blasphemy was broadcaster and Christian Muggeridge, and Stockwood - the then Bishop of Southwark - who appeared in a sweeping purple cassock while spending most of his time gesturing with a chunky cross. In an opening salvo, The Bishop - with notes carefully hidden in his lap - gives a meandering sermon addressed to his audience, before accusing the Pythons of being mentally unstable. Muggeridge begins by dismissing LIFE OF BRIAN as a "tenth-rate film," and the Pythons seemed shocked by the severity of the attack, especially because all four had met before the show and there had been no hint of the aggression that was to come. As the debate becomes more heated, Muggeridge complains about the ease with which the Pythons "were able to extract humour from the most solemn of mysteries". He says he was upset that the film was, to him, denigrating the one man responsible for all art. What makes the crusader's stance more trite is that Stockwood and Muggeridge later seemed delighted with their flirtation with show business, viewing the exercise as a entertainment performance of their own.

Charles Edwards as Michael Palin and Darren Boyd as John Cleese in HOLY FLYING CIRCUS.

The overwhelming conclusion of the Pythons is that while Palin is agitated and uneasy, Cleese is in his element. Addressing Muggeridge that "four hundred years ago, we would have been burnt for this film. Now, I'm suggesting that we've made an advance," Cleese defends eloquently and with a calm assurance, explaining how LIFE OF BRIAN is consistently labelled as an attack on Christ rather than as a series of satirical observations on closed systems of thought. What is most unnerving is seeing the Pythons having to defend their right to openly question ideas; after this debate, a parody of the discussion appeared on NOT THE NINE O'CLOCK NEWS, involving a Bishop defending his new film - GENERAL SYNOD'S LIFE OF CHRIST - which was accused of being "a thinly disguised and blasphemous attack on the members of Monty Python, men who are, today, still revered throughout the western world."

It is ironic that LIFE OF BRIAN's success as a film is its tight narrative, which is in strong contrast to the normal Pythonesque sketch-driven chaos. Without an episodic structure, characters are allowed to breath, and when the story does deviate, it is only into people that directly affect Brian, such as the Roman Guards or his followers. LIFE OF BRIAN is Monty Python's most rounded and satisfying work, with the People's Front of Judea central to the ongoing religious and political comment; the non-active activists are a consistent joke as they debate, argue, vote and re-debate even the simplest motions. As such they just get further embroiled in talking about - but not acting - on their beliefs. It’s this intelligent - yet straightforward - blend of satire, religion and politics that makes the misinterpretations and tirade of Muggeridge and Stockwood even more insulting.
~ Stephen C. Jilks