Little Monsters

I DON'T WANT TO BE BORN (1975)
THE GODSEND (1980)

George Claydon and Joan Collins in I DON'T WANT TO BE BORN. This outrageous film typifies the output of mid-1970s British horror, reduced to hanging onto the coattails of themes made more skillfully elsewhere.

IN 1968, ROSEMARY'S BABY begin a new era of mainstream Satanic cinema, setting up the archetypal "Seventies Demon Child"; and after THE EXORCIST, major studios viewed The Devil as big business. Lucifer's screen time in both pictures is actually limited: an impregnation scene in the former, the appearance of Pazuzu the demon in the latter. Instead, we are watching movies that embrace paranoia, corrupted innocence and body horror within the family unit. The spawn of Mia Farrow and the infliction of Linda Blair propelled menacing minors and frayed social groups into a gamut of releases, forming the fatherly despair of IT'S ALIVE, the rise of Damien in THE OMEN, the telekinetic teenager of CARRIE, and the painful divorce of THE BROOD. With the release of THE SHINING in 1980, Stanley Kubrick's loose Stephen King adaptation added to this downward spiral by reducing family in the horror film to that of festering resentment.

Joan Collins is touched up and cursed by a vaudeville dwarf in Peter Sasdy's I DON'T WANT TO BE BORN. Nightclub dancer Lucy (Collins) leaves her sleazy life with boss Tommy (John Steiner) and colleague Mandy (Caroline Munro) behind by marrying wealthy Italian Gino (Ralph Bates) and living in Kensington. The birth of their son signals a series of violent injuries and deaths - which includes family Dr Finch (Donald Pleasence) - and in an EXORCIST-inspired finale, Gino's sister Nun Albana (Eileen Atkins) performs a ritual on the baby, while at the same time at the strip club the dwarf Hercules (George Claydon) goes full Tommy Cooper and dies on stage. Sasdy cannot keep a lid on the banal performances and overwrought plotting: if the baby is indeed possessed by the Devil, it is less problematic than insinuating that dwarfs have black magic powers. As the infant lays waste to his nursery and gums anyone foolish to get close enough, it is unclear that - due to the constant cross-cutting between the baby's face and Hercules - more physical killings require the spirited aid of the dwarf. 

THE GODSEND is anything but, a flaccid picture of 
questionable English parenting and guardian skills.

Ten years after collaborating on THE CORPSE, Gabrielle Beaumont and Olaf Pooley re-teamed to make THE GODSEND, a late entry in the Demon Child stakes which should have been titled THE GODAWFUL. Adapted from Bernard Taylor's 1976 debut novel, illustrator Alan (Malcolm Stoddard) and "ex-TV personality" Kate Marlowe (Cyd Hayman) meet The Stranger (Angela Pleasence), an otherworldly pregnant woman who gives birth in their house and then promptly disappears. This new addition to family - the baby cuckoo as it were, blond Bonnie (Wilhelmina Green) - systematically strives to kill the Marlowe's four children, while maintaining a hold over the mother. During her decimation, Bonnie also causes Kate's miscarriage, and gives Alan mumps which renders him sterile.

Stoddard and Hayman make for abysmal partners and parents, not breaking an emotional sweat until the death of their third child (amazingly, Hayman won the best actress award at the Sitges - Catalan International Film Festival). Although third-billed, Pleasence is effortlessly effective and genuinely eerie in what is essentially a cameo - her character spells out the cuckoo connection by stating that she "always goes south" in winter - and its always amusing to see EASTENDERS and XTRO veteran Anna Wing in an even more fleeting role. Bloodless and gutless, THE GODSEND loses sight of any suspense through its predictability, Green scowling at her inherited siblings and smirking at their off-screen demises.

"It's a Creepy Business, Darling"

WORST FEARS (2016)
HORROR ICON (2016)

The Nucleus DVD of WORST FEARS not only tidies up the anthology, but also completes the mockumentary HORROR ICON.

THIS direct-to-DVD portmanteau collects seven shorts - all but one written by David McGillivray - and surrounds them with new framing footage by Jake West featuring The Storyteller (McGillivray himself). The tales, made between 2004 and 2011, are kept fresh by their different locations - filmed in Marrakech, Lisbon, Nice and London - and underpinned by a typically home-grown seediness and array of familiar faces. This Nucleus Films version is the second attempt at a WORST FEARS splicing, the first - a "horror hostess" cut with news presenter Juliette Foster in the role - premiered at the Electric Picture Palace, Suffolk, in 2007, and was instantly disowned by McGillivray's director Keith Claxton. In this revamp, McGillivray seems at home in the re-shot linkage, his camp façade wryly adding gravitas to the tales to come.

Tincture of Vervain stars "Her Ladyship" Fenella Fielding, disappointed with a provincial group of elderly witches ("I thought you'd like a bickie"); Wednesday has an Eastern European cleaner falling into the clutches of Anna Wing and Victor Spinetti; In the Place of the Dead sees a Djinn literally devouring a disastrous marriage; Mrs Davenport's Throat mixes airport arrivals with Herschell Gordon Lewis; Child Number Four is a creepy child yarn based on Gavin Smith's The Scarecrow; After Image tells of a photographer learning his true fate; and the secret of a strange apartment is revealed in We're Ready for You Now. 

Are you prepared to face your worst fears? David McGillivray - described by Starburst as "a bit of a legend" - is The Storyteller.

Known for his self-deprecating sense of humour, McGillivrey refers to himself as a "prolific writer, mostly of hack journalism, but also lowbrow films, plays, and radio and television programmes" who "is becoming increasingly unreliable, grouchy and difficult to work with.” Originally a critic for Monthly Film Bulletin, his life-long involvement in theatre was a gift when making the shorts contained here, enabling him to have a list of contacts long enough to fill gaps when they inevitably appeared (especially as no one was paid. The Scarecrow in Child Number Four, amazingly, was even played by passing acquaintance David Brett, of Flying Pickets fame).

The DVD also includes HORROR ICON, which started life in 2007. Now completed and edited by West, this faux documentary attempts to track down the elusive figure of David McGillivray, a long-standing shadow over the heady days of 70's British horror and softcore. Interviewees either refuse to talk about McGillivray or are uniform in their distain, charting a parallel universe that implicates the writer and producer in Columbian drug smuggling. This one-note joke wears thin even though the piece is only thirty minutes long, but it is fun to see Norman J. Warren diss McGillivray, and hear Pete Walker instantly put the phone down on just the utterance of the name of his partner-in-crime.

Rape from Space

INSEMINOID (1980)
XTRO (1983)

Unremittingly cheesey and occasionally ridiculous, 
it really does feel like XTRO is from another planet.

IN the wake of seemingly endless ALIEN rip-offs, Britain’s contribution to this unnecessary subgenera were two low-budget films both structured around extraterrestrial rape: Norman J. Warren’s INSEMINOID - where Judy Geeson is assaulted by a monster with a test-tube penis - and Harry Bromley Davenport’s XTRO - where a male abductee is reborn fully grown by a girl who has been probed by an alien tentacle (for those who want to try this at home, the inseminatory fluid in Warren’s entry was a combination of raw egg and watered-down Swarfega). INSEMINOID tells the story of an archaeological expedition, who discover a vast tomb-like complex and an assortment of crystals beneath a strange planet. The first half is unbelievably slow (with dialogue functional at best), and only gets going when Sandy (Geeson) is attacked. Once impregnated the character - at the psychic urging of the crystals - hunts down her colleagues, feasting on them to sustain her pregnancy, and Sandy eventually gives birth to plasma-seeking twins who abscond to Earth. 

The highlight of INSEMINOID is John Metcalfe’s low-lit Chislehurst Caves interiors, which make the most of a combination of blue and red filters - with this surprisingly lush element contrasting with the increasingly garish content. Similar stylistic flourishes evaporate into a completely nihilistic shocker with XTRO, which mixes scenes of bitter, understated British life with effects heavy on teeth and slime. Narrowly escaping becoming the second official Brit-made video nasty - that honour only belonged to James Kenelm Clarke’s steamy sexploiter EXPOSE - XTRO was marketed as the anti-E.T., with the tagline “not all aliens are friendly.” In fact no-one “phones home” here: they're usually bludgeoned, stabbed or sucked to death in a mess of rubber mallet-head bopping, murderous toy tanks and (inconceivably) a black panther.

"Conceived in violence, carried in terror, born to devastate and brutalize a universe!": INSEMINOID's evil alien twins.

Surprisingly, XTRO opens on an idyllic autumn afternoon. Tony (Simon Nash) is playing with his father Sam (Philip Sayer) and their dog in the garden of their house; the sky shatters, its crisp sunlight replaced with darkness and howling winds. Sam is absorbed by a blinding white light and disappears; three years later, Tony is suffering from recurring nightmares. Feigning amnesia, Sam returns and moves back into a fragmented family unit, and sets about rebuilding his relationship with Tony and Rachel (Bernice Stegers). But this is a front to get closer to his son; in an unsettling scene which could be viewed as a child abuse allegory, Sam bites Tony's neck and starts pumping secretions into the child, preparing him for a similar change. This gives Tony amazing abilities which he uses to bring a toy clown and an Action Man doll to life. The latter set piece is truly outlandish - the boy sends the life-size doll to slaughter his next door neighbour after she chops up his pet snake. The fact that neighbour Mrs Goodman is played by Anna Wing - who spent years as Lou Beale on EASTENDERS - is a fittingly trivial fact for a trivial viewing experience.