Composite Beings and Zombie Bikers

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1970)
PSYCHOMANIA (1972)

In SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN, two hikers out on the moors are being shot at by Nazi-like soldiers. The female ambler is  played by a pre-LUST FOR A VAMPIRE Yutte Stensgaard, who is subsequently taken to a castle for torture.

BOTH these pictures come from a period in British horror where more outlandish themes were being explored rather than the increasingly dated Hammer Gothics. Gordon Hessler's SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN is a conspiracy thriller like no other, an AIP/Amicus co-production that features a delirious mix of body parts, gallows humour and police pursuits. With the major draw of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, the film basically is another take on the Frankenstein legend. Opening with a runner collapsing in a London park and finding himself waking in a strange hospital where he's missing a leg, the story weaves its way through three main plot threads: rogue general Konratz (Marshall Jones) murdering his way into power of an unnamed Eastern bloc country; serial vampire rapist Keith (Michael Gothard) preying on young women he picks up in 'happening' nightclubs; and Dr Browning (Vincent Price)'s Composite programme, a plan to infest the world with controllable beings of organic and synthetic tissue.

Based on the 1966 SF novel The Disorientated Man by "Peter Saxon" - in reality a pen name used by W.Howard Baker and Stephen Frances - the film rights were picked up by Milton Subotsky, who turned in his usual old-fashioned treatment which was re-written by Christopher Wicking. The resulting screenplay is remarkably faithful to the book, apart from dropping an alien explanation for a paranoid political message. Price fares best of the top-billed stars, with Lee and Cushing given disposable roles: the former as a government official and the latter as a very disposable military superior. However it is Gothard and Alfred Marks - who apparently ad-libbed much of his dialogue as Inspector Bellaver - who give the most memorable performances. Marks shines in the grand pantheon of disgruntled police inspectors that populate British horror, and in a part described by Jonathan Rigby in English Gothic: a Century of Horror Cinema as resembling "a bionic Mick Jagger", Gothard carries out a very unpleasant alley attack and later there is a celebrated car chase sequence. Its all infectiously ridiculous, capped by a maniacal climactic battle between Browning and Konratz, filled with a vulcan-like shoulder squeeze and hearty swings of a gas cylinder.

John Cameron's score is the highlight of PSYCHOMANIA, essentially a rock soundtrack that achieves the gravitas of a sweeping orchestra.

Don Sharp's PSYCHOMANIA tells of Tom Latham (Nicky Henson), the leader of The Living Dead motorcycle gang, who terrorise the Home Counties and hang around standing stones called The Seven Witches. Tom's mother (Beryl Reid) is a medium aided by butler Shadwell (George Sanders), and there is a mystery surrounding the death of Mr Latham ("Why did my father die in that locked room? Why do you never get any older? And what is the secret of the living dead?") When Tom achieves "the ton," he crashes off a bridge and dies; the gang bury him upright on his bike, and he comes back to life a couple of days later, terrorising the local populace and convincing his gang members that in order to come back from the dead you only have to believe you will. Only Tom’s girlfriend Abby (Mary Larkin) refuses.

PSYCHOMANIA's incoherent and kitsch charm mixes the trademark tranquil eccentricity of British horror with Frog cults and zombie bikers, becoming a metaphor for teen rebellion and anger at the establishment (all the members of The Living Dead want to do is cause trouble and "blow some squares’ minds"). The film was almost universally blasted by critics on release - The Times wrote that PSYCHOMANIA was only fit to be shown at an "SS reunion party" - but today this Benmar production is a guilty pleasure. Like Tom's early exchange with Shadwell, there are more questions than answers: what actually occurred at Tom's birth?; what is the history of the magic room?; who is Shadwell servant to?; and did Mrs Latham's powers turn seven witches into the standing stones? Henson is the lifeblood, but Sanders' bizarre presence has the distinction of seemingly being the film that drove the actor to suicide. Leaving behind an aptly Wildesque note, Sanders wrote "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

Maids of Evil

HALFWAY INN (1970)
SOME LIKE IT SEXY (1971)

Before a brief career in features, the Collinson Twins appeared
in the bawdy 8mm short HALFWAY INN.

TWINS have long been a source of fascination in cinema, and they usually get a raw deal. Representing duality and split personality, they often symbolise the battle between good and evil, and signify that sinister events are about to happen. Female examples in this intriguing sub-genre include Brian DePalma's breakthrough hit SISTERS - where Margot Kidder stars as twin siblings, one of whom is most probably a psychopathic killer - and Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING, where the pre-teen Grady Twins are one of many mirroring devices used to add to the horror of Jack Torrance's descent into madness. More recently, Wolfgang Büld's lively TWISTED SISTERS stars Fiona Horsey is an unrelenting power struggle between good twin/bad twin, and even a first season episode of THE X-FILES - EVE - featured nine-year-old twin sisters separated at birth killing their parents.

Born to an English Royal Navy father, Maltese identical twin sisters Madeleine and Mary Collinson caused quite a stir upon their arrival in Britain during April, 1969. After various modelling assignments they became the first twin Playmates in the October 1970 Playboy, after attending a party where they met Victor Lownes, the head of Playboy's European operation. The Collinson's sealed their pop culture immortality by taking the title roles in Hammer's TWINS OF EVIL a year later and, after five flirtations with the turgid British sex scene - the two under consideration here, plus squalid entries GROUPIE GIRL and PERMISSIVE, and the Keith Barron/Kenneth Cope vehicle SHE'LL FOLLOW YOU ANYWHERE - Hollywood beckoned, but their only American credit was LOVE MACHINE, where they shared a shower with John Philip Law.

The Collinson Twins quickly bore of Christopher Matthews - as does the viewer - in SOME LIKE IT SEXY.

HALFWAY INN is a thirteen minute short from George Harrison Marks, the glamour photographer, publisher and filmmaker whose early work included THE WINDOW DRESSER, where his partner Pamela Green starred as a cat burglar who hides from the law by posing as a lingerie shop dummy. Marks' background as a music hall performer is evident in the "little stories" devised for his 8mm films, some of which were appealingly macabre: in PERCHANCE TO SCREAM, an evil inquisitor sentences women to be whipped and beheaded by a masked executioner. It should be remembered that the twins were only seventeen (at most) at the time, and their scenes in HALFWAY INN are relatively strong for 1970. The film is a period piece where a man is soon consumed by a comely maid; after flirting over dinner there follows several sexual encounters, and the man is reduced to exhaustion by the apparently relentlessly lusty maid, and flees. It is only at the end that we are shown that there are in fact two maids, who have been joyfully sharing the intimate duties.

Unlike Continental erotica, British sex films were mainly comedies, a thinly veiled critique on our own private lives. However, the problem with this throwaway sub genre was that the productions were not titillating or funny. Donovan Winter's SOME LIKE IT SEXY was originally released as COME BACK PETER in 1969, but after several countries complained the film wasn't sexy enough extra sequences were shot, including the Collinson Twins in a sisterly menage a trois with professional ladies man and E-type Jag-driving Peter (Christopher Matthews). This "improved version" is also noteworthy for having a body double for Mattews whose standard posterior is replaced by an actor who possesses the hairiest arse in motion pictures. Both versions follow Peter's sexual adventures with the likes of a middle-aged socialite, a blues singer, a hippy and even a Salvation Army officer, surreally inter cut with flashes of a butcher hacking at a side of beef. This inexplicable image is explained in the twist "sex fantasy" ending, where Peter is revealed not as a super stud but as a butcher's delivery boy on the Fulham Road, where the colour image drains to monochrome as he climbs into his tatty white van.

The Last Gothic

SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)

New Zealander Anouska Hempel bares her fangs. The actress also played "Australian Girl" in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and the title role in Pete Walker's TIFFANY JONES. Now a hotelier and designer, she married Allied Dunbar chairman Mark Weinberg in 1980, becoming one of the richest woman in Britain. During 1998 Hempel bought the right's to Walker's film and Russ Meyer's slave picture BLACK SNAKE - where she stars as Lady Susan - in order to keep them out of circulation.

HAMMER’s bloodiest film, SCARS OF DRACULA - scripted by Anthony Hinds - is also one of its most beautifully shot, defying its typically meagre budget. Braking the sequence began with their original DRACULA, no attempt is made to link it to the conclusion of the previous entry, TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA. The Prince of Darkness (Christopher Lee) is afforded more screen time and dialogue, uttering his lines in a dreamy tone (under pasty make-up) that could be the result of Lee’s oft-quoted desire to express “the loneliness of evil” and the curse of immortality. Alternatively, it could be the disenchantment of an actor tiring of a limiting role (John Forbes-Robertson was considered before Lee was persuaded to return, but would later be cast as The Count in THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES). What is grating is that the film dispenses with Hammer's sensual lord vampire to create an atmosphere of brutal violence. The young cast are tepid at best (a miscast Dennis Waterman as Simon, the dubbed Jenny Hanley as Sarah, and Christopher Matthews as womaniser Paul), but the real meat comes from the supporting cast, with Patrick Troughton transforming Dracula’s urbane butler Klove into a masochistic errant boy, and Anouska Hempel as concubine Tania.

The last of the studio’s Gothic Draculas - and developed as a double bill with Jimmy Sangster's equally misguided THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN - the film revels in 70s-style exploitation. Dracula is consequently transformed into a sadist, mystifyingly stabbing vampiric Tania to death, and branding Klove with a white-hot sword. He also impales Paul on a metal hook, and sends legions of bats to massacre an entire church of women and children; even the story is set in motion by a bat vomiting blood on the Count’s remains. Away from the general gore, Hind's screenplay is a plethora of nonsense: for example, the opening of "The Angry Mob" burning down the castle doesn't seem to have disrupted the interior. Director Roy Ward Baker’s preparatory work apparently drew him to actually read Dracula, inspiring the filmmaker to add an "unprecedented" shot from the novel of The Count scaling his castle’s wall which he claimed was his “only contribution … to the Dracula cycle” (obviously he had never seen DRAKULA ISTANBUL’DA, filmed seventeen years previously). In fact, the film’s “only contribution” is to have the most laughable bouncing rubber bats in British horror film history.

During the climax, Jenny Hanley's cleavage is ravaged by a vampire bat, eager to tear away her crucifix necklace. This "blood on breasts" sequence would have been unheard of for less liberal times.

During the audio commentary on Optimum's R2 DVD of 2006 - woodenly moderated by Marcus Hearn - Lee and Baker wax lyrical about the classic cinema dictum "less is more," views that particularly contradict the nature of the film they are viewing. Comments on The Count's shift towards frenzied violence are almost an afterthought, with the duo more lost in their silver screen legacies and after-dinner like recollections. Its a particularly meandering and name-dropping vocal from Lee, who quite rightly highlights the standard of actors Hammer cast in bit parts (here, Michael Ripper as the innkeeper, Michael Gwynn as a priest and Bob Todd as the Burgomaster), but he also makes the amazing statement that not only is Dracula's stabbing of Tania nonsensical, that such a scene is troublesome in the annals of influencing true crime.