No Sex Please, We're British

WHITE CARGO (1973)
LET'S GET LAID! (1977)

Even Countess of Cleavage Imogen Hassall and David Jason as an everyman hero can't save the Walter Mitty-inspired WHITE CARGO.

BESET by funding problems and dwindling audiences, the British film industry of the 1970's also had to combat small screen competition from television and domestic video. Furthermore, Margaret Thatcher's first Conservative government cut state funding on productions. Existing in their own parallel universe, British sex comedies of the 1970's are renowned to be unsexy and unfunny affairs, but here are two chronically inadequate examples. Fanatically popular throughout the decade, this sub-genre existed in Britain's most troublesome cinematic period thanks to two major plot devices that required little budget: the cheapest special effect of all - i.e. female breasts - and slapstick.

Ray Selfe's WHITE CARGO - re-written by David McGillivray after The Goodies rejected the initial treatment scripted especially for them - casts David Jason in his first major screen role. Underachiever Albert Toddey (Jason) visits a Soho strip joint owned by Dudley Fox (Raymond Cross) and meets showgirl Stella (Imogen Hassall). Stella is actually an undercover policewomen, and the club is selling girls into white slavery to an unnamed Arabian oil state. A number of scenes are played out twice - firstly with Albert's tendency to fantasise himself as a heroic, slick government agent (initially to be shot in 3D), and secondly the rather less glamorous real outcome. Making use of several recycled sets from the Peter O'Toole classic THE RULING CLASS, WHITE CARGO at least has an interesting cast; in a part originally intended for Ian Lavender, Jason's enthusiasm about his star turn allegedly diminished rapidly during the shoot, and the underused Hassall is the glue attempting to hold the film together. David Prowse also appears as club heavy Harry, who thinks nothing of trading his girlfriend in to the slave market for cash-in-hand.

The only sexual charge in LET'S GET LAID! is created by Anna Chen - as 'Oriental Girl' - astride Robin Askwith in a car atop Hampstead Heath.

James Kenelm Clarke's LET'S GET LAID! also has an unnecessarily convoluted plot and fantasy sequences. Bringing together the vanguard of British sex talent - Robin Askwith, Fiona Richmond and a bit-part from Linda Hayden - demobbed wallflower Gordon Laid (Askwith) is given the key to a Mayfair apartment owned by a rich cousin. Laid aids actress Maxine Lupercal (Richmond) in a flat across the hall in disposing of the body of a secret agent, and inadvertently pockets the dead man's cigarette lighter which is actually the potentially explosive PJ46 device. Amidst a police hunt, the attentions of international crook Moncrieff Dovecraft (Anthony Steel) and the complication that Laid has a double in thespian Jimsy Deveroo, the fantasy inserts make no attempt to follow the dull narrative, which includes Richmond cavorting as a Nazi Miss Whiplash.

Bloodsucking Freaks

INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED (1970)

In a non-speaking role, Imogen Hassall is bewitching 
as the leader of a perversion-driven vampire cult.

DIRECTLY after THE BLACK TORMENT in 1964, director Robert Hartford-Davis and cinematographer Peter Newbrook quit Compton and formed Titan. After making the musical GONKS GO BEAT, Michael Bentine's THE SANDWICH MAN and Norman Wisdom vehicle PRESS FOR TIME, the studio turned out their lasting legacy in 1968 with the seedy CORRUPTION. A brutal picture which sees Peter Cushing as a surgeon killing in order to restore his young fiancée's facial tissue, Cushing departed to make another low point in his filmography with Tigon's THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR. Titan, however, went on to nearly complete their greatest folly, a take on Simon Raven's novel Doctors Wear Scarlet - INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED.

If you ever wanted to see Patrick Macnee and Imogen Hassall ride donkeys in a British vampire picture, then INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED is the film for you. Richard Fountain (Patrick Mower) - an Oxford don and the Foreign Secretary's son - falls into the clutches of Chriseis (Hassall) while researching ancient Minoan rites in Greece. Chriseis heads a non-supernatural bloodsucking cult of socialites who murder innocents as a form of sexual perversion. In an attempt to avoid a scandal, a search party flies to Mikonos in a desperate search for Richard, which contains Major Derek Longbow (Macnee), British Foreign Office assistant Tony Seymore (Alexander Davion), friend Bob Kirby (Johnny Sekka), and Fountain's somnambulant fiancée Penelope (Madeleine Hinde). After apparently halting the cult's influence over Richard, the don returns to his sheltered life, but we discover that the marks left by Chriseis still resonate.

Also known as BLOODSUCKERS and FREEDOM SEEKER, INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED is based on Simon Raven's 1960 novel Doctors Wear Scarlet. Raven - a Luciferian provocateur who was also a journalist and television writer - rejected faith and possessed a deep contempt for the English unwillingness to offend.

According to David Pirie's The Vampire Cinema, INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED was a long-gestating project of Terence Fisher, who was never able to interest Hammer in its subversive content. With the rights acquired by Titan and Hartford-Davis at the helm, it was the beginning of a painful production and editing process. While shooting in Cyprus funds were exhausted, leaving the picture unfinished. With a compressed narrative and lame narration introduced to cover the cracks, the director disowned the picture and prints only exist under a directorial psydonym (Michael Burrowes) or with no director credit at all. The ending was also shot against Hartford-Davis' wishes, where Kirby and Seymore go to Fountain's coffin to administer a stake through his heart. This climax vilifies the rest of the film, which had explained vampirism as a psychological distortion, rather than reverting to cliché. Also jarring is an extraordinary six-minute sequence of a hallucinogenic orgy - including an uncredited Francoise Pascal - which was either cut or excised completely for overseas prints.

Mower’s character is revealed as impotent - and possibly bisexual - making vampirism his only means of satisfaction. Richard's liberating climactic outburst at a Oxford dinner not only frees him from the stifling academic system championed by provost Dr Walter Goodrich (Peter Cushing) - Penelope's father - but also plays as a rousing counter-culture statement of the times ("the thieves who come to take our souls ... smooth deceivers in scarlet gowns.") As Tim Lucas points out in his Video Watchdog review, INCENSE would play well with Fisher's THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, where Mower plays another privileged upper class individual who falls under the power of persuasion. As well as Cushing - who is used far too fleetingly - Edward Woodward appears as an anthropologist who tries to explain vampirism where the drinking of blood serves as surrogate orgasm.

Prehistoric Pap

WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH (1970)

"Enter an age of unknown terrors, pagan worship and virgin sacrifice..." The "gigantic spectacle" of WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH.

AFTER the world-wide success of ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., Hammer's first cash-in was actually completed while the Raquel Welch extravaganza was still in post-production: PREHISTORIC WOMEN. Even though the studio flirted with forgotten lands in 1967's THE LOST CONTINENT - whose monsters acted more as a prelude to Amicus' lost world pictures - Hammer's follow-up to ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. proper didn't appear until late 1970. Developed into a screenplay by director Val Guest from a treatment by novelist J.G. Ballard, WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH begins with Kingsor (Patrick Allen) sacrificing blonde virgin Sanna (auburn-haired Victoria Vetri, sporting a blonde wig). She is saved when winds sweep her over a cliff and into the arms of Tara (Robin Hawdon), a man from a fishing tribe. Tara welcomes Sanna into his clan and they fall in love, much to the annoyance of Ayak (Imogen Hassall). When the moon appears in the sky for the first time the tribe panics, with Ayak accusing Sanna of witchcraft. The outsider flees into the jungle where she is forced to survive amid prehistoric beasts, which includes being accepted by a mother dinosaur as one of her own hatchlings.

The real curse of ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. was that Hammer found itself unable to afford the star attraction of Welch, or control the runaway success of its stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen was engaged with THE VALLEY OF GWANGI, and suggested Ohio-born SPFX creator Jim Danforth to lead Hammer's visual effects department on the picture. Danforth would eventually be rewarded with an Academy Award nomination, but only after an exhausting association with his employers. With little time for location work, a decreasing deadline and spiralling budget, he was aided by Roger Dicken, David Allen and Brian Johnson. Using real-life lizards and alligators as padding, the production still had to lose two major effects sequences: one involved a horde of giant ants, the other two pterodactyls. Against this backdrop of blood, sweat and tears, Danforth delivers a number of memorable scenes, such as villagers fighting off a rampaging Plesiosaur with flames, and a Triceratops pursuing a caveman to the edge of a precipice.

Imogen Hassall is jealous cave girl Ayak. Referred to as "the countess of cleavage" because of her revealing outfits worn at film premieres, the actress was a regular performer in 60s and 70s cinema and television. In 1980 - at the age of 38 - she committed suicide at her Wimbledon home by overdosing on Tuinal tablets.

The Canary Islands give WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH an expansive glow that belies such juvenile fantasy. As with ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., there is no intelligible dialogue, only a series of grunts and gesticulations; in Wayne Kinsey's book Hammer Films: The Elstree Studio Years, Guest states "I invented and wrote a whole new language. I actually thought if we could do this really believing in what you're doing we may get away with it." Ballard said that he was "very proud that my first screen credit was for what is, without doubt, the worst film ever made." Why such an experimental new wave science fiction author would become involved with an immature Hammer dinosaur picture has remained a mystery to this day.

The movie is also hindered by 21-year-old Vetri, hardly an equal to the iconic Raquel Welch. In Tom Weaver's interview book Double Feature Creature Attack, Guest describes the starlet as "a nitwit" and "a real nothing, and a very strange mixed up lady." As Angela Dorian, Vetri was Playboy's Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and subsequently the 1968 Playmate of the Year. Before donning the fur bikini, Vetri turned down the title role of Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA, and worked mainly in television - including BATMAN and STAR TREK. But she did have a bit part in Roman Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY, and later appeared in sexploitation entries INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS and GROUP MARRIAGE.

Victoria Vetri - aka Angela Dorian - in Playboy September 1967 finery.

Vetri made headlines in 2010 for shooting her fourth husband, Bruce Rathgeb. A year later the charge against her was reduced from attempted murder to attempted voluntary manslaughter, to which she pleaded no contest. The judge sentenced her to nine years in state prison. To further the Polanski connection, the model/actress was friends with Sharon Tate, and following Tate's horrific murder the Polish director gave Vetri his own gun - a Walther PPK - for self protection, a weapon alleged to have been used four decades later in the Rathgeb incident.

Family Values

MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY (1969)
MUM & DAD (2008)
THE CHILDREN (2008)

“In a happy family you must always have rules:” MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY.

HOME-BASED dysfunction and horror go together like Norman Bates and Mother. The PSYCHO template has divided into two distinct, transatlantic lines; while Britain produced Freddie Francis' MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY and Pete Walker's FRIGHTMARE, America's more influential variant came out of Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and Wes Craven's THE HILLS HAVE EYES. The family is problematic in horror because of repressed violence and sexuality; perhaps this is why US films are more powerful, as they concentrate on more baroque situations and also act in direct contradiction of the American Dream. Francis' film discussed here has a more underlying, sardonic approach typical of British fare.

MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY tells of a wealthy family who live in an isolated, Victorian mansion. Their lives are devoted to acting out a fantasy from which they never go out of character, and rarely speak in any way other than baby talk. They are free from the divisiveness of growing up and puberty; even though "children" Sonny (Howard Trevor) and Girly (Vanessa Howard) are in their twenties, they sleep in giant cribs and dress like sixth-formers. Sonny and Girly regularly seek out loners to bring back to their house to play "The Game"; when the "new friends" refuse, they are "sent to the angels." One day, they kill a male prostitute (Michael Bryant)'s girlfriend (Imogen Hassall) and convince him that he was responsible. And after bringing him back to their house, he seduces each of the women and turns the family against itself. It’s a playful allegory of the breakdown of the nuclear family of the 1950s as a result of the free love movement of the 1960s, and has echoes of PEEPING TOM as Sonny films his killings for Mumsy (Ursula Howells) and Nanny (Pat Heywood), and even predates THE SHINING's axe through the door and FATAL ATTRACTION's cooking pot scene. But it’s a tedious affair hindered by weak casting: Bryant, in particular, is totally out of depth to convince that he has any sexual prowess to control the females.

MUM & DAD is the sickest movie ever to bear the BBC Films logo.

Openly acknowledging its debts to MUMSY and FRIGHTMARE, Steven Sheil’s micro-budgeted MUM & DAD is the story of Heathrow Airport cleaner Lena (Olga Fedori), a Polish girl estranged from her family. She is befriended by chatty co-worker Birdie (Ainsley Howard) and her mute brother Elbie (Toby Alexander), and when Lena misses her last bus home, the Pole accompanies them to their nearby house - an undesirable suburban semi under the Heathrow flight pass - where she is drugged and chained. Birdie and Elbie's parents - known only as Mum (Dido Miles) and Dad (Perry Benson) - abduct surrogate children who are forced to co-operate in thieving from airport luggage, and subject them to gruelling ordeals as they are forced into the deranged family unit.

MUM & DAD is a brave attempt at British Torture Porn under the shroud of Fred and Rosemary West, and works both as a study of the English underclass and as symbolic of the way Britain exploits foreign labour. Benson's Dad is a beer-bellied, thick-spectacled, brutal letch, and the sight of his flabby, naked arse is only championed by what may well be cinema's most disgusting masturbation scene involving a slab of bloody, unidentifiable meat. Miles is equally unsettling as the outwardly warm maternal figure, and Howard's cheery performance adds another dimension to the depravity (though a secret, drooling child hidden on the top floor - perhaps Mum and Dad’s true offspring - is the most grimmest element).

HOLLYOAKS veteran Hannah Tointon plays a teenage daughter caught between bickering parents and murdering minors in THE CHILDREN.

Tom Shankland’s THE CHILDREN also offers an off-kilter look at family life. Set in an isolated, (slightly) snowbound locale over a New Year family get-together, the children soon become sick and turn into killers; the smugness of the upper middle-class parents is slowly peeled away by their children's alternate whining pleas for comfort and vicious attacks. While ostensibly well meaning and providing their kids with encouragement, the two sets of parents are too caught up in their own concerns to detect the problems with the increasingly broody infants, and even when realisation finally hits, they still allow prejudices and assumptions to blind them.

The subgenre of monstrous minors never appeared onscreen until after World War II; strictly speaking, they arrive in the 1950s, following the displacement of so many children whose potential where uncertain. THE CHILDREN draws from a rich legacy of problem child cinema - THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW to name only two - in exploring fears of innocence lost. Unlike these supernatural forebears, however, Shankland's film is seated in the present's fixation with illness and pandemics. The reason for the children’s behaviour is not explained - a virus is the most likely, and there is a playful reference to MMR jabs - and the dinner scene, where the tide turns, is an undoubted highlight. While the killings tend towards the OMEN-styled novelty variety (such as a lethal combination of toboggan and garden rake), they are nevertheless carried out with infectious, ghoulish glee.