Introduction: Devils Bit Scabious

Anyone who enjoys solitary country walks will be familiar with the signs of an approaching winter, as trees lose their leaves and wildflowers begin to die back, petals disappearing as seed-heads slowly shrivel and decay.  But there are a few notable late-flowering species which perversely buck this trend, remaining in bloom into October (or, in exceptionally mild years, even November): Sneezewort, Soapwort, Fennel, Thrift, Pennyroyal, Devils Bit Scabious, Yellow Toadflax, Meadow Saffron and several others all lurk defiantly in our fields and hedgerows as the days grow shorter, enlivening the grey landscape with little bursts of colour until the first frosts arrive to finally blast them from existence for another year.  By then of course most walkers have long since given up, and often never get to see them at all.  But they are there, if you care to look for them.

Succisa pratensis (Devils Bit Scabious) at Lavernock Point, Penarth on 25^th November 2018

© Annie Irving

The British horror film boom lasted for eighteen glorious years, from the release of Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein in May 1957 through to the final ‘costume gothic’ (featuring the same star and writer-producer), Tyburn’s Legend of the Werewolf in Oct 1975.  By that point low-budget British exploitation of any type was on its last legs, as the market had become swamped with cheap product that US distributors were no longer interested in acquiring, domestic audiences appeared to be in terminal decline, and the dire economic outlook (thanks to the Oil Crisis and resulting UK stock-market crash of winter 73-74) meant production finance was near-impossible to obtain anyway.  The (symbolic) final entry of any real significance, Hammer’s modern-dress Dennis Wheatley adaptation To the Devil – a Daughter appeared in Feb 1976, and thereafter (barring a few belated offerings from Pete Walker / Norman Warren etc) all was silence.  Or so conventional wisdom has it.

The established theatrical release-format for Brit horror was the Double Bill: two c.90 minute co-features sharing roughly equal billing.  Legend of the Werewolf was thus supported by a reissue of Hammer’s Vampire Circus, while To the Devil – a Daughter was similarly twinned with earlier Wheatley classic The Devil Rides Out.  But by this point the double-bill itself (an industry standard from the mid-50s) was likewise running out of steam.  Cautious exhibitors (fretful of further alienating their already dwindling audiences) fought hard against any changes, with Hammer’s Jimmy Carreras arguing “The public will always patronise the theatre with the double bill and stop away from the house that is showing merely the single feature. They will shop for the full three-and-a-half hour programme” – but the fact was that main features (particularly the emerging wave of US blockbusters) were getting longer and longer, and it was increasingly unnecessary (and indeed impractical) to support them with a British ‘B’.  All that was now required was a fairly perfunctory ‘Full Supporting Programme’ comprising a Short and accompanying Trailers.  But few UK filmmakers were then actually MAKING Shorts (or at least, fiction Shorts) as the form had long been considered economically unviable.  Catch 22.

We need to pause briefly here to consider the commercial context.  There were historically three chief planks of state-support for British film production: the Quota, the NFFC and the Eady Levy.  The Quota was introduced in 1927 (via the original Cinematograph Films Act) and enforced a rising minimum quota of British films for rental and exhibition – by the 1970s this was fixed at 30% of all screenings.  The NFFC (National Film Finance Corporation) was introduced in 1948 and was essentially a state-owned ‘film bank’ offering interest-free loans to British producers.  Finally the Eady Levy – from its original Treasury sponsor Sir Wilfred Eady – was a tax on cinema seats first introduced in 1950 (becoming law in 1957), channelled into a British Film Production Fund for redistribution to producers.  All three were considered vital resources, particularly for the independent sector.

Defining our terms, the 1960 Films Act classified a Short film as being 33 mins or less – films between 34-71 mins were officially Second Features (or ‘Featurettes’), while anything 72 mins or over was a First Feature.  This distinction was important, as the Act stipulated Shorts could receive ‘Double Eady’ – ie twice as much as their longer counterparts.  However at this point the overwhelming bulk of such cash was going straight to the two main Circuits’ rival in-house ‘cinemagazine’ series: Rank’s Look at Life and ABC’s Pathe Pictorial, both of which screened weekly until 1969 (and were only reluctantly cancelled once TV documentaries rendered them obsolete).  A further basic problem for aspiring Short producers was their low circuit booking-rates – a typical mid-60s Short might cost £2,000 or more to make, but distributors usually bought them for a flat fee of c.£700, meaning they rarely had a chance of covering their costs.   Small wonder so few were produced or screened before the 1970s.

In May 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power implacably opposed to ANY form of state subsidy, whilst simultaneously keen to encourage industry via dedicated tax-breaks.  In August her Chancellor Nigel Lawson thus introduced a major change to Capital Allowances, meaning film could be treated as plant or machinery for tax purposes – in combination with complex ‘Sale and Leaseback’ deals this briefly made British films a very attractive investment for City speculators, though abuse of the system soon led to Lawson tightening the rules, dramatically reducing rebates from 1984 before dropping the scheme altogether in 1986.  Meanwhile his colleague Kenneth Baker’s landmark Films Act of May 1985 summarily abolished the Quota, NFFC and Eady Levy in one fell swoop, abruptly terminating almost six decades of continuous state support.  So, to summarise, there was a short-lived but significant period c.1976-1983 when British Short films fleetingly became a commercial proposition, as a developing gap in the market was conveniently matched by suddenly available production finance.

There were really only a handful of basic Short-categories during this period: traditional travelogues / topical documentaries, musical featurettes (generally a live performance by a popular band) or fiction films in one of the established genres (comedy, crime, horror, sexploitation etc).  This could make for some very unlikely pairings.  Jaws (1975), the first of the smash-hit US blockbusters that transformed modern cinema, was released with Philip Hill’s Royal Windsor, a sedate 25-minute tour of the park and castle, while Star Wars (1977) was in contrast packaged with Stanley Marks’ Fast Company, a lively look at the emerging UK motorcycle-scrambling scene.  Horror meanwhile suddenly found itself tied up with just about ANYTHING: Dario Argento’s unforgettable Suspiria (1977) was supported by an even more terrifying prospect – Tony Maylam’s Genesis In Concert, while David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) went out with Ray Selfe’s Can I Come Too?, an indescribable Music Hall sex-farce starring Charlie Chester and Rita Webb.  Viewer’s heads must have exploded long before Louis Del Grande’s.

But all these offerings, regardless of basic quality, featured a sweet double-hit for their sponsors: they both counted towards the relevant cinema’s Quota tally AND paid double-Eady.  For UK shorts paired with a US blockbuster that could mean serious cashback…. for the US renters who’d cynically acquired them for that very purpose.  Indeed this shameless manipulation of a system originally intended to support struggling British producers provoked increasingly bitter criticism which eventually led to its downfall.  [One infamous example is Richard Gayer’s cult London skateboarding doc Hot Wheels (1978), which Paramount bought for pennies then paired with Grease to huge profit].  However, it did mean that these modest little films crucially GOT SEEN, often by audiences exponentially larger than similar full-length features could have hoped to attract back in the days of the old-skool Double Bill.

The definitive reference resource for UK Cinema remains Denis Gifford’s mammoth British Film Catalogue, which first appeared in 1973.  The second (Nov 1986) edition contains a ‘Part Two’ addendum (covering the years 1971-85) which opens with a crisp Introduction worth briefly quoting: “Short film production increased towards the end of the period, but unfortunately this coincided with a decline of interest on behalf of the trade press.  The only remaining film trade journal Screen International decided to no longer review shorts, and the only magazine of record the Monthly Film Bulletin followed suit.  In consequence, few indeed are the published details available to the researcher, and it has proved to be as difficult to uncover information on the fiction shorts of recent years as it was to uncover details of shorts made eighty years ago…”

Three decades on (and despite the intervening appearance of the internet) this observation still largely applies.  A methodical trawl through Gifford’s ‘Part Two’ turns up about 26 Shorts 1976-83 falling within the Horror (or more accurately ‘Macabre Thriller’) genre, and the remainder of this essay will try and discuss them.  ‘Try’ is the operative word here.  Many of these films have not been seen since their original theatrical runs forty years ago, and several are now potentially Lost as a result (though it’s likely prints of most will be mouldering away forgotten in the corner of some dusty vault).  In the case of currently unavailable titles, reconstruction will be attempted via contemporary (MFB) reviews, or occasionally more recent (IMDB) reminiscences, or (in the absence of either) by scraping together every last crumb of detail from the web as a whole.  But let’s begin with a handy Table summarising our raw material:

Note that all the details above (with the exception of the ‘Supporting’ column) are taken from Gifford for consistency.  The dates thus do not always reflect actual release, and can sometimes relate to either DTI registration or subsequent BBFC certification.  US distributors appearing are Fox, CIC (Paramount-Universal-MGM) and UIP (ditto, with the further addition of United Artists), while C-E-W is transatlantic combine Columbia-EMI-Warner.  All the other companies featured are British independents.  Looking at the films individually:

1)  Face of Darkness (1976)

This is the longest film on our list, being technically a featurette at just under an hour in length.  It now seems definitively Lost, with the handful of available critiques apparently based on memories of its original 1976 screening.  Writer-director-producer Ian Lloyd has just one other credit on his CV: The Overdue Treatment (1973) a documentary about abortion narrated by Joan Bakewell.  Face of Darkness was speculatively picked up by newly-formed indie distributor Brent Walker as a handy cut-price support, and there are only three reviews worth quoting, the first (the sole contemporary piece) being Richard Combs’s MFB notice which opens with the usual terse plot-summary:

“In an effort to revive his failing career, and still plagued by memories of his wife’s murder at the hands of terrorists, politician Edward Langdon [Lennard Pearce] introduces a public order bill in Parliament which would reinstitute the death penalty.  Advised by his friend Philip [Jonathan Elsom] that the bill has little chance of passing unless some violent incident stirs public anger, Langdon sets about creating such an outrage.  From his studies in the occult he learns how to raise one of the undead: a man tried during the Inquisition and buried alive.  The Undead [David McAllister] agrees to help Langdon carry out his plan, but warns that since Langdon did not complete the ritual by biting off the ghoul’s tongue, he need obey the politician only for as long as he wishes.  He approaches the intended victim, schoolgirl Angie [Susan Banahan] by first casting a spell over her mother Eileen [Gwyneth Powell], then plants a bomb in Angie’s schoolyard.  The resulting slaughter ensues the passage of Langdon’s bill.  The Undead then appears before a fish-market porter [Roger Bizley] resembling a peasant attendant on the original Inquisition, who chases and captures the ghoul.  Taken to a psychiatrist [John Bennett], who resembles the priest who once tried him, the Undead escapes his modern inquisitor and returns to Langdon, promising he will now always be with him.

“An ineffably pretentious horror film which wraps its slight political theme and motivation – a fading MP attempts to bring himself to prominence by whipping up a law and order scandal – inside an indulgently moony evocation of the spiritual darkness into which his ambition leads him, David McAllister provides an effectively atmospheric presence as the Undead, though the cross-cutting framework which equates the attempts of medieval inquisitor and modern psychiatrist to exorcise his evil remains a glib and juvenile fancy.”

Lennard Pearce, Jonathan Elsom, David McAllister, John Bennett

Kim Newman writing in Fenton & Flint’s ‘Ten Years of Terror’ (2001) is even more impatient: “… an obviously amateur production that somehow made its way onto a real screen [with] all the hallmarks we’ve come to recognise of the hand-to-mouth movie: a tiny cast, no interior sets, mumbled performances, poor sound recording, endless talk, a great deal of wandering around outdoors, contrivances to keep away from crowds, and especially murky photography.   You could be misled into thinking from the plot that this is an action-packed mix of the supernatural and gritty politics, but it’s actually a very pokey film.  Almost all of it consists of lengthy conversations, with Langdon’s sidekick Philip hanging about solely to have things explained at length to him…  Given that it was rare for British horror films to touch on politics at all (and that terrorist campaigns were breaking news in the 70s) Face of Darkness stakes out distinctive territory.  It’s just a shame that it’s such a drab little effort….”

Rather more positive is ‘Chaplinpadua’ writing in 2007 on IMDB:  “The politician Langdon, played by Lennard Pearce (‘Grandad’ from Only Fools and Horses), whose petulant face is well suited to the role, plans to commandeer a zombie, instruct it to bomb a school, manipulate the outrage, reinstate capital punishment and thus avenge his wife’s murder.  Perhaps not surprisingly, eldritch scenes ensue.  Using an antique map and ancient text, Langdon locates and disinters the wooded unmarked grave of a medieval heretic and then administers ‘the kiss of life’ to his subject in a very unsettling sequence.  Later, his charge appears in Battersea, dapper in white polo neck and occult medallion, to perform a sinister and charming mime for the children…   The scenes during which David Allister (‘The Undead’) is psycho-analysed are a little too long, although not without humour – more time could have been taken with the editing perhaps.  The pure illogicality is very appealing.   Although this film is very far from being a run of the mill B movie, it came into the category of quota quickie (mainly because of the running time) and was released as part of a double-bill with the Canadian film Death Weekend.  Lovingly made in and around London, with vivid outdoor photography (maybe a necessity given the budget, but nonetheless beautiful) and a subtle, understated score by Martin Jacklin, this unusual and atmospheric film deserves to be made available.”

2)  Red (1976)

This film waited over two years to get a release, registered in Dec 1976 but not screened (as support to Damien: Omen II) until Feb 1979.  Director Astrid Frank was born Eike Pulwer in Berlin in 1945 and started out as a child star on German TV, but by the early 70s was reduced to working in British sexploitation.  The quality of her resulting roles encouraged her to finance, write and co-produce her own directorial calling-card, but by the time it finally appeared her career was virtually over.  There are just two notable reviews, the first being David McGillivray’s contemporary MFB notice:

” A [c18th] painter [Ferdy Mayne], whose life has been devoted to the pursuit of beauty, stops to pass the night at a country house.  Here he meets three troubadours [Mark Wynter, Gabrielle Drake, Roy North] who serenade him while he sketches the girl’s head.  The painter retires to his room, falls asleep while studying his drawing, and is awakened by a disturbance which proves to be a mock-trial.  The painter watches with growing horror as the two men accuse the girl of a number of crimes (including immorality and the bewitchment of men), bind her to a table, make love to her, and finally decapitate her.  The next morning the painter is telling a servant [Astrid Frank] about his trouble sleeping when the girl appears apparently unharmed.  Unsure, however, whether the band on her neck is a scar or a ruby necklace, the painter hurries from the house, leaving behind a drawing of a bloody severed head.

“Disappointed by the low standard of British short film production, the young German actress Astrid Frank made Red with £30,000 she raised herself.  Laudable intentions, which have unfortunately resulted in a film which looks like a pilot for almost any Hammer horror of the sixties.  The strengths of this style are occasionally well-emulated – the indefinable air of menace in the scene where a spectral coach rumbles past the distinguished personage of Ferdy Mayne – but are soon overpowered by cliched shots of the full moon, skulls, and curtains billowing in the wind.  Apparently lurking beneath the gothic exterior of Red is a feminist message about the futility of the pursuit of beauty, but this is ill-served by the faintly risible episode in which two former pop-singers enact a grave, full-frontal ritual with Gabrielle Drake’s severed head.  The presence in an eighteenth-century setting of a television aerial and the Victorian music hall song Twiggy Vous? might be taken to indicate the timelessness of the theme or the confusion of the director.”

 Astrid Frank, Ferdy Mayne, Mark Wynter, Gabrielle Drake, Roy North

…. and the second, Stephen Lambe’s vivid IMDB recollection from 2005:

“Though I’ve only seen this film once – and then over 25 years ago – much of its detail has stayed with me due to its erotic content, seen at a time when (as a 16 year old) I was very impressionable.  I’ll run through the plot, as, at a guess, I doubt anyone will get a chance to see it.  I saw the film in Guildford, probably in 1979 – it was a short feature in support of the dreadful Omen II (William Holden etc).  This was at a time when shorts were not infrequent in support of a main film in the UK.  I went with a group of friends one afternoon, and this was an ‘X’ so we were over a year too young to get into the film – the first time I had done this.  Red was written and directed by German starlet Astrid Frank, who makes a brief appearance as a maid with a low neckline.  Essentially, the plot is this: A painter is entertained by a group of three troubadours – two males (one played – hilariously – by Roy North who at the time was undergoing some celebrity as straight man to children’s TV puppet Basil Brush) and one female, played by the utterly delectable Gabrielle Drake.  I remember a rather awful musical sequence a few minutes in.

That night, the unseen painter witnesses a horrible ritual. There is something of an extended orgy, with Gabrielle (extensively nude) tied up and ravished by her two colleagues, who then murder her and cut off her head (the head was quite chilling, I remember).  The painter rushes back to his room, and paints the gory scene.  That morning, Gabrielle seems alive and well – except for a ruby red scar around her neck!  Quite a twist, eh? (ahem).  I can’t tell you whether this was any good or not – it probably wasn’t, and it certainly couldn’t have been made in today’s mainstream – but the film had a profound effect on me as a teenager during that awkward emergence from puberty…”

3)  Take An Easy Ride (1977)

Possibly the best-known title on our list, this acquired a growing cult-rep over the early 2000s prior to an official DVD release (from Odeon Entertainment) in 2010.  A peculiar pseudo-documentary mix of Public Information film, grittily mean-spirited sexploitation and outright horror, it actually began life as a TV-doc warning of the (self-evident) dangers of hitch-hiking, deliberately in the tradition of such earlier ‘exposes’ as Derek Ford’s The Wife Swappers (1969).   Director Kenneth Rowles (b.1945) started out as a runner at Merton Park Studios before becoming an editor, and later dabbled in production with Venom (1971) and Ups and Downs of a Handyman (1975), though Take An Easy Ride is his only directorial credit.  Quite astonishingly it is also the only film on our list currently available on Amazon Prime, so coverage here can be restricted to a couple of representative reviews, the first once again being Richard Combs in the MFB:

“A number of hitch-hikers are questioned about their treatment in various countries (two Americans warn of the dangers of hitch-hiking in the Southern states), and some lorry drivers express their views about hitch-hikers (they are wary of travelling with uninsured passengers, which in the event of an accident could cost them their jobs).  A series of stories is intercut, illustrating different aspects of hitch-hiking.  Careful about the people from whom she accepts lifts, Suzanne [Ina Skriver] tells how she was taken in by a pleasant couple [Alan Bone and Tara Lynn] in an expensive car, who treated her to a meal and then insisted that they all put up at a motel for the night, during which they tried to draw her into group sex.  Two girls [Pauline Bate and ‘Christianne’], travelling to the Ashford Pop Festival are picked up by an elderly trucker [Charles Erskine], who ignores the leering comments of his younger colleagues at a roadside cafe, and eventually drops the girls safely at the festival.  Also determined to go to the Festival, young Mary Ford [Margaret Heald] is given travelling money by her father [Derrick Slater] (although her mother [Jeanne Field] disapproves of her going at all), but is persuaded by her friend Anne [Helen Bernat] that they should hitch-hike – the pair are picked up by a strange young man with a glove-compartment full of dirty magazines, who eventually drives off the road and attacks them.  Two other young girls, Pam and Ruth [Gennie Nevinson and Stella Coley], having just stolen money for drugs and feeling the need for a change of scene, hitch a ride with a young man [Terry Francis], then hold him up and abruptly kill him.  In hospital, the Fords are told that their daughter will be blind, while her attacker is later seen picking up the two girls previously driven down by the elderly trucker.

“A series of meanderingly sensational cautionary tales – with a hysterical word of warning for both gullible hitch-hikers and charitable motorists, and a far more serious warning for cinemagoers lured by sociological pretences into accepting such tired old retreads on titillatory themes as this.”

Ken Rowles, 1976 double-bill poster, 1981 video, 2010 DVD

The most thorough contemporary overview of the film is in Simon Sheridan’s ‘Keeping the British End Up’ (2001) which features some input from its director::

“It was going to be made as a TV documentary for what was then Southern Television… I was given a budget of just £10,000, but while I was still shooting it the rushes were seen by David Grant, and he said to me ‘Would you be interested in it playing in one of my cinemas?’  He was obviously thinking how easy it would be to get some Eady money for it, so I said Yes, fine!  [It was actually distributed by Grant’s pal Dave Childs as support to imported German epic Erotic Young Lovers].  Grant only made one condition: the film had to contain more sex – ‘I don’t feel that I added anything to the film that cheapened it… I definitely didn’t feel compromised adding the extra sex scenes, as I was already filming a couple of things which were a bit stronger anyway…’  Shot over two weeks in summer 1974 in Doddington, Kent and on the outskirts of Leeds castle in Maidstone, Take An Easy Ride played at Grant’s recently-opened Pigalle cinema in Piccadilly Circus for an incredible 48 continuous weeks: ‘At its peak I reckon it was making about five grand a week’ claims Rowles, ‘Grant made a helluva lot of money out of that film…’

So, is it any good?  No it’s absolutely dreadful, appalling bottom-of-the-barrel exploitation principally of interest to would-be rapists.  With a witless script, abysmal acting and utter lack of morals, the film’s current ‘ironic’ cheerleaders are the type who were enthusiastically promoting Plan Nine From Outer Space forty years ago as “so bad it’s good!!!”  But Woods’s shambolic 50s sci-fi at least has its heart in the right place.  The makers of Take An Easy Ride in contrast merely have a cold eye fixed on the box-office potential of leeringly-presented sexual assault.  This is the sort of film that makes you feel like you need a shower after watching it.

4)  The Kiss – A Tale of Two Lovers (1977)

The notorious Mr Grant was also responsible for our next entry, though this one is only (supposedly) available via a few extremely dodgy illegal-download websites.  At a mere 18 mins, it is (with one exception) the shortest film on the list, playing as support to yet more foreign (Oppidan-imported) sexploitation, probably French coming-of-age melodrama The Best Way to Walk.  Its plot is borrowed from Ambrose Bierce’s classic 1890 short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and a subsequent French adaptation – La Riviere Du Hibou – won the 1963 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film, quite possibly inspiring The Kiss’s makers fourteen years later.  Our first review is again from the MFB, courtesy of John Pym:

After a langorous picnic, a couple [Barry Cranwell and Felicity Devonshire] make love.  Later, during a country walk, the hooded figure of Death [Digby Rumsey] appears and signals them to follow: perplexed, they are led through various eighteenth-century architectural follies, and finally deposited, none the wiser, on an open hillside.  The woman kisses the man, whereupon it transpires that they are in fact in a car.  The car crashes into a tree and bursts into flame.

“Kevin Pither’s camera follows the progress of his couple through the intriguing follies of Stowe school; Death, hopping athletically before them seems, however, less the Grim Reaper than some sprightly joker who leads them through a maze of false perspectives as a prelude to their unexpected end.  The Kiss remains at base a low-budget sex film (the chilly couple linger seductively over their melon and grapes), tricked out, but without sufficient depth or subtlety, as something much more solemnly portentous”.

Felicity Devonshire and Barry Cranwell (from his 1995 photographic book ‘Planet’)

The only other decent overview is (as before) from Sheridan:

“This peculiar 18-minute short was co-scripted by photographer Kevin Pither and David Grant, the latter uncharacteristically drifting into the avant-garde.  Pither originally worked as a cameraman on Ray Selfe’s numerous documentaries during the 1960s – by the following decade he had become chief projectionist at Selfe and Grant’s cinemas, but had a hankering to direct his own films.  He kept nagging Grant, and The Kiss was the curious result.  During shooting, however, Pither realised his screenplay was not all it appeared to be, and the news was broken to him by his old boss Ray Selfe: ‘I said to him, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’ve stolen the plot from another movie – it was basically a sexier variation on Incident at Owl Creek!… we ran The Kiss as a support movie at the Pigalle…  It never ran anywhere else because there was no market for that sort of film.  I don’t think anyone liked it at all.  The audience would complain… they wanted something sexy, not arty!”

The Kiss is now largely remembered as the final film of popular 70s actress / model Felicity Devonshire, one of The Sun’s very first Page 3 girls – following retirement she became a Property Tycoon, supposedly now worth c.£40m.  Barry Cranwell became an erotic photographer who published a glamour book ‘Planet: the Most Beautiful Men on the Planet’ in 1995, and may possibly be worth slightly less than £40m.  As for their hooded nemesis Digby Rumsey, we shall meet him again shortly….

5)  The Lake (1978)

Like Red, The Lake similarly had to wait well over a year for a release, eventually popping up in Feb 1980 as support to Chuck Norris actioner A Force of One.  It also sets the unhappy precedent of being the first of our Shorts not to receive an MFB notice, and the two reviews cited here are thus comparatively recent.  Part of the reason for this is that the film got a welcome one-off NFT screening in June 2012 as part of their occasional ‘BFI Flipside’ series, as the following Programme Notes indicate:

“The Flipside: Short Sharp Shocks – Panic (UK 1978. Dir James Dearden. 25min) + The Lake (UK 1978. Dir Lindsey C Vickers. 33min) + Twenty-Nine (UK 1969. Dir Brian Cummins. 26min).  Though often ignored by film historians, short horror and thriller films were in past decades a staple part of the British cinema-going experience and a chance for many directors to put complex plots to one side and instead revel in impressionistic detail, creepy atmosphere and hair-raising shocks.  Tonight we bring you three taut, terrific examples: Panic, a chilling rendition of the spooky hitchhiker yarn; The Lake, a strange story about an evil, mythic rural force; and Twenty-Nine, the tale of a man who can’t quite remember how he ended up in the mysterious flat in which he finds himself that morning, let alone what happened the night before.  Introduced by William Fowler and Vic Pratt (BFI National Archive)  Wed 13 June 2012  6:20pm NFT1”

One of the sharpest write-ups of this event was by Matthew Michael via his Lie Down To Reason blog:

“The Lake sees a young couple, Tony [Gene Foad] and Barbara [Julie Peasgood] plus their dog (the only characters) setting out on a picnic at an idyllic and isolated lake, stopping off on the way to gawp at a boarded-up murder house.  But while they stare up at the house, something else is staring down at them, and this sets the scene for half an hour of steadily mounting terror.  The lake itself is a suitably lonely location, allowing director Lindsay C. Vickers to set up some neat establishing shots of dark water and rustling undergrowth.  The young couple are, at first, entirely unaware that they are being observed.  However, the dog starts to act strangely.  And Tony goes off to investigate, leaving Barbara on her own…

Though very little actually happens for most of the running time, Vickers creates a superbly menacing atmosphere through the judicious use of point-of-view shots and sound effects.  There are two explicitly ghostly moments, one (a hand in the lake) highly effective, one (a little girl in the woods) less so, as it tends to reduce the sense of threat rather than increase it   Nevertheless, the film, like most great horror movies, works because it possesses a sense of dread and tragic inevitability as the audience waits for the horror to be unleashed on this innocent couple, whose only sin, like the protagonists of M.R. James, has been that of curiosity.  The final sequence is surprisingly action packed and well done, and the denouement, which has Dead of Night’s logic of a recurring nightmare, has been well set-up during earlier scenes.”

Gene Foad and Julie Peasgood

A similarly enthusiastic write-up on IMDB is by Trevd-22977 from 2016:

“A young couple go for a picnic beside a lake in the grounds of an empty house.  Three years before, the owner had murdered all his family, killed his animals and disappeared.  This short film is one of the scariest I have ever seen – I caught it as a short prior to a screening of ‘The Howling (1981) back in the early 1980’s in Brisbane.  It was very effective as a slow build thriller and I will never forget the scene at the end with the guy swimming out to his pet dog on the lake.  It is a real shame this has disappeared – I’ve since sought it out to no avail.  Lesser feature films have been praised as classics of the genre, but this really does deserve to be released and seen again.  The director did a TV movie “The Appointment (1981) which also had a very unsettling scene in it.  He obviously knew what he was doing and should have had a brilliant career directing thrillers – it makes me wonder how many other short films we will never get to see that are of this high quality.  This film made a huge impression on me – I rate it up with Halloween, Clownhouse, and When a Stranger Calls.  I think it is that good.”

The Lake was shot in eleven days for £28,000 – about average for a Short of the period.  Its two stars both went on to enjoy fairly steady TV careers, though Peasgood also later starred alongside horror legends Lee, Cushing, Price and Carradine in Pete Walker’s House of the Long Shadows (1983), while Foad, er, worked as a carpenter on Batman Begins (1995).  Them’s the breaks.  Director Lindsey C Vickers (b.1940) is something of an enigma, starting out with Hammer in 1970 as a Third Assistant (Taste the Blood of Dracula / Vampire Lovers / Horror of Frankenstein / Scars of Dracula) before being promoted up to Second Asst. (Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb / Vampire Circus / Amicus’s And Now the Screaming Starts).  He’s nevertheless now best-remembered for his solitary feature The Appointment (1981), a similarly eerie / off-kilter ‘fatal premonition’ mood-piece starring Edward Woodward, Jane Merrow and Samantha Weysom.  Despite boasting a genuinely unsettling atmosphere and quite stunning climax this failed to gain a UK theatrical release, possibly because it’s deliberately slow / impenetrable and the acting is rather uneven (Woodward is ok, Merrow painfully stiff, and Weysom just plain weird).  It eventually crept out on video in March 1983, and has been accumulating a steadily increasing cult-rep ever since – there’s currently a good-quality print (courtesy of ‘Shimmering Shape’) up on YouTube, so decide for yourselves.

6)  Panic (1979)

Saturday Night Fever opened in the UK in March 1978, and immediately sparked a national disco craze.  But there was a significant problem – John Badham’s original cut aimed for raw social realism, and featured much bad language, thuggish violence and a particularly nasty rape sequence.  The BBFC had no choice but to rate it ‘X’, completely excluding the younger teenage audience desperate to see John Travolta strutting his stuff.  The commercial potential of a more family-friendly version was clear, and Paramount drastically re-edited the film to remove / soften all the contentious elements (using alternate, sanitised TV-takes of the bad-language scenes for example).  Shorn of ten whole minutes, but now boasting the vital BBFC ‘A’, this revised version was released in April 1979 to a massive new audience of excited teenies.  All it needed was a suitably innocuous supporting Short.  What it got was one of the most unforgettably nasty slices of Brit-horror ever committed to film.

James Dearden contemplates traumatising a generation of young disco-fans.

In a Sept 2013 ‘Last Seen Contemporary Movie’ discussion thread on horror.com, Sicknero offered this:

“Panic (1978), a British short by director James Dearden who later went on to make several feature films including Fatal Attraction.  I first saw it when my parents took me and my sis to see Saturday Night Fever, it was the support film.  I was only ten and it scared the pants off me 🙂  Zero blood and gore, instead a suspenseful tale of a woman who, while driving on a dark, rainy night, stops to offer a lift to a creepy old woman at a bus stop. It’s on YouTube (search “Panic 1978″) if you want to know what happens…”

…which just about sums matters up.  Panic is THE archetypal British horror-short, 24 minutes of pure, undiluted skin-crawling edginess.  Unlike Saturday Night Fever it contains no controversial content at all – no violence, sex or bad language – so the BBFC were quite happy to award it an ‘A’.  Why on earth Paramount considered it a suitable companion to the blandly neutered SNF we’ll never know.  Presumably the relevant booking-manager had a sadistic sense of humour.

As with predecessor The Lake, Panic went unreviewed in the MFB, though it’s always held a certain cult rep amongst those who’ve caught it, either during its original theatrical run or subsequent late-night TV screenings.  As Sicknero comments, a print has been up on YouTube since April 2011, further widening its exposure (28k views and counting), though a slightly longer (and much better quality) version has recently been uploaded by ‘VHS Archive’.  The plot is a classic shaggy-dog-story, breathlessly recounted as gospel truth in countless school playgrounds since time immemorial.

Julie Neesam, Peter Blake, Avis Bunnage

We open on a young couple, Mandy and Paul [Julie Neesam and Peter Blake] having a late-night argument in the latter’s flat.  Mandy is leaving for a fashion-shoot, but a jealously insecure Paul doesn’t want her to go, petulantly suggesting she give up her career (and independence) to move in with him.  Mandy wearily rejects this idea (which is plainly not a new one) and walks out, leaving Paul sulking.  In just two minutes we have economically established a pervasively chilly vibe.

Mandy drives off into the London night, and – stopping at a deserted red light – is harrassed by two loutish punks [John Blundell and Ray Burdis] who drunkenly attempt to force her door open, but she accelerates away as the lights change, leaving them cursing in the road.  Now the atmosphere is actively oppressive, as our rattled heroine continues along a lonely Common road and it begins to rain heavily, water pouring down the windscreen to restrict visibility to a impressionistic blur of sodium.  Passing a solitary yellow-mackintoshed figure waiting forlornly at an isolated bus stop, she takes pity and pulls up to offer a lift.  The silent figure awkwardly clambers in – it is a dumpy old lady [Avis Bunnage] clutching a large canvas bag, who ignores her rescuer’s increasingly strained attempts at conversation, and instead just stares unnervingly at her with an unblinking intensity.

Gutterally requesting a cigarette, in the sudden flare of the match Mandy glimpses an unnaturally hairy hand, causing her to swerve violently.  Excusing herself by claiming she was avoiding a cat, she pulls up and pretends to be worried she may have damaged a back wheel, begging her sceptical passenger to get out and check.  When the old lady reluctantly climbs out into the rain, Mandy immediately speeds away without a backwards glance, leaving her stranded.  But her bag is still on the seat.

Pulling up at a callbox, Mandy phones Paul in a panic to explain her predicament – he’s unsympathetic, finding her unlikely terror at a harmless little old lady mystifying, but suggests she drives to the Police Station at the end of the Common to hand the bag in.  Grateful for such a practical solution, she agrees.  Arriving at the Station she begins to tell her story to the Duty Officer [Leonard Fenton] when his phone rings.  It is Paul, who wants to apologise for being so dismissive earlier – if Mandy is really that frightened, would she like him to drive over to her flat now and spend the night?  Again she gratefully agrees, and he rings off saying he’ll be there in twenty minutes.  Meanwhile the patient sergeant opens the abandoned bag to see if it contains any ID.  Mandy’s eyes widen in horror as he reaches inside to withdraw an enormous meat-cleaver.

Cut to Paul, driving down the same rainy Common road.  He passes a solitary yellow-mackintoshed figure trudging along the verge clutching a large canvas bag, and stops to offer a lift.  A few minutes later the car pulls up at a red light, and after a second or two the dumpy figure emerges to hobble away.  The lights change to green, but the car doesn’t move.  Cut to a high-angle shot looking down at the empty junction from above, as the lights slowly go through several cycles while the car remains motionless.  Roll Credits.

Panic, as this synopsis attempts to convey, is a stone-cold minimalist masterpiece, its quietly chilling final shot lingering unpleasantly in the mind long after other, more sensationalist efforts have faded.  All of the cast (with the exception of Neesam, who, though excellent here, barely appeared in anything else) are familiar faces, with punks Blundell and Burdis amusingly getting their just desserts later that year as Scum villains Banks and Eckersley, and Avis Bunnage a regular fixture in just about every Kitchen Sink / New Wave feature of the early 60s, from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning through to Sparrows Can’t Sing.  But – while Geoff Leach’s eerie score and Vernon Layton’s moodily saturated camerawork deserve special mention – the key name here is undoubtedly writer-director-producer James Dearden.

Dearden (b.1949) is the son of director Basil Dearden (responsible for numerous Ealing classics including Dead of Night), and actress Melissa Stribling (Mina in Hammer’s original 1958 Dracula).  His first short, The Contraption (1977) is an icily effective little eight-minute black joke in which Richard O’Brien painstakingly constructs a huge mousetrap in his cellar on which to commit suicide – its measured pace, coldly detached gaze and grim payoff all clearly anticipate Panic.  But the irony of Dearden’s career is really the film he DIDN’T direct: his forgotten 50 minute short Diversion (1980) is essentially a dry-run for Adrian Lyne’s bunny-boiling blockbuster Fatal Attraction (1987), for which Dearden only contributed the screenplay.  Later directorial efforts include A Kiss Before Dying (1991) and Rogue Trader (1999), but Panic arguably remains his masterpiece, and indeed one of the queasy highpoints of British horror.  Just ask any fifty-something disco fan.

7)  The Detour (1979)

In contrast to the relatively well-remembered Panic, The Detour is INCREDIBLY obscure, to the extent that it doesn’t even have its own IMDB entry and is missing from most versions of its creator’s CV.  Rodney Holland (1942-2009) was born in Sydney, Australia, moving to the UK in the 60s, and starting out in the film business c.1970 as a sound / dubbing editor (nominated for a 1974 BAFTA for Don’t Look Now), before moving up to full editor in 1982 (Company of Wolves etc).  The Detour (which he also wrote and produced) is his sole directorial credit.

Holland was interviewed by Christopher Gullo in 2004, and offered a few snippets on the project’s origins: “The Detour was the result of my firm decision to start making films and break into directing.  Not an easy thing to do, but I was determined to go out and make a film to start with – a break into commercials might then follow if I did it well enough.  Despite a film-school background I hadn’t secured a place on (for example) the BBC directors training course – too much competition from those fresh out of Oxbridge…. I was basically settling into a steady career in post-production, something I’d never really set out to do, but I’d always had to combine ambitions as a filmmaker with the down to earth necessities of earning a living and supporting a family….

“The ‘firm decision’ to direct a quality Short of course had to be followed up with a financial package, however tight.  My family were hoteliers on Malta, and my brother Jeremy put up the bulk of the finance from the business while also managing to persuade several Maltese citizens to contribute… Some of the investors thought that a film showing the island in all its beauty – from Neolithic temples to sunlit biblical landscapes – could only be positive, but we didn’t approach the Tourist Board, fearing constraints about making a glorified travelogue, something British cinemagoers were sick and tired of…

“[Some years later] Distributors GTO rang me and said the reels of film of The Detour were now mine, as their contract had run out.  I told GTO to deliver the cans to my cutting room in Soho where they piled up in the corridor.  Now, this was in the days when we still cut films by hand, before the non-linear digital revolution.  My dubbing editor – the guy who splits the tracks and builds the soundtrack – needed miles of ‘gash’ film stock to space-out his 35mm magnetic soundtracks, so I pointed to the mound of rusting cans outside my cutting room.  He agreed the old prints could be put to good use as Spacing…”

The Detour is now remembered for one reason and one reason alone: its Narrator.  To quote Tony Earnshaw’s June 2016 Yorkshire Post article ‘Changing Times for Trips to the Cinema’: “When I was a lad – in the previous century – it was still possible to bag a bargain at the cinema.  Those were the days of the Children’s Film Foundation and its output, of mini documentaries, news specials and cartoons… it was even possible to revel in a double-bill, snapping up two films for the price of one.  Alas, those days are long gone – double-bills are non-existent.  And the humble short subject?  Just occasionally one might emerge as superior to the main movie – way back in 1979 I saw a crime comedy called Too Many Chefs at my local ABC.  Tucked away on the poster outside the cinema was a tiny sticker advertising something called The Detour.  I saw it just that once, but I always remembered it because the voice that narrated it belonged to Peter Cushing”. 

According to Holland “[I wanted] the golden light of the Mediterranean to be counterbalanced by the voice of darkness.  Peter generously agreed to read our narration and came up to London from his home in Whitstable, Kent.  Fastidious as always he wore his white gloves for the recording…  He was helpful as ever, exploring meaning and intonation.  ‘Was that alright, dear boy?’ he would ask…”

The sole official record of The Detour seems to be Tim Pulleine’s terse MFB review:

“Malta.  During a school outing, Dominic’s [John Galdes] pet dog Rameses – which a sculptor [Adrian Rendle] has sketched for a work depicting the Egyptian dog-headed god Anubis – runs away.  While looking for the animal, Dominic visits the sculptor’s home, and on seeing the finished sculpture experiences a premonition of evil.  That night, however, he has a dream about a religious revelation at the Miraculous Grotto, and the next morning goes to the site to find Rameses unharmed.

“Laudably aiming to raise the sights of the commercial programme-filler, Rodney Holland’s film is graced by well-shot Maltese locations and a most handsome dog in the leading role.   Unfortunately the narrative is archly underdeveloped and ultimately not a little confusing.”

The brief involvement of the iconic Cushing provides a clear link – arguably the clearest one in our survey – between the glory days of British Gothic and UK Horror’s final burst of theatrical life with supporting Shorts.  Is The Detour a lost classic?  We’ll quite possibly never know.

8)  The Dumb Waiter (1979)

This is the shortest film on our list at a mere 17 minutes, but also one of the most tightly-professional.  Writer-director Robert Bierman (b.1950) made one other featurette – The Rocking Horse Winner (1983), which won that year’s BAFTA for best Short – before moving into a busy TV career, though is now chiefly remembered for his sole feature, the cultish US black comedy Vampire’s Kiss (1988) starring Nicholas Cage.  He was also famously lined up to direct the remake of The Fly (1986) before having to pull out following the tragic death of his daughter (in a car accident while on holiday in South Africa).  The Dumb Waiter eventually played as support to the equally misanthropic Pink Floyd – The Wall in July 1982.

The Dumb Waiter shares Panic’s icily forensic focus, but ultimately lacks the latter’s depth and resonance, being simply a rather nasty woman-in-terror piece redeemed by crisp direction and a typically solid lead performance from a young Geraldine James.  What limited attention it has received (once again, no MFB review) is due to its sharp anticipation of what would become standard 80s slasher-tropes, though (similar to Panic) it deploys these with notable restraint.  A good quality print has been up on YouTube (courtesy of Michael Beck) for three years, and possibly the best recent overview is Gregory Burkart’s from June 2016, on his ‘The 13th Floor’ blog:

Robert Bierman, John White, Geraldine James

“I’m going to try something a little different for this week’s column, and bring your attention to an almost-forgotten 1979 short film from UK writer-director Robert Bierman.  I’d argue that this short sums up everything that works in slasher cinema – without resorting to attention-grabbing techniques like graphic violence, sleazy exploitation or a short-attention-span editing style…  The Dumb Waiter accomplishes its tension without once spoon-feeding information to the audience: the dialogue alone – conveyed almost entirely through telephone conversations – reveals that a woman named Sally [Geraldine James] is being menaced by an nameless, faceless, black-gloved stalker [John White], who is determined to gain access to her seemingly-secure London apartment.  That’s really all there is to it… the beauty of the piece is in the way the stalker’s scheme plays out, and in how the viewer perceives the extent of the danger to Sally long before she does.  As Alfred Hitchcock so elegantly explained, suspense comes not from the shock of a bomb going off, but from the audience becoming aware of the bomb before the characters do.

“We know exactly how the stalker will gain access to the woman’s residence (it’s in the damn title after all), so we spend nearly the entire 17 minutes wondering when and how it’s going to happen.  I’m sure I’m going to catch hell from people expecting something more shocking and overtly scary, but that’s not what The Dumb Waiter is about.  Sure, our anticipation has been dulled by decades of slasher tropes in every possible permutation… but remember, this film was made in 1979, before many of those clichés existed.  The closest earlier film to approach this kind of stalker scenario was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas in 1974, which also introduced its unseen villain through a series of nightmarish phone calls.  Aiding the suspense immensely is Bierman’s predatory camera – which prowls streets and corridors and seems to spy on the protagonist at every turn – and the dark, brooding score by Colin Towns, which combines chilling synths with touches of flute (something he also used to more sombre effect in his brilliant score for The Haunting of Julia).  I know some of you are going to watch the film and say, “Is that it?” But you’re not this film’s target audience.  Frankly, as jaded as horror viewers have become, I’m wondering if that kind of audience even exists anymore… besides myself, that is.  Still, I hope I’m wrong.”

9)  Dark Water (1980)

Director Andrew Bogle is an intriguing near-blank, despite producing a clearly distinctive body of work.  His first credit Getting Out (1976) is presumably a student film (produced by the Polytechnic of Central London’s School of Photography), and he also seems to have been involved in Ken Loach’s Black Jack (1979).  In 1979 he formed production company Dragonfly with co-writer / producer Tony Grisoni and swiftly shot three shorts: Dark Water, The Inside Man and Possessions, all picked up and distributed theatrically by ITC.  His final film, Haunters of the Deep (1984) is latterly his best-known, a Cornish ghost story for the Children’s Film Foundation, recently (2013) released on a popular ‘Scary Stories’ BFI DVD compilation.

The Inside Man is a crime-thriller, outlining the calculated revenge the son of a murdered nightwatchman takes on the criminal gang responsible for his father’s death.  Martin Auty in the MFB really liked it, and his review neatly encapsulates the appeal of the form when adroitly executed: “Consolidating the skills apparent in Dragonfly’s debut short Dark Water, The Inside Man testifies to the viability and vitality of intelligent programmer material.  From the opening sequence the film swiftly sketches in the social setting and relationships which are a necessary prelude to the action.  Economy is the keynote of the script, where dialogue has often been pared down to functional one-liners, and the same thriftiness sustains Andrew Bogle’s direction: shot-by-shot the film advances its ingenious narrative, and, aided by Clive Tickner’s distinctive lighting and shooting, establishes an effective tension.  The discipline of the half-hour format and the boldness of the cutting (with sound links alone often making the transition from scene to scene) elevate this modest short above many of its generic relatives in television and testify, once again, to the importance of shorts and featurettes that dare to expect more of their audiences than the run of cinema commercials.”

Phil Davis, Gwyneth Strong, David Beames

Ten months earlier Auty had been similarly enthusiastic about Dark Water:

“Teenage friends Jo and Eddie [Gwyneth Strong and Phil Davis] are admitted to their local swimming pool although it is due to close in ten minutes.  Anxious to leave, the Manager [Tony Caunter] hands over the keys to a swimming instructor, Bob [Bruce White], and while driving away hears on the radio about an escaped murderer.  Jo and Eddie hide in the changing rooms in order to have a longer swim after the pool is closed, but in the eerie half-darkness they find Bob’s body floating face-down in the water.  Eddie leaves Jo in the cubicles and goes off to investigate.  Hearing a sinister noise, Jo wanders into the darkness only to find that Eddie has been murdered in the shower room.  In fear of her life now, she is stalked through the building by the killer [David Beames].  The Manager meanwhile returns to the pool having forgotten his wallet, and sees the lights on inside the building.  At that moment, as the killer is about to seize Jo, he falls through the ceiling and crashes fatally into the empty pool.

“Tautly plotted and expertly directed, Dark Water is an estimable short that discreetly pays its respects to Hitchcock and admirably exploits the chill atmosphere peculiar to municipal swimming pools.  The camerawork is consistently sharp, and though certain performances seem to call for closer direction (the Manager is somewhat overplayed; Jo is slightly unresponsive to the death of her boyfriend), the mood and material are ideal for the impressive young actor Phil Davis.  Overall, the film vindicates the belief that an independent British film industry can produce challenging shorts for mainstream programming.”

Dark Water seems currently unavailable, though there is some evidence a print was once up on YouTube, and a few foreign websites theoretically offer downloads.  It originally played as support to The Amityville Horror, as an (undated) interview with its co-writer Tony Grisoni (b.1952) on the Writewords website confirms: “[I studied at] what was then the Polytechnic of Central London but is now the University of Westminster (the film course is still run by the brilliant and indefatigable Joost Hunningher) and I used collages and scrapbooks to produce kind-of screenplays, but dialogue was a mystery to me – it was all pictures and music.   The first real scripts I turned out were three shorts I co-wrote with a friend, Andrew Bogle, who went on to direct them.  They were disposable romps – thrillers – which went out with feature films like the Amityville Horror and so on.  Andrew and I had both worked for Tony Garnett at the BBC as runners and then as production managers.  In fact I spent the first 10 years after college working in editing rooms, running on BBC dramas, assistant directing on music videos, production managing on a couple of documentaries [but] it was film making that has always obsessed me….”

10)  Victims (1980)

Victims is an effective (if rather self-consciously arty) short, documenting in impressionistic style a lonely and frustrated housewife’s oppressive descent into homicidal madness.  It went out as support to Escape From Alcatraz – gawd knows what Clint fans must have made of it – and a reasonable-quality print (though see some of the commentary below) is currently up on YouTube, again courtesy of ‘VHS Archive’.  Tim Pulleine in the MFB was cautiously positive:

“In an affluent suburb, a woman [Angela Morant] whose boorish husband [Warren Clarke] is away at the office all day goes through her daily round of housework and shopping.  She is periodically afflicted by fantasies of knifing the handsome young milkman [Adam Bareham] with whom in her imagination she has previously made love, as well as by reminders of her unhappy marital life.  When her husband belatedly returns, she stabs him to death.

“Although it makes rather a meal of its suburban angst, this is a short film of some flair.  The calculated showiness of shooting and editing is sufficiently justified by the material not to lapse into the portentous, and sequences such as the supermarket visit successfully convert the mundane into the authentically strange.  The trick ending – even though it can be seen coming – manages by its timing to take one by surprise.  Alan Blake can be looked to for interesting work in the future.”

Unfortunately such work was not forthcoming, and Victims remains its director’s only film to date.  And there under normal circumstances we would have to leave matters, except that in this case a long-term fan of the film, the playwright Simon Farquhar, took the trouble to track down and interview Blake in June 2017, and record the results on his ‘Dreams Gathering Dust’ blog.  We can quote extensively from Farquhar’s piece here, as it offers a unique insight into the creative process of actually getting a theatrical Short made and screened during the (all-too-brief) period under review:

Alan Blake and a page of his original shooting script

“I had the idea for Victims in the winter of 1978.  At the time I was a young TV commercials director at Jennie & Co, one of London’s top production companies.  My partners there were the film directors Terry Bedford and Adrian Lyne, along with our MD (and producer of Victims) Gower Frost.  I was known for a narrative comedy style of work which included award-winning ads for things like Hamlet cigars and Cadbury’s Fingers.  Like many of the ‘up and comings’ in our business, I wanted to graduate from shooting ads to making ‘serious’ films, I just needed an idea…  One evening I overheard a conversation in The Builder’s Arms, my local pub in Barnet – a couple of the regulars were ribbing a young guy who’d just got a job as a milkman, suggesting this fella’s sex life would now take a turn for the better, ‘what wiv all them bored housewives an’ all’, naturally followed by bawdy Real Life anecdotes in support of their theory.  It was typical male chauvinist banter of the day, but it set me wondering about the kernel of truth that might have prompted such exaggerations…

“It seemed to me that if a housewife were to be tempted into a relationship with the man delivering her Gold Top, it could well be in response to overwhelming loneliness and distress.  I decided to turn the bawdy cliché on its head – I wanted my film to convey these feelings in a way that might make the audience question themselves about their own environments, but I didn’t want to preach and I needed to keep people interested and in their seats, so I wrote Victims as a pseudo-thriller….  I don’t remember the production budget, but it was definitely a lot less per minute of screen time than a TV commercial (though probably much more than the average first-timer could have hoped for).  We started shooting on May 29th 1979 at Lee International Studios, Wembley, where we filmed the interior scenes of our couple’s home, then the following week we went on location in Chalfont St Peter and Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, with the exterior views of the family’s house being shot in Arkley, Hertfordshire….

“The nature of this film, with depression running through every scene, didn’t make for a particularly jolly shoot.  I’m sure there were some lighter moments of banter between us all but they were certainly fewer than I enjoyed when making commercials! Angela Morant and I did indulge in occasional small-talk, but I always felt she was making an effort to break out of an underlying sadness.  Was her slightly subdued off-camera demeanour purely the result of her being in character, or was she actually a bit unhappy?  Angela had divorced from the actor, Ben Kingsley a couple of years earlier and I wondered if the pain of that still lingered – but it was none of my business and I didn’t pry.  Actors have to draw on their life experiences, and sometimes need to revive painful moments to get their art on screen – as do writers and directors!

“[Cameraman] John Crawford and I decided that the look of the film was to be a mix of bleakness, combined, where appropriate, with moody, ominous lighting, using lensing and camera work that would be interesting enough to engage our audience and aid the suspense inherent in the narrative.  On a technical note I should mention that this film was shot for cinema – its ‘edge of darkness’ exposure range often tested boundaries that TV just couldn’t handle.  This wasn’t helped by some poor film-to-tape transfers made when it was shown on TV – only those people who saw it in the cinema got to see the best of John’s work.  The first murder [of the milkman] didn’t happen in a literal sense – it was just the wife cleansing herself of the fantasy she’d imagined.  At the end of the film it’s evident that the milk bottles on the doorstep which were smashed in the beginning are still fully intact.  This device was pretty clear on the cinema screen, but needed closer attention from the viewer when the film eventually appeared on TV.  The first ‘murder’ does act as a portent of the husband’s demise at the end – I was hoping that by almost replicating the scene of the first stabbing I’d also be helping to dispel its reality, but I’m not sure I succeeded with everyone on that!

Angela Morant, Adam Bareham, Warren Clarke

“Our film could have accompanied any number of minor features being put out at that point, so you can imagine how pleased we were to learn that it had been selected to go out with a major movie, Escape From Alcatraz, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood – it was released to over 500 UK theatres.  Up until this time short films really had few outlets beyond the art-house circuit, so this represented a major leap forward and was seen as offering new hope to young film-makers. Unfortunately the Eady Levy (a government backed tax-rebate scheme which incentivized this kind of production) was terminated in 1985 once it was realised its financial benefits were, more often than not, going to distributors rather than to the producers the scheme was intended to help….  

“My own opinion of Victims was mixed – I had been greedy, wanting to make a serious film that had artistic and social integrity, which would win high praise from the most discerning critics, whilst also being thoroughly entertaining and enjoying popular appeal among people from all walks of life!  Of course this was a very tall order, not often achieved by the greatest and most experienced directors, let alone a comparative beginner such as I was then.  I definitely made some mistakes, perhaps leading the audience on too much and dwelling too long on some of the suburban fill.  The blend of the dramatic narrative Carrot with the suburban documentary Stick would be better balanced if I were tackling the subject today.  And I’ve learned that Message in films is often better delivered as sub-text.  So, although proud to have made a pretty original and different short film that succeeded on many levels, I did at the time also feel some measure of failure, to temper my ego…”   

11)  Black Angel (1980)

Black Angel is something of a paradox – by far the mostly widely-screened Short on our list, it has probably been seen by more people than everything else here put together, with many viewers (or at least those commenting on IMDB) recalling it with huge affection.  Which is ironic, as it is pretty much the least interesting film under discussion.  But then again, as they say, Context is Everything.

A newly-restored print was uploaded to YouTube in May 2015, featuring a specially-shot introduction in which director Roger Christian (b.1944) briefly recalls how it came about: “After set-decorating Star Wars, and art-directing Alien and Life of Brian, I wrote a short film called Black Angel.  George Lucas had requested a film to go out with The Empire Strikes Back – he read my story and commissioned it on the spot.  So with a grant of £25,000 I headed to Scotland with a crew of nine people, four actors, two trained horses and a Volkswagen bus.  I extracted pieces of my original story so I could do it within the budget, and we filmed in some incredible locations [the tidal island of Eilean Donan on the Kyle of Lochalsh, Glens Cluanie and Shiel in Kintail, Steall Falls on Glen Nevis etc] many of which had never been seen on film before.  I was very influenced by Tarkovsky at the time, and liked the way he made films that connected to the subconscious, so I attempted to do the same….  The negative got lost when Rank Labs went down, but turned up again years later [found in Universal’s US archives in 2012], so we restored a print and showed it at a couple of film festivals in early 2014 to a tremendous response…..”

Roger Christian and his DP Roger Pratt on location in Eilean Donan

Back in 1980, David McGillivray in the MFB was slightly more sceptical:

“Sir Maddox [Tony Vogel] returns home from the war to find his castle pillaged and empty, and his land devastated by disease.  Donning his warrior’s helmet he rides off ahead of his retainer [James Gibb] to seek revenge, but while negotiating a river he is pulled underwater by the helmet’s weight.  He is saved by the magic power of a young maiden [Patricia Christian], who vanishes after revealing that she is in the thrall of the Black Angel.  An old man [John Young] leads Sir Maddox to the Black Angel, a phantom who can appear and disappear at will.  Sir Maddox is no match for his cunning, and, after a fight, he submits.  The maiden offers her own life in exchange for that of her would-be rescuer, but Sir Maddox will not permit her sacrifice.  The Black Angel knocks him into a river, and he is pulled underwater by the weight of his helmet….

“Filmed entirely on location in Scotland in a variety of foul weather, Black Angel achieves some self-conscious pictorial splendour as Sir Maddox pursues his quest up hill and down dale.  The film, however, is all scene-setting and little substance, climaxing in a duel so saturated in photographic effects that the outcome assumes secondary importance.  The final disillusionment comes with the revelation that this particular piece of sword and sorcery seems to have been contrived purely to disguise the cheeky appropriation of the central plot device from Incident at Owl Creek.”

McGillivray is (as usual) right on the money here – for all its determined straining for mythic stature, Black Angel is a distinctly underwhelming experience, its stunning landscapes blandly framed as glossy picture-postcard backdrops for a half-baked and leadenly acted script.  Even at a mere 25 mins the film really drags, and is moreover often unintentionally comic – if the poignant encounter with the Children of the Sickness doesn’t make you laugh out loud, nothing will.  This is especially ironic given the director’s earlier collaboration with the Pythons: Christian may have been aiming for Tarkovsky, but the climactic duel unavoidably recalls Graham Chapman’s identical encounter with the Black Knight (Alright, we’ll call it a Draw).  Indeed, this film’s resolutely po-faced UTTER lack of humour is what ultimately defines it.

Tony Vogel and Roger Christian on location

…Unless of course you’re a nostalgic Star Wars fan, in which case it’s a 10/10 Very Special Film!  Great Movie!  Superb – Want More!  Tremendously Atmospheric!  Visually Stunning!  Immersive!  Dark and Brooding!  Masterpiece! etc etc.  Indeed of the 20 rave reviews on IMDB, only one sounds a contrarily curmudgeonly note: Charliegeeza’s exasperated June 2015 assessment:

“1/10  ABSOLUTE WASTE OF TIME.  The film is available on Youtube (legally) for free – just go there and search for Black Angel.  This is one of the worst short movies I’ve seen – for something 20 minutes long it manages to include an awful lot of time wasting.  It starts with a 5+ minute “intro” where nothing happens, as the film follows some benign horse ride.  I found myself skipping ahead trying to work out where the actual story begins, or what little there is of it.  The fight scenes are atrocious, they include repeating footage (and this is a SHORT!) and the kind of hammy choreography that William Shatner would have been proud of back in the day.  Whilst Star Trek had a more fun outlook for context, this piece is trying to be serious so it’s just cringeworthy.  The story itself is not worth much – it’s barely enough for a short film.  This has not aged well and I’m amazed anybody can watch it and say that it’s either thought-provoking or entertaining or anything.  Don’t waste your time.”

Ouch.

Roger Christian has continued to work steadily over the ensuing four decades, with his 1982 horror The Sender now boasting a small but growing cult-rep as one of the overlooked classics of its era, though (just like Lindsey Vicker’s The Appointment) it failed to gain a UK theatrical release, eventually creeping out here on video in August 1986.  He’s otherwise probably best remembered for Battlefield Earth (2000) starring John Travolta, about which the less said the better.

(To complete the set, we can briefly note that Return of the Jedi was supported in June 1983 by animation-veteran John Halas’s experimental short Dilemma (1981), an avant-garde anti-war piece notable as one of the very first CGI cartoons.  Eerily memorable but not exactly fun.  Stanley Marks’s Fast Company remains by far the most engaging film of this little trilogy, and if you don’t believe me, just try watching the three back-to-back on YouTube).

12)  Cry Wolf (1980)

Back to (relative) obscurity.  Director Leszek Burzynski gained a BA (Modern Languages / Russian Studies) at the University of Leeds before beginning his career with the BBC, shooting two comic shorts for Paramount (Truckers and Cry Wolf) over 1979-80, then two series of John Alderton’s Channel 4 sitcom Father’s Day 1983-84.  His goofy US horror Trapped Alive (1988) starring Cameron Mitchell was released here on Blu-Ray earlier this year by Arrow, though he’s latterly moved into more serious documentaries etc and is currently active on social media (if that’s your sort of thing).

David McGillivray again reviewed Cry Wolf for the MFB:

“Working late one night at the Institute for Animal Research, Dr Jack Russell [Paul Maxwell] is visited by his young assistant Maria [Rosalind Ayres], who accidentally laces Jack’s tea with a canine serum.  Jack undergoes the first of a series of unpredictable transformations into a werewolf.  He goes into hiding, later attacking old Mrs Taylor [Gabrielle Daye] in order to steal her dog food.  Helped by the Romanian werewolf authority Professor Porphiriou [Stephen Greif], the police injure Jack with a silver bullet, and he is forced to seek medical attention from a vet [Joseph Brady].  Worried by Jack’s disappearance, Maria goes to the police [James Bree and Chris Fairbank], learns what has happened, and is able to prevent a second attempt on Jack’s life by injecting him with an antidote.  Jack and Maria are married, but some time later, when Maria throws their dog a biscuit, it is Jack who leaps forward to catch it in his mouth…

“The most striking aspect of Cry Wolf is that it is virtually indistinguishable from the black-and-white British science-fiction films of the Fifties which it parodies.  Most of the credit for this achievement must go to the cameraman Robert Krasker, who was persuaded out of retirement to duplicate the lighting of such films as The Quatermass Experiment (From which ‘Agony’ scriptwriter Stan Hey has lifted two situations).  It is a pity that Cry Wolf, neither particularly funny nor satirical, works only on the level of a nostalgic exercise for the delectation of film buffs, but as such it is still a novelty quite unlike any other recent British short.”

 Leszek Burzynski, Paul Maxwell, Rosalind Ayres, Stephen Greif

There are three relevant IMDB reviews – first, Wearysloth from April 2003:

“In this odd mix of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Wolfman, Dr. Jack Russell accidentally takes his own potion and after the customary thrashing about on the floor becomes a werewolf…well not exactly a werewolf, his name should give you the clue.  This short film is the UK’s answer to Young Frankenstein, a loving recreation of 40’s horror movies with perfect casting, acting and especially beautiful cinematography by veteran Robert Krasker.  Alas where the film slips up is that it is simply not funny, even if it does predate Rob Schneider’s The Animal for its punch-line.  One of the better UK Shorts nevertheless.”

Next, KeithMP from Dec 2007:

“I saw this film, presumably in 1980, at the British seaside resort of Great Yarmouth whilst on an idyllic camping holiday based at Lowestoft.  What attracted me (and my lady friend at the time) to the cinema was not this magical little short, but the fact that it was showing with the current screwball hit comedy, Airplane – I had no knowledge of Cry Wolf at all.  The cinema was just about full to capacity, and on came the short B film.  The cast is made up of lots of familiar names to British film and TV fans, but nothing could have prepared me for this little treat.  The script is deliberately (I assume) as corny as possible with lots of obvious and overplayed comical nods to the old Universal horror classics – and it’s in traditional black and white.  This is one weird short, great fun, and I’d love to see it again.  One more thing, when the film finished the audience burst out in spontaneous loud applause!”

And finally pfcoleman, from Aug 2016:

“I saw this film once only, when it was showing as a ‘B’ film with ‘Airplane’ in 1980.  I was especially interested to catch it, as it features my car, a 1952 Austin A40 Somerset.  The location director spotted this parked outside my home when he was arranging to use the building opposite (St Benedict’s Junior School, Ealing) – it had an Edwardian front entrance with a rather grand set of steps, and when he saw  my car outside hired it from me for £50 cash.  It was driven around repeatedly during the course of the morning, from the gates of the school and up to the steps of the house, where it stopped abruptly and one of the cast got out and quickly ran up to the front door – this scene appeared in the opening seconds of the film, was set at night time, and lasted only half a second!  I’d be fascinated to know if this 1980 Ealing / Isle of Dogs film still exists, as it’s definitely – for me at least – worth seeing a second time!”

13)  Dead End (1980)

Well, this shouldn’t take long.  We have two available plot summaries: IMDB’s “A woman is terrorized in a deserted car park” and Denis Gifford’s even more evocative “Woman menaced in multi-storey cark park”.  That appears to be it.  The listed stars are Belinda Mayne (daughter of Red’s Ferdy Mayne, also seen in Don’t Open Till Christmas – qv), Jenny Seagrove (ex-partner of Michael Winner, also seen in Local Hero etc etc), and Tracy Hyde (originally a child star, also seen in Orchard End Murder – again qv).  The absence of any male names in the cast is interesting, suggesting another woman may possibly be doing the menacing.  Dead End got a wide UK release supporting Smokey and the Bandit II (or SatB Ride Again, as it was known over here), but further details of any sort seem non-existent.

Alan Birkinshaw, Belinda Mayne, Jenny Seagrove, Tracy Hyde

Director Alan Birkinshaw was born in 1944 in Auckland NZ, the younger brother of writer Fay Weldon.  Age 20 he settled in England and joined ATV as a cameraman, in 1966 directing and producing his first television drama, A Nice Dream While It Lasted (written by his sister).  By 24 was directing for Westward then later LWT, including quiz shows, farming programmes (he started out as a teenage Jackaroo in Queensland), live news and drama.  He broke into the film business in 1974 with sexploitationer Confessions of a Sex Maniac starring Roger Lloyd Pack (ie Trigger), and followed this with legendarily tasteless slasher Killers Moon in 1978 (again co-written with Weldon), then Dead End.  Invaders of the Lost Gold (1982) was shot in the Philippines with a terrific exploitation cast led by Stuart Whitman, but failed to gain a UK theatrical release, going straight to video (courtesy of Vipco, which should tell you all you need to know).  The same fate befell Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984), another notorious slasher which contrived to get through four separate directors (Edward Purdom, Derek Ford, then Birkinshaw in tandem with Ray Selfe), though only Purdom’s name ended up on the credits.  Birkinshaw seems to latterly revel in his tough-guy persona, though perhaps the most telling comment is a throwaway line in an IMDB review of Confessions: “…directed by the one and only Alan Birkinshaw, of Killers Moon and Invaders of the Lost Gold infamy; you can tell it’s one of his as it has the same scuzzy atmosphere.”

14)  Dreamhouse (1981)

Stanley Long (1933-2012) hopefully needs no introduction here, and unfamiliar readers can be pointed in the direction of his lively 2008 autobiography ‘X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker’.  He started out as a glamour photographer in the mid-50s, moving into 8mm ‘loops’ and from there into features, tending to specialise in pseudo-documentaries: West End Jungle, Nudist Memories, Take Off Your Clothes and Live, London in the Raw, Groupie Girl, The Wife Swappers, Naughty, On the Game etc etc.  With a few honourable exceptions these are all uniformly awful, but made him a great deal of money.

Together with younger brother Peter, in 1976 he set up his own distribution outfit, Alpha, initially to release Adventures of a Taxi Driver (which made more money in the UK than Scorsese’s contemporary Taxi Driver, no doubt due to Barry Evans’ stunningly committed performance in the title role, easily overshadowing the more lightweight Robert De Niro).  Alpha rapidly emerged as one of Britain’s top indie distributors, with the sharp-eyed Long importing popular overseas exploitation including early big-hitter titles like Cronenberg’s Rabid & The Brood, Kentucky Fried Movie and The Exterminator. – which in turn meant there was an obvious opportunity to produce his own cheap supporting Shorts and thus hoover up the available Eady money.

The results were three modest horror vignettes, all scripted by his old crony Michael Armstrong and directed by Long himself, and all fractionally over the minimum 34-minute running time which officially qualified them as Second Features.  The first – and arguably most memorable – was Dreamhouse, a straightforwardly chilly haunted-house melodrama with a sharp (and nasty) sting in the tale.  This was originally screened supporting The Exterminator, though comments on the 2011 YouTube print (courtesy of Ricona63) suggest it was also later paired with The Evil Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street, and – at least in North Devon – Friday 13th Part 2 (the latter presumably a subsequent reissue).

Stanley Long, Ian Saynor, Veronica Doran, Yvonne Nicolson and Orla Pederson (the killer)

Amiable young couple Tony and Susan [Ian Saynor and Yvonne Nicolson] move into a conventionally-nondescript detached suburban house (actually in Ruislip), but Susan soon begins experiencing increasingly alarming visions.  At first these are simply inexplicable – a boy aimlessly riding a bike in random circles around the front lawn, a handyman painting the window-frames in the front room – but grow steadily more frightening, with knife-wielding men suddenly lunging across open doorways, and fleeting glimpses of corpses bloodily crumpled in the bathroom.  Worried she’s experiencing echoes of some earlier violent event, she consults a psychic [Veronica Doran] who reassures her that the house is completely clear of any haunting energies, and delicately advises her to see a doctor.  But that night Susan witnesses what seems to be the brutal massacre of an entire family, and sinks to the floor in glassy hysteria…

Fade up on the house some weeks later.  New tenants have moved in, and Tony glumly knocks on the door to collect his last few belongings, as a boy circles the front lawn on his bike and a handyman paints the interior window-frames.  He briefly chats to the new owner [Brenda Kempner], confirming Susan is still in hospital being treated for a complete breakdown, then heads back to his car.  As he sits behind the wheel, the blank-faced killer from Susan’s visions suddenly looms up from the back seat and silently cuts his throat before getting out and sauntering into the house.  The camera pans down to read the headline on the passenger-seat newspaper: MASS MURDERER ESCAPES.

Dreamhouse is nastily effective stuff, with Long handling the tension and jump-scares confidently, and drawing likeably naturalistic performances from his two young leads.  Of the three Alpha shorts this is the most uncomplicatedly horrific (and the only one to gain a ‘X’ cert), though Long candidly admits in his autobiography that he didn’t like the script’s explicit violence and only shot it out of commercial necessity.  There is little attempt to provide any comic relief (though Veronica Doran’s eccentric Medium brings to mind Margaret Leighton in From Beyond the Grave), and the overall edgily oppressive vibe is strikingly reminiscent of the ‘House That Bled to Death’ segment of the contemporary Hammer House of Horror TV series.

15)  Knights Electric (1981)

Knights Electric is a borderline title for inclusion here, as its supernatural elements are throwaway at most, and it is effectively just an extended pop-music promo for some of the period’s best emerging New Wave bands.  It is, however, such a fantastic adrenaline-driven rush of entertainment on this basis that you’d frankly have to be dead not to like it.  An excellent-quality HD print was uploaded to YouTube by its director four years ago, and can be cheerfully recommended to anyone who enjoys good music accompanied by punchy visuals.

Tim Pulleine in the MFB was cautiously positive:

“Four punk hooligans [Pete Lee-Wilson, Jon Eden, Mark Draper and Daniel Peacock] make a sortie into a Great Yarmouth amusement park, where they antagonise other customers and come-on to a group of teenage girls [Cindy Day, Jenny Bonada, Tiffany Brown and Jeanette Neely].  But they are consistently thwarted by the spectral apparitions of four handsome youths [Peter Harvey, Ziggy Summers, Mark Scott and Eddie Riseman] who ultimately squire the girls away.

“Told without dialogue, using occasional snatches of first-person voice-over, this brief sketch has a remarkable fluency and gusto.  The amusement park setting is inescapably second-hand, and the treatment of the quartet of louts – allowing that they eventually get a comeuppance of sorts – remains dubiously ambivalent.  But the sheer rhythmic attack suggests that the director and his collaborators might well make something striking out of more deserving material.”

And they say that British Cinema has been blighted by critical snobbery.  Pulleine clearly deplores the day our celluloid villains began actually getting away with their heists (rather than be sent on a Gender Awareness training course run by Jack Warner).

Barney Broom (top left) on location in Great Yarmouth with the Knights.  Below- Girls & Punks

Director Geoffrey “Barney” Broom was the son of a Norwich vicar, attending Brighton College of Art in 1970 (on a Graphics course) before moving briefly to South Africa then later studying at Columbia Film School in LA.  Returning to London in 1978 to work on features as a teaboy / runner (beginning with Rank’s remake of The 39 Steps), he’s since gone on to produce over 350 shorts of various types (including pop videos and corporate-sponsored projects etc), all documented on his ‘barneyfilms’ website.  Knights Electric was released as support to Dennis Potter’s originally-banned TV play Brimstone and Treacle, and a more unlikely pairing would be hard to imagine.  The narration is provided by Danny ‘Do It All’ Peacock (though his voice is here framed as that of gang-leader Pete Lee-Wilson), while the dynamite soundtrack is courtesy of John Foxx, Martha and the Muffins, The Ruts, Gary Numan, The Pretenders, Tomita, Madness and Blondie.  As I say, if you don’t like that lot in combination with a swaggering snapshot of a classic British seaside-resort in full swing, I just give up.

16)  Possessions (1981)

The third of Andrew Bogle and Tony Grisoni’s ‘Dragonfly’ shorts for ITC, Possessions is by far the most obscure.  It doesn’t have an IMDB entry, and Gifford simply lists it (no accompanying credits) as a ‘DRAMA’.  The only available info is that it was shot by Clive Tickner (who also photographed the duo’s Inside Man) and was nominated for BAFTA’s ‘Best Short Film’ award in 1981 (losing out to Sredni Vashtar – qv).  Apart from that, the sole tantalising glimpse is via Darrell Buxton’s comprehensive ‘Pass the Marmalade’ website-database:

“POSSESSIONS (1981) – directed by Andrew Bogle.  Couple move into a house where, a century earlier, a man had murdered his wife’s lover, hanging the body in a wardrobe for her to discover.  The modern-day husband happens upon the same piece of furniture and re-installs it in its former site …from the director of Dark Water, this is another ITC horror short which played with The Postman Always Rings Twice on its 1981 UK release.”

Tony Grisoni, Clive Tickner, and a spooky Victorian wardrobe

And that, for the time being, is that.

17)  Vampyr (1981)

More serious obscurity.  Having recently (2015-16) published two novels (Murder Most Foul and Woodland Ghosts), director Gordon Punter offers a mini-biog on his Amazon page: “Born in England and raised in west London, Gordon Punter, a self-taught film-maker, has spent the past thirty years (principally in the Middle East) employed as a Media Production Director, writing, producing and directing video commercials, documentaries and corporate programmes.  An avid reader of history, in particular True Crime, he took early retirement in 2008 to concentrate on his writing, and presently lives in Canada with his wife Cindy”.

Gordon Punter and a spooky flying book

Punter seems to have just one other Short credit (likely shot immediately after Vampyr), the 1981 crime-thriller Betrayal starring Ronald Lacey and Murray Melvin – Gifford’s terse plot summary is “Assassin learns he is marked for assassination”.  Vampyr was produced by David Fallow, written by Merrick Fenton, and features just three named actors: Ernest Atkinson, Prunella Easton and William Rhodes, none of whom seem to have made anything else.  The ‘A’ cert would tend to suggest fairly innocuous content, but once again the only further detail is courtesy of Darrell Buxton:

“VAMPYR (1981) – screened as supporting film to The Hunger on its original UK release.  Man reading a copy of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ begins to hallucinate; at one point he crawls across the floor, with the camera angle suggesting the count scuttling down the walls of his castle, and another scene has the book itself flying in mid-air, its covers flapping like bat wings”.

18)  Sredni Vashtar (1981)

Andrew Birkin (b.1945) began writing screenplays in 1972 with Jacques Demy’s The Pied Piper, and has since built up an impressive CV including such cult favourites as Slade In Flame (1975), The Thief of Baghdad (1978), The Final Conflict (1981) and The Name of the Rose (1986).  As he explains on his website:

“In generous recognition of my slave-like call to duty on Omen III (aka The Final Conflict), 20th Century-Fox gave me the loot to write, produce and direct a short film of my own to accompany Omen III on its UK release in 1981.  The result was Sredni Vashtar, based on a 3-page 1911 short story by Saki (aka HH Munro, 1870-1916).  The making of the film was unalloyed pleasure from start to finish: I wrote the script in 48 hours, cast my mum as Aunt Augusta, my long-time friend Sacha Puttnam as Conradin, and other close friends in the remaining parts, shot the thing in a week, cut it in two days… and within six weeks it had won the BAFTA award for best Short, as well as an Oscar nomination.  Never again have I experienced quite such zen-like freedom and bliss!”

A full-length print of Sredni Vashtar seems to have been uploaded on Birkin’s site at one time, but has since disappeared – perhaps taken down for copyright reasons.  This has resulted in the slightly unusual situation (or at least, unusual in this context) of there being plenty of images knocking around on the web, but no actual copy the film itself.  (Generally you either get both or nothing).

Andrew Birkin, Sacha Puttman, Judy Campbell

Following Sredni Vashtar, Birkin directed three other features, all from his own screenplays: Burning Secret (1988), Salt on Our Skin (1992) and The Cement Garden (1993).  Sredni Vashtar was an adroit start, as John Pym confirmed in the MFB:

“Young Conradin [Alexander ‘Sacha’ Puttnam] silently endures the persecution of his guardian aunt [Judy Campbell].  His only friends are a hen and a ferret (whom he has deified as ‘Srendi Vashtar’).  Having disposed of the hen, the aunt enters the potting shed to do the same for what she supposes are ‘guinea pigs’.  The ferret emerges with a bloody snout.

“The Saki story (from The Chronicles of Clovis) on which this fastidious film is based is five-and-a-half pages long.  The filmmakers have embroidered, but not too much.  The aunt has been given a name, Augusta, and there is a reference to Conradin’s father having been killed on the second day of the Somme: Saki was himself raised by an Aunt Augusta and was killed in the First World War.  The boy has also been given a tutor, who torments his charge with Latin grammar with a relish that Saki would have approved.  If the film has a fault – and it is handsomely shot, accurately art-directed and well played – it is that what in the original is something of a commonplace (animals are, it is inferred, natural avengers) becomes somewhat overworked.  Conradin’s invocation to Sredni Vashtar is a shade too desperate, and the use of ‘Carmina Burana’ to conjure up a primaeval force does not quite match Saki’s tone.  Nevertheless, by its own lights, an exemplary short.”

19)  The Orchard End Murder (1981)

One of the very last featurettes theatrically released in the UK, Orchard End Murder is the second-longest film under discussion (at a whopping 50 mins), and was originally screened as support to Gary Sherman’s Dead & Buried (1981), which subsequently (Nov ’83 – June ’85) appeared on Britain’s infamous Video Nasty list.  Writing in their Nasties history ‘See No Evil’ in 2000, Davids Kerekes and Slater suggested that “The most memorable aspect of seeing Dead & Buried on its original theatrical run – for one author at least – was the fact that it was supported by a short British obscurity entitled The Orchard End Murder.  Set within an apple orchard in which a murdered woman is buried by a hunchbacked station-keeper and his simple-minded assistant, it had an atmosphere and contained images that were to have far more lasting impact than anything in Dead & Buried.”

For 36 years most viewers had to take this observation on trust, until in July 2017 the BFI released the film on Blu-ray as part of their Flipside series, thus conferring instant Cult status.  Writer-director Christian Marnham (who, like Alan Blake, started out in advertising) doesn’t seem to have made much else since however, apart from an episode of Dempsey and Makepiece (1985) plus Lethal Woman (1988), a lurid South African-shot rape-revenge thriller which sounds like a mash-up of The Most Dangerous Game and I Spit On Your Grave.  Tim Pulleine in the MFB conceded (as previously) that his debut showed promise:

“Charthurst Green, Kent, 1966.  Pauline Cox [Tracy Hyde] accompanies Mike Robins [Mark Hardy] to a village cricket match in which he is playing, but becomes bored and wanders away.  She fetches up at the local railway halt, where she is first entertained to tea by the garrulous, hunchbacked station keeper [Bill Wallis], then upset by the intrusion of the latter’s assistant Ewen [Clive Mantle], who proceeds to kill a rabbit in her presence.  Making her way back to the match Pauline is waylaid by the simple-minded Ewen as she crosses an apple orchard; when his advances become violent she tries to fight him off and he strangles her.  That evening the hunchback discovers Ewen with Pauline’s body in the shack where he lives, and helps him to bury the corpse in the orchard.  Later however, Ewen inadvertently betrays himself; the body is disinterred by the police and Ewen breaks down hysterically.  Years later, the hunchback, who has disavowed Ewen, encourages the friendship of another village youth.

Peter Jessop’s carefully-textured camerawork initially lends this mini-feature an edge of the picturesquely sinister.  But the resolution of the anecdote is rather forced and anti-climactic, and some of the details (like the police searching the orchard at the dead of night) ring distractingly false.  All the same, it represents a debut of some promise.”

Christian Marnham, Tracy Cox, Bill Wallis, Clive Mantle

There are two brief IMDB reviews worth quoting, the first from milkandpebbles in 2011: “LOST GEM  If you can track this down it’s worth a watch.  A young couple take a trip to the country for a cricket match he’s playing in.  She goes off exploring during the match and meets a peculiar character who invites her in for a cup of tea.  Lesson learned – always be suspicious of a man who collects gnomes.  It’s quite well made, the acting is okay.  Plenty of laughs – some intentional and some not – and the scene in which the murder victim is buried in a huge pile of rotting apples is really striking.  There’s another scene in which a body is discovered in a shallow grave with just the bum sticking out of the ground which is hilarious.”

…and the second from saintetiennelee in 2018: “PECULIAR BUT ENJOYABLE  Watched this when it was released on the excellent BFI Flipside range, and it’s a worthy addition to the series.  Some of the early scenes in an idyllic village have an almost ethereal quality to them.  It’s really good to see Tracy Hyde again, as I’d not seen her in anything other than Melody – albeit a very different role.  Things quickly change from an English village cricket match to a brutal murder – some of the scenes with Hyde are quite disturbing.  It’s low budget, has some clunky dialogue and farcical policemen [one of them an uncredited Rik Mayall in his debut].  I actually thought it had the look and feel of a CFF (Children’s Film Foundation) film up until the first scene with Clive Mantle.  After that it’s clear it isn’t suitable for children!”

20)  The Magic Shop (1982)

Following Sredni Vashtar this is the second literary-classic adaptation on our list, this time from an 1895 short-story by HG Wells (1866-1946).  Gifford’s plot-summary cuts to the chase – “Magic shop proprietor performs genuinely magical tricks on boy and father” – and while Wells’ story is in essence light-hearted, it nevertheless carries a delicate undertone of menace, best caught in its beautifully-judged final sentence: “I am inclined to think, indeed, that in this [financial] matter honour is satisfied, and that, since Gip’s name and address are known to them, I may very well leave it to these people, whoever they may be, to send in their bill in their own time.”  Judging by the moody two-minute clip uploaded to YouTube in 2009 (courtesy of Cyberdelika), this version makes the most of the sinister undercurrents.  It starred Paul Erangey as the boy (Gip), Karl Johnson as the father, and Ron Cook as the proprietor, with fleeting appearances by William Rushton and Peter Bull.  We can’t unfortunately take matters much further than that though, as there are no MFB or IMDB critiques, and no currently available print.  The Magic Shop was originally released (by Columbia) as support to US thriller Absence of Malice starring Paul Newman.

Ian Emes, Paul Erangey, Ron Cook, Karl Johnson

The director was Ian Emes, who has helpfully provided his own (lengthy) CV on IMDB.  Born in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1949, he studied at Birmingham College of Art (painting and sculpture), then subsequently in B’ham Polytechnic’s animation dept.  Realising he could short-cut traditional (ie labour-intensive) methods of animation by rotoscoping live action, he began experimenting and produced a surreal short film ‘French Windows’ synchronised to the Pink Floyd track One Of These Days.  This was screened on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972 and brought Emes to the attention of the band themselves, who began commissioning him to produce experimental films projected as huge backdrops to their live performances.  The success of these led to him working in a similar capacity for Paul McCartney, The Who and Mike Oldfield amongst others – according to Emes, his McCartney film was “included in the release of ‘Rupert and the Frog Song’ but later removed on the basis that it was too frightening for children”.  The Magic Shop was his first live-action Short, and he’s since followed it with Knights and Emeralds (1986) a cult coming-of-age drama shot in Brum, an episode of The Comic Strip (The Yob – a spoof of The Fly) and various other TV work.

21)  The Pledge (1982)

The Pledge has – like Orchard End Murder – been far more widely-seen in recent years than most other films on this list, due to its appearance as an extra on the BFI Flipside blu-ray release of Schalcken the Painter (1979) in Nov 2013.  This was a rather neat thematic pairing (both are moody period-costume dramas), which is more than can be said for its original theatrical tour when it went out as support to Bob Clark’s raunchy high-school farce Porky’s.  Once again, what the distributor (Fox in this instance) thought they were up to is unfathomable.

Director Digby Rumsey was born in Bournemouth in 1952, and trained at the London Film School, starting his career as an assistant editor and sound recordist.  He made about nine shorts 1972-81, of which the last, The Pledge, remains his best known, being an adaptation of a macabre 1908 short-story The Highwayman by Lord Dunsany (aka Edward Plunkett 1878-1957).   Rumsey is a noted Dunsany scholar, and had previously filmed two other stories of his, Nature and Time (1975), and In the Twilight (1978).  After 1981 he principally shifted into documentaries, while still occasionally dabbling in the avant-garde and continuing his editing work.

Geoff Brown in the MFB was surprisingly unenthusiastic:

“England, 1790.  The dead, decomposing body of a highwayman [Frank McDermott] swings from a gibbet.  Flashbacks pinpoint his unlawful activities (rape, murder, theft) and subsequent arrest.  Three former comrades, Will [Glenn Cunningham], Joe [Peter Rutherford], and the Gypsy [Roger Watkins] sit in a tavern and pledge to release his soul by cutting down his body and removing the iron collar clasped around his neck.  At night the corpse is transferred to an archbishop’s sarcophagus; the archbishop’s bones are then placed in a newly-dug grave.  Back at the tavern, the trio suddenly attack a fellow card player.

“While one welcomes the appearance of any independent British short on what used to be called the ‘full supporting programme’, one cannot help fearing for The Pledge’s reception from audiences who come for Porky’s.  Digby Rumsey’s morbid, fitful little film begins with a battery of cryptic scenes presenting brooding English landscapes (shot in the Cambrian hills), along with snapshots of the highwayman in lusty life and maggoty death.  The images are briefly complemented by characteristic chunks of Michael Nyman music (subsequently released commercially as ‘M-Work’).  But once we reach the comrades in their tavern, the kaleidoscopic style gives way to a conventionally ordered narrative, relayed with archaic dialogue and a lumpish pace.  The pledge is taken; the body is laboriously transferred at dead of night with the help of a ladder and a lamp.  After another flurry of cryptic images, the tale is concluded.  But to what purpose?  As a period snippet of British horror, Rumsey’s film is some distance from the confident, gruesome poetry of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, while as an experimental foray into narrative cinema the stylistic devices are too muted to do much for either genre or spectator.  In  such circumstances the presence of Peter Greenaway’s regular composer Nyman (and Greenaway himself as co-editor) only serves as an irritant.  Some of the camera’s landscape-surveys share Greenaway’s formal clarity, but the film could have benefited throughout from his gift for linking eccentric fantasy with a rigorous manipulation of cinematic tools.”

Digby Rumsey and his gibbet

One can only assume Brown was in a very grumpy mood when he wrote this, possibly having got out of bed the wrong side that morning.  How can the presence of an (effectively anonymous) co-editor conceivably act as an irritant?  Michael Nyman’s dramatic score is consistently fine, moodily reinforcing some frequently unforgettable imagery, and the use of landscape is never less than vivid.  (The latter is in marked contrast to Roger Christian’s glossily artificial picture-postcard views of the Highlands in Black Angel – the soggy, blasted Welsh heathlands seen here look, in contrast, all-too horribly authentic).  A more fair-minded assessment comes from enochsneed via IMDB in 2007:

“UNUSUAL BUT MEMORABLE SHORT  I saw this film as a support for a main feature in 1982.  It is an unusual film but intriguing and quite enjoyable.  Filmed on location in Wales, it conveys a convincing atmosphere of cold and desolation in the opening scenes where a peddler is making his way along rough paths in the mountains.  The plot is fairly straightforward: three companions of an executed criminal have sworn to recover his body and bury it in a churchyard so his soul can go to Heaven.  In flashback we see the crime for which he was executed – the rape of a farm-girl in a barn.  By night the old friends cut down his corpse from a gibbet, remove the bones of a bishop from his tomb (taking care to re-bury them within the churchyard boundary) and replace them with the remains of their friend.  In the finale we hear the criminal sigh as his soul is released.  Thus we get a strange mixture of 18th Century sociology, religion, superstition and Romanticism.  An unusual blend, but one that makes a lasting impression, with good use of locations.”

The Pledge is the last film on our list to gain an MFB review (in Sept 1982).  Two months earlier the magazine had undergone the most radical revamp in its fifty-year history, shifting to an awkward three-column layout and (for the first time) including photos on almost every page, along with several specially-written Feature Articles in addition to the usual reviews.  The intention was clearly to become a mini-Sight & Sound – a fairly pointless exercise when Sight & Sound already existed.  The inevitable side-effect was that there was now far less space for the actual reviews (the magazine’s sole raison d’etre as a periodical of record), with one immediate casualty being the Shorts coverage (which had been dwindling for some time anyway).  From this point, the handful of shorts still discussed each year were almost exclusively worthy Arthouse efforts with little real commercial potential (or indeed ambition).

Having said all that though, it must be admitted that one of the new feature-articles in the Sept 1982 issue is of considerable interest to us as a historical snapshot of the Shorts market at that point.  Titled ‘HOW TO SHORT CIRCUIT THE MAJORS’ it interviewed three producers of recently-released shorts, focusing on the tough economic realities of getting such films made and screened.  The three interviewees and their films were Christine Oestreicher.(black comedy Couples & Robbers), David McGillivray (paranoid drama The Errand), and Digby Rumsey (period horror The Pledge).  All can be selectively quoted:

OESTREICHER: “The Ladd Company had embarked on a policy of placing quality shorts with their feature films, and [director Clare Peploe] was asked to develop a suitable subject for a half-hour short film to accompany Blade Runner [distributed by Columbia-EMI-Warner]…  Within a month we had a script, a budget and a provisional green-light for Couples & Robbers, with the proviso that we cut our budget from a proposed £47k to just £35k!  As we were shooting ten days with four actors on 35mm we were a little concerned how this could be achieved, but eventually £45k was agreed and we were in production.

“This budget-limit reflected what the company felt Blade Runner would take at the box office.  Generally, a short film receives a 4% – 6% allocation of the total film rentals, and from that sum the Eady-payout (at two-and-a-half times the normal feature-rate) is calculated.  That is, until the short recoups £30k in Eady money, at which time the payout returns to the standard percentage until it recoups the maximum £50k – then no more Eady!  …So for Couples & Robbers to earn back its production and print costs, Blade Runner needs to perform very well at the UK box office, to the tune of £900k film rentals – a difficult sum to achieve these days with cinema audiences in rapid decline….”

In the Tavern: Roger Watkins, Glenn Cunningham, Peter Rutherford

McGILLIVRAY: “Having written the script to The Errand – and then seen it rejected by every film company to whom I’d submitted it – in Jan 1980 my friend the sound-recordist Godfrey Kirby suggested we shoot it ourselves with the aid of a mutual friend, car salesman John Vilton.  With some difficulty the three of us scraped together £6,000 – my £2,000 share was borrowed from my bank on the pretence that it was to be used for central heating for my flat.  I recommended Nigel Finch (with whom I’d worked on radio and TV) to direct – he was willing to do it for nothing, and invested a further £2,000 of his own.  This generosity was due in no small part to his belief, unscrupulously fostered by myself, that the film would make vast profits and lead to his being offered a feature.

“I wrote the first draft of the script in three days, and the second draft in two.  The Errand was shot in fourteen days over July – August 1980, in between torrential downpours…. working days of up to nineteen hours caused tempers to fray, and every blown line meant paroxyms of anxiety due to the unbudgeted cost of an extra take.  By August 15th we were broke, and would have been unable to pay the lab-bills had we not sold our Land Rover through an ad in Exchange and Mart.  Post production was completed on Nov 17th, and The Errand was then shown to a number of distributors, none of whom showed the slightest interest in buying it outright as we had hoped.  In April 1981 Columbia-EMI-Warner offered us a deal which promised us 100% of the Eady money.  The cost of the 35mm blow-up (from the original 16mm footage) and eighty prints, however, was to be deducted from the receipts.  We accepted, faute de mieux.

“Had our short been released with a hit feature, the Eady payments might have conceivably covered the £17,500 print-costs and left us with a profit.  Unfortunately it was put on a bill with a flop horror film, Happy Birthday To Me, and later re-released with Outland, which fared little better at the box office.  In recent months The Errand has been sold to cable and satellite TV, but sometimes for sums as low as £200.  We have been long-resigned to the loss of our investments – Nigel, however, has not spoken to me for some time.”

RUMSEY: “‘Will, Joe and the Gypsy returned to the tavern and continued to rob and murder.  They never knew that in their sinful lives they had committed one sin at which the angels smiled…’  Those words should have run over the final scene in The Pledge, but with exactly ten days to do a 16-to-35mm blow-up and produce fifty release prints, they went to the wall.  It’s amazing how there is still glamour attached to the majors.  A distribution deal with 20th Century-Fox sounds impressive for an independent filmmaker, but it needs to be put in context…

i)  FINANCE  The Pledge first attracted money in August 1980, when the Southern Arts Association agreed to give financial assistance to the film – it was initially allocated £6,000 and then a further £2,300 the following year.  As with most of the costlier Royal Academy of Arts productions, it was crewed under the ACTT/RAA code of practice and the actors were paid a flat rate per day – this means that there are residuals due, but first we need to see some money.

ii)  PRODUCTION  The film was made on location in Wales during late Oct/Nov 1980.  The Cambrian mountains tend to be a bit grim at that time of the year, especially when shooting at night and in snow – good location catering and plenty of hot tea proved to be the best way to maintain morale.  The cast and crew stayed in two rented houses; dragons still exist, hiding out as Welsh landladies.  The Pledge in fact generated a number of surreal possibilities.  We had to keep the ‘corpses’ in the house, and as the landlady lived next door these were furtively smuggled from the front door to the van every day.  The erection of the gibbet was very satisfying.  After the half-ton of wood was dragged up the hill, and a three-foot hole dug in solid rock, it finally stood upright to be visible for miles around.  I liked that idea of combining historical reality with the present.  Props had been hired from the Bristol Old Vic and Pinewood, with the corpses and sepulchre separately commissioned.  Peter Greenaway and Alan Mackay edited the film, and it was Alan who persuaded me to try and sell it as a cinema short.  An outsider trying to sell a film in this country needs good luck and good timing.  Don’t make it an ‘X’ – they are more difficult to programme, because distributors want to be able to put shorts out with anything.

iii)  SALES PROCEDURE  Invite the man from each distributor to a decent preview-theatre to see your film.  DON’T invite more than one company rep at a time to the same viewing (there’s a lot of snobbery / politics / ego around).  I spent a lot of money on preview-theatres and had nearly reached the end of the list when an agent was recommended to me.  Within a fortnight he’d had a call from Fox asking for two shorts immediately.  That was a mere ten days before Porky’s opened in the West End, so the print schedule was incredibly frantic, a situation I now realise suited them fine.  I had tried selling The Pledge at the Berlin Film Festival to no avail, so I was pleased to have finally found an outlet. 

I had hoped to sell the film outright to avoid having to consider its finances over the next few years, but Fox rejected this proposal.  Instead I was offered 25% of the box-office allocation for shorts, and 25% of the Eady money – the first figure will be offset against the cost of the blow-up, prints etc.  The Eady money returnable is at most £12,500, this being 25% of the Eady maximum for shorts.  This is equal to the cost of the film after residuals have been paid, but as of August 1982 I still haven’t had a contract and Fox’s latest offer is to lump my box office percentage and the Eady money together, which probably means I’ll never see a single penny.  Ironically, Fox had previously seen the film when I was originally trying to sell it – their rep commented that he couldn’t understand the dialogue.  The exposure is useful however, as it’s giving new audiences a distinctly unrepresentative example of independent film.  Whatever one might think about Porky’s, a lot of people will see The Pledge.”

22)  The Cottage (1982)

And after that wealth of detail, it’s back to frustrating obscurity.  The fullest available plot summary for The Cottage is: “A young writer [Nicola Pagett] is visited at her remote country cottage by an elderly woman [Ann Heffernan] who claims to be the house’s previous resident. But the woman exerts a strange influence on the writer as she reveals the cottage’s horrific history.”  And, er, that’s it.

Mark Chapman, Nicola Pagett, Ann Heffernan

Director Mark Chapman (b.1955) has worked solidly in TV (chiefly in documentaries) following his debut with The Cottage, with one of his best-remembered shows being the 1990 Omnibus special Life of Python.  According to IMDB “He was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen’s New Years Honours List, for his services to the film industry in Queensland through documentary production”.  Writer Paul Sommers likewise went on to become a TV-doc producer, most recently of something called Spy Wars with Damien Lewis.  Of The Cottage’s two stars, Pagett was one of the most familiar TV faces of the ’70’s (largely due to her popular stint on Upstairs Downstairs), while Heffernan’s career stretched from ‘Kiosk Girl’ in the Lavender Hill Mob all the way up to a 1993 episode of Maigret.  The Cottage was released as support to Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, and its pedigree tends to suggest another possible lost gem.

23)  That’s the Way to Do It (1982)

The second of Alpha’s trio of featurettes, That’s the Way to Do It (unlike companion Dreamhouse) is not currently available in its original format, for reasons we’ll get onto shortly.  Originally released as support to EC-comics-inspired anthology Creepshow, its most recent intact airing seems to have been a one-off BFI Flipside screening (of all three films back-to-back) at the NFT in Feb 2009, attended by co-creators Long and Armstrong along with a glittering line-up of international stars (David Van Day).  Less mean-spirited than Dreamhouse, it carries a rather melancholy (indeed distinctively English) vibe beneath its lashings of gleeful black humour, and features some low key but neatly-contrived chills all held together by an excellent lead performance from Robin Bailey.

Beleaguered Eastbourne Punch & Judy man Jack Grimshaw [Robin Bailey] is at his wit’s end: his beloved business is failing and his unsympathetic family – nagging wife Lena [Ann Lynn], obnoxious stepson Damien [Jonathan Morris], and the latter’s vacuous girlfriend Suzy [Dione Inman] – all want him to sell up, bin his stupid puppets and emigrate with them to Canada.  The final straw comes when the loutish Damien contrives to set fire to Jack’s seafront-tent – helplessly rescuing his charred puppets, a forlorn Jack seems to sink into despair.  But Damien is subsequently battered horribly to death on the deserted beach by an unseen figure shrieking “That’s the way to do it!”, and Lena is likewise fatally bludgeoned that night in bed.  Discovering her body, a panicked Jack summons a doctor [Bosco Hogan] to explain Mr Punch has come to life, but before the medic can phone the police all the lights suddenly go out and he too is beaten to a pulp on the stairs.

Robin Bailey, Ann Lynn, Jonathan Morris, Dione Inman, Bosco Hogan

Next morning the oblivious Suzy calls round for Damien, but the house seems eerily empty… until she looks upstairs and bumps into the bloody corpses of Lena and the doc hanging lifelessly from a peg on the back of the bedroom door.  Surprise!  A demented Jack (wielding his Mr Punch puppet, who is now armed with a very big stick indeed), chases her around the house, down the road and into a council bin yard, playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek amongst the wagons.  Following her up onto an adjacent roof, Jack/Punch is poised to strike when Suzy manages to push him over the edge, and he falls to his death into a passing bin-lorry, to be gruesomely chewed up by its crusher.

That’s the Way to Do It is based on an EXTREMELY transparent twist – it’s perfectly obvious from the start that mild-mannered Jack is the murderer, possessed by the spirit of his demonic puppet – but nevertheless builds up quite a charge, due as noted to a fine performance from Bailey in the lead and some sly visual jokes, up to and including the climactic crocodile / bin-wagon gag.  It’s pretty clear this is rather more up its director’s street than the bleakly nasty Dreamhouse, and for their final collaboration Long and Armstrong effectively abandoned straight horror altogether for a deliberately whimsical Fairy Story….

24)  Do You Believe In Fairies? (1983)

The Alpha trilogy actually represents an interesting stylistic progression, and – depending on your point of view – this final instalment is either the weakest or most insolently-inspired effort of the lot.  It certainly isn’t remotely frightening and has the general ambience of a children’s TV show of the period – it wouldn’t feel out of place as an episode of Rentaghost for example.  Released as support to brutal crime-thriller Vigilante – see the Smash Hits’ gossip-column snippet below – what on earth prompted the BBFC to award it a ‘AA’ is a complete mystery.

Aspiring motocross rider Gavin Martin [David Van Day] urgently needs money to fix his broken bike, so gratefully accepts a payday loan from his clothes-shop boss Colin [Philip Bloomfield].  Needing to repay this, his brother Tim [Matthew Peters] points out an ad in the local paper asking for a part-time gardener / handyman, and the devious Gavin casually applies.  His new employers are eccentric elderly sisters Emma and Mildred Hurley [Dora Bryan and Jean Anderson], who show him around their imposing Tudor house and grounds explaining that the garden’s extensive collection of gnomes – along with other invisible fairies – act as magical guardians of the house’s valuables.

The sisters chattily indicate two ancestral-portraits above the fireplace, of the icily beautiful Lady Anne Hurley and her final lover.  Lady Anne had a pact with the fairies to help conceal a long string of such dalliances from her jealous husband, with the accumulating corpses of her regularly-discarded toy-boys all buried by the gnomes in the flowerbeds outside.  Her husband finally discovered the bodies and she was executed for murder – can you imagine?  Gavin, however, is far more interested in the glimpse of a huge treasure chest kept in the sisters’ bedroom, which – bulging with gold and silver – proves too great a temptation to resist.

Together with Tim and his garage-mate Frank [Gary Linley], Gavin resolves to rob the house that night.  The trio creep in under cover of darkness, but Tim is throttled in the drawing room by a giant gnome, while Frank is fatally ambushed in the garden by mouldering zombies emerging from beneath the flowerbeds.  Gavin, meanwhile, is confronted in the living room by the spectre of Lady Anne [Kim Thomson] who seductively emerges from her picture-frame for a lingering kiss before casually impaling the hapless thief in a flurry of telekinetic kitchen-knives.  We fade up on Emma and Mildred cheerfully showing another prospective handyman around – though the portrait of Lady Anne’s ‘final lover’ now has an oddly familiar look….

Matthew Peters, David Van Day, Gary Linley (plus girlfriends), Jean Anderson, Dora Bryan

Do You Believe In Fairies? is so insouciantly silly it is quite impossible to dislike.  Dora Bryan and Jean Anderson are plainly enjoying themselves, while David Van Day – whose portrayal of a charmless oaf is, er, remarkably naturalistic – is in contrast so stunningly bad his performance simply has to be seen to be believed.  The giant wrestling gnome (with no attempt made to match hair and fake-beard) is another unforgettable highlight.  What Vigilante’s incredulous audiences must have made of all this can only be guessed.

Under normal circumstances …Fairies would surely have gone on to become one of the most obscure – if not legendary – shorts in this survey, but normal circumstances for once didn’t apply.  As Long himself explains in his autobiography “Each of my little horror films was primarily made to go out as a second feature to American films and claim a portion of the Eady Fund money – however, they proved so successful I was persuaded to edit them into one feature, in a similar style to the Amicus horror anthologies of the 1960s and 70s …I’ve called the making of Screamtime a bit of a ‘kick bollock and scramble’ affair – everything was done in a huge rush and not without incident…”

Medusa’s 1984 video-sleeve.  Marie Scinto, Michael Gordon, Vincent Russo

Screamtime went straight to video (courtesy of Medusa) in the UK in Oct 1984, though seems to have achieved a few US theatrical screenings in 1985: Albuquerque in March and Cincinnati in June for example (at least according to IMDB).  The (outrageously slender) framing story was hastily shot in New York by Long, here credited under the pseudonym Al Beresford.  We open on a Times Square video shop, where layabout horror-fan Ed [Vincent Russo] and his pal Bruce [Michael Gordon] casually steal three tapes to watch with Ed’s friend Marie [Marie Scinto] in the latter’s apartment.  (The trio of sleeves we briefly glimpse have been retitled Scream House, Killer Punch and Garden of Blood respectively, and in order to fit an overall running time of just 89 mins have each been edited down to a tight 26 mins only).  First they watch Killer Punch, then Scream House.  By this point Bruce and Marie have lost interest (retiring to the bedroom for a discreet romp) so Ed watches Garden of Blood alone.  But the malevolent tapes have developed a murderous life of their own, and at the conclusion of Garden of Blood a zombie-arm shoots out of the TV screen to strangle Ed, while Mr Punch himself suddenly materialises in the bedroom to bludgeon Bruce to death as Marie recoils in understandable terror.  We pan across NY rooftops to the muted sound of Mr Punch’s snuffling giggles and roll credits.

A decent quality (though rather hissy) full-length print of Screamtime has recently (Sept 2019) been uploaded to YouTube by ‘phattphucks’, and vintage ex-rental VHS tapes are also quite often available on eBay – if you’ve the nerve to actually watch one of course….

25)  The Bloody Chamber (1983)

Our penultimate short is another literary adaptation, though from an atypically recent source: Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories was published in 1979 to quite a splash, containing ten Adult retellings of classic European folk myths (another entry, The Company of Wolves, was also filmed a year or so later).  We don’t seem to have an official plotline for the filmic Bloody Chamber (basically a re-write of the Bluebeard myth, likely originating in the career of infamous c15th French nobleman Gilles De Rais), so can instead borrow a short precis of Carter’s original:

“A teenage girl [Susanna Hamilton] marries an older, wealthy French Marquis [Terence Stamp] whom she does not love.  When taken to his castle she learns that he enjoys sadistic pornography, and he takes pleasure in her resulting embarrassment.  She is a talented pianist, and a young, blind piano-tuner [Rupert Everett] hears her music and falls in love with her.  Her husband then informs her he must leave on a business trip, forbidding her to enter one particular room while he is away.  She enters the room in his absence and realizes the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies when she discovers the bodies of his previous wives.  The Marquis returns home, discovers she has disobeyed him, and proceeds to try to add her to his collection of corpses via beheading.  The brave piano-tuner is willing to stay with her, even though he knows he will not be able to help, but she is saved at the last moment by her mother [Judy Parfitt], who arrives and shoots the Marquis dead just as he is about to murder her.  The girl, her mother and the piano-turner go on to live together, and the girl uses her now considerable fortune to convert the castle into a school for blind children.”

Nick Lewin (yes, really), Terence Stamp, Susanna Hamilton, Rupert Everett, Judy Parfitt

This is probably a fairly accurate account of the film, as can be determined from a July 2009 discussion thread on the Filmdope website, in which ChrisB attempts to identify a mystery featurette he’s been searching for:

“A short made for the cinema in I think in the 70s / 80s starring Terence Stamp and Judy Parfitt.  Plot sees Stamp as a well to do man living in a large rambling house (St Michaels Mount was used I think) which is inaccessible when the tide is in.  Judy Parfitt’s daughter marries him, much to her mother’s consternation, only to find when she is taken to his home he isn’t all he seems.  He forbids her to enter a certain room in the house, but while he is away on business curiosity gets the better of her.  He returns before she realises it and tries to kill her, but she has already phoned her mother suggesting all is not well in her life, and now mother is riding to her rescue across the causeway as the tide is coming in.  She arrives in the nick of time and kills the Bluebeard character to save her daughter.  I’m sure the tagline at the end (after comforting the girl) is Parfitt uttering the line “NOW JUST REMEMBER DEAR, MOTHER ALWAYS KNOWS BEST” or words to that effect.”

There is only one (very recent) review on IMDB, courtesy of ladymidath in Oct 2019:

“UNFORGETTABLE  I saw The Bloody Chamber as a Short before a main feature [48 Hours] – yes, shorts were a thing back then.  It was a beautifully shot and wonderfully acted piece based on Angela Carter’s story of the same name.  I wish I could see this film again but alas no one seems to have it, and it’s a shame because it was a treat to watch.  Hauntingly beautiful and chilling at the same time, it was a take on the old story of Bluebeard which of course was loosely based on Gilles de Rais.  It’s a pity that this film has dropped off the radar, because even though it was filmed as a featurette it deserves to be seen again.”

The adaptation from Carter’s novella was by Ross Cramer, who had previously written and directed comic short The Waterloo Bridge Handicap (1978) starring Leonard Rossiter, plus the Eddie Kidd motorbike actioner Riding High (1981).  Director Nick Lewin has recently shifted into fine-art photography, and the ‘nitrateexposed’ website offers a brief biog: “Nick Lewin is an award-winning film director whose career has encompassed many noted commercials, a theatrical short (The Bloody Chamber for Paramount Pictures) and a documentary film on modern ballet (Tzcuk).  His various awards, both in America and Europe, have included the British Television Advertising Awards, the Clios, and the Art Directors Club   He studied at the University of Aix-en-Provence before starting out as an editor at Elstree Studios, then later worked for Ridley Scott Associates – with both Ridley and Tony Scott – as well as Hugh Hudson.”  His earliest editing credits are in fact for James Dearden’s first two shorts, The Contraption and Panic (qv) and he later (1992) directed an episode of the TV series Mistress of Suspense, based on Patricia Highsmith’s macabre short story Under a Dark Angel’s Eye.

26)  Retribution (1983)

Our final short is ironically just about the most obscure entry of the lot.  At least with Andrew Bogle’s Possessions we have a plotline of sorts – with Retribution we don’t even have THAT.  There is no IMDB entry, and no details in Gifford beyond the fact that it is a ‘DRAMA’.  All that seems to be available is the following snippet from Darrell Buxton’s Pass the Marmalade site:

“RETRIBUTION (1982) – directed by Gregory Dark.  This one supported Friday the 13th Part 3 on its initial UK release – one scene features a brutal knife-killing, played out in silhouette against a whitewashed wall.”  And, er, once again that’s it… apart, perhaps, from the observation that since it was only awarded an ‘A’ cert (or rather the newly-revised PG), its horrific content must have been relatively restrained.

Gregory Dark and a spooky silhouette on a wall

Gregory Dark (b.1950) is the son of producer John Dark (now best remembered for his work on the later Amicus fantasies), and accordingly started out as an Assistant Director on The People That Time Forgot (1977), Carry On Emmannuelle (1978) and Dirty Money (1979), then later Lindsey Vicker’s The Appointment (1981) and Sean Connery’s final Bond outing Never Say Never Again (1983), before moving up into production with Clockwise (1986) and City Slickers (1991).  In 1982 he formed production company Iliad Films with producer Vance Goodwin, and the pair shot four shorts (including Retribution) back-to-back: The Cure (12 mins) a comedy about a man trying to give up smoking, Bitter Cherry (12 mins) a drama about an imprisoned union-activist politicising his cellmate, and finally The Superstitious Man (8 mins) a comedy about the misadventures of, um, a superstitious man.  Despite the fact that Retribution boasts a considerably longer (29 mins) running time – and must presumably be more ambitious – it is ironically the least documented of the quartet.  And there we have to leave matters, with Gifford’s 1986 complaint about lack of pertinent information echoing in our ears.

Epilogue: Take an Eady Ride

So what happened next?  In a word, collapse.  Gifford lists nineteen shorts as being registered in 1983 across a wide range of genres (including, as we’ve seen, two Horrors).  In 1984 there were just eight (of which five were music – Culture Club, David Bowie, Queen, IDJ, The Police).  And in 1985 there were only FIVE IN TOTAL – three dramas, one comedy and one music (New Order).  The British short film was now simply surplus to requirements.

How did this come about?  Via a complex mix of factors all coalescing to fatal effect.  Looking first at the commercial context, in 1984 cinemagoing in the UK finally hit rock-bottom, with just 54 million admissions – against a population of 56m that meant less than one visit per capita. By this point there were only 660 cinemas still open, with a total of 1,246 screens between them – about half were single-screen independents, and half dilapidated (pre-war) circuit theatres crudely tripled in the early ’70s.  From the post-war high of 1946, audiences had dropped by a staggering 95%, and six out of every seven UK cinemas had closed as a result.

In March 1984, Nigel Lawson’s budget announced the sudden phasing-out of Capital Allowances: down to 75% with immediate effect, then 50% from March 1985 and zero from March 1986.  The fleeting appeal of British film for financial speculators accordingly ceased quite literally overnight.  That November, Norman Lamont began the process of pushing the government’s new Films Bill through Parliament, which finally became law on 25th May 1985.  Its core proposals have already been outlined – the abolition of the Quota, NFFC and Eady Levy.  There was now no statutory requirement for cinemas to screen British films at all, and thus little inducement for impoverished producers to risk making them.  The most obvious immediate casualty were Shorts, which – stripped of both Quota stick and Eady carrot – suddenly found themselves with no raison d’etre.

One or two interesting items accordingly slipped between the cracks during this period, the best-known example being Saxon Logan’s 50-minute featurette Sleepwalker.  This was shot in early 1984, and certified 18 (ie X) by the BBFC that June.  But it was submitted by its production company (Bioscope) rather than a distributor, as none of the latter showed any interest in picking it up.  A self-consciously arty political satire (imagine Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party with Dario Argento directing the third act), this was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in Feb 1985 then promptly vanished entirely for three decades until its blu-ray release (on the BFI Flipside label – yes, them again) in Sept 2013.

Sleeve-art by Graham Humphreys.  Nikolas Grace, Joanna David, Bill Douglas, Heather Page

Of course, this is not to suggest that short films ceased to be made altogether – a glance at the Pass the Marmalade site reveals literally hundreds of recent titles, most appearing since the advent of cheap digital camcorders in the mid-1990s.  But the majority of these will never be professionally screened anywhere (outside informal fan-club type gatherings).  If a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  If a film’s audience is essentially limited to its makers and their pals, does it exist in a traditional sense?  These are questions for other scholars to pursue (though just to be clear, the correct answer is No).

How then can we sum up our little collection of Winter Flowers?  All of them critically reached the fabled mass-audience, even if that audience was on its last legs and had only turned up to see Porkys.  Almost all of their directors were young hopefuls trying to break into features, though with a handful of exceptions (Dearden, Christian, Birkin) most failed in this ambition and were obliged to return to the advertising world that had trained them – or (at best) shift into TV work.  Meanwhile the indie distributors who (admittedly for purely pragmatic reasons) had pushed these films out there in the first place were largely defunct by 1985, as the unstoppable rise of home video seemed to crush all before it.

Perhaps the key element – the most important quality – of these films was their intrinsic surprise value.  Fair enough, punters turning up for Dead & Buried can’t have been that taken aback by Orchard End Murder, but such pairings were in fact in the minority – only nine of our 26 shorts went out with horror main-features.  The rest were paired virtually at random.  What must Saturday Night Fever’s teenyboppers have made of Panic?  Or Escape From Alcatraz’s Clint-fans of Victims?  Or Smokey and the Bandit’s petrol-heads of Dead End?  Or Porkys’ sniggering voyeurs of The Pledge?  Or 48 Hours’ action-junkies of The Bloody Chamber?

The answers are still emerging forty years on, and essentially represent those rare but precious moments when we encounter something UNEXPECTED and it lingers edgily in the mind as a result.  In a March 2013 thread on the Vault of Evil board (headed ‘1980s Cinema Short’), ripper contributes the following: “Sometime in the early 1980s I saw a short film in the cinema, shown as support for the main feature.  It had a running time of between 30-45 mins I would say, and was about a couple moving into a country cottage and the supernatural events that occur there.  It was British and there may have been a well that featured in the plot.  I have no idea of the title, actors, or whether it was made for TV or specifically as cinema support.  I know it’s not much to go on, but would anyone know what it might have been that I saw all those years ago?”

The short answer is No.  Various contributors suggest it’s most likely either The Cottage or Possessions (though it could equally well be Dreamhouse, which doesn’t get mentioned).  However no one is really sure, and ripper is politely unconvinced.  Someone else then brings up another Short “about a soldier who was set up to be killed by his superiors” but can’t remember its name (The Errand), while ripper nostalgically reminisces about seeing Dawn of the Dead supported by The Great British Striptease (1980) starring Bernard Manning and Su Pollard (plus a load of Blackpool strippers).  Eventually the thread just peters inconclusively out.  It’s a neat little snapshot of the current state of affairs regarding these half-forgotten obscurities.

So, to sum all this up, the received wisdom that the great tsunami of British Horror finally crashed to an end with Hammer’s To the Devil – a Daughter in Feb 1976 proves to be not quite correct after all – there was actually an almost unnoticed seven-year backwash as the tide ran out, which now surely deserves some belated reappraisal.  After all, there’s nothing more absorbing than turning over stones on an empty beach.

© Sim Branaghan    October – November 2019