Video Nasty #24 - House by the Cemetery

A major entry on the Video Nasties list, House by the Cemetery, is one of two Lucio Fulci films to appear on the DPP's roundup of offending titles. Among the campaigners to clean up the British Video Industry, the Italian director was very definitely persona non grata - by the early 80's his reputation as a maker of exceedingly violent films was firmly established. Legend has it that a print of his 1982 film The New York Ripper had been kicked out of the country before it could be shown to distributors. In November 1983 House By the Cemetery made it's first appearance on the DPP's hit list - it mattered little that the film available to the British public was a watered-down BBFC sanctioned version. Lucio Fulci was in lock down...


The story concerns Norman Boyle, a university researcher who leaves New York city with his wife Lucy and young son to live in New England, swapping their cramped apartment for a spacious old house in the country. However, the house was once owned by Dr. Freudstein, a 19th century scientist who was rumoured to perform grotesque inhuman experiments. Freudstein it seems discovered a way to conquer death and unbeknownst to the house's new owners, Freudstein's zombified body is very much alive and lurking in the basement awaiting human victims to replenish his deteriorating cells...

The third of Fulci's gothic chillers (or his fourth zombie film if you prefer), House by the Cemetery is not nearly as wayward as the preceding films, City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. By comparison, Cemetery's story is nailed down tight, but the film still has its fair share of fuzzy logic and inconsistencies. Best not to analyse the plot too closely and instead bask in the film's rich dark atmosphere. Sergio Salvati, Fulci's perennial cameraman from this era lends the 'scope visuals a distinctly cold and wintry touch appropriate enough for what is a rather moody film, set in a house of the damned, where every surface seems coated in an inch of dust (and the odd tombstone). The film's first half is relatively restrained, but following an exceedingly gruesome bat attack Fulci's customary brutality arrives in spectacular style, the haunted house turning into a slaughter house with poker stabbings, throat slashings and flesh rippings.¹

Ostensibly, Fulci raids the coffers of recent horror films like The Amityville Horror and The Shining but Cemetery is a strangely reflective film of former Fulci glories - in one scene Norman plunges an axe through the door the cellar only for it to penetrate inches away from his son's head trapped on the other side - a scene reminiscent of City of the Living Dead. The head smashing-on-rocks moment in The Psychic is riffed on when Catriona McColl's is dragged down the basement staircase, her head bashing against the steps. The climax of the film where Dr. Freudstein's lumbering zombie finally emerges from the shadows is surely one of Fulci's finest moments, the strangely haunting conclusion has a parallel with the finale of The Beyond. Catriona MacColl in her last film for Fulci delivers another solid turn, but the film's most memorable performance, perhaps for the wrong reasons is Giovanni Frezza, playing little Bob Boyle with a genuine childlike innocence and wonder, his role almost ruined by the dubbing his voice into English using an adult actor affecting a child's voice.

Blue Underground's DVD, a port of the excellent 2001 Anchor Bay edition is for now the best way to see House by the Cemetery on home video. This title has been dogged by inferior editions throughout the years, public domain label Diamond Entertainment had their own DVD alongside the Anchor Bay, while at the time of writing Amazon are selling a dubious 3D DVD version, obviously one to avoid. The current 2007 Blue Underground DVD is a fine effort, featuring an excellent 2.35 anamorphic transfer, and a pleasing English dub. Extras are scant, a trailer, a TV spot and a slightly longer version of the bat scene (without sound). The good news is that Blue Underground will be releasing a new special edition of the film on DVD and Blu-Ray in September with brand new extras. Closer to home, House by the Cemetery is finally available uncut in the UK on the Arrow label. Transfer and audio wise, it's comparable with the Blue Underground disc, but includes an additional extra, "Fulci In The House: The Italian Master Of Splatter", a short 18min feature on director's great run of films in the late 70's, early '80's.

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Notes
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1. In the scene where Dagmar Lassander, playing the real estate agent is killed when a poker is plunged into her throat, an additional shot reveals a huge wound to her head. However this bit of violence is never seen. It looks suspiciously like a cut but in fact Fulci was unhappy with the effect and removed the scene.

Skellig Herzog

Just a very quick detour from the Video Nasties series before we return with House by the Cemetery… My good friend and fellow blogger Martin gave me the idea for this post, based on his series of excellent dispatches from Hong Kong at his fantastic blog A Hero Never Dies. At the weekend I rescued my scanner from a mound of boxes, still unopened from our house move back in March (?) and was scanning some old photos, when I found some pics of a trip we made in 2004 to the Skellig Islands, two small steep rock islands that loom out of the Atlantic ocean, 8 miles off the South West coast of Ireland. This extraordinary, primordial world has a special meaning for me, as it was here in 1975 that Werner Herzog filmed the strange and haunting final sequence of his film Heart of Glass…


An aeriel shot of Skellig Micheal, the larger of the two rocks where a colony of monks lived in isolation. Blow up the image and you can just make out the ruins of the monastic settlement which still stands today. This is where Herzog shot the footage for Heart of Glass

Passing Skellig Beag (“Little Skellig”) on the way to Skellig Michael. You can’t land on this island as the cliff walls are too steep and the terrain dangerous to negotiate. In the foreground my wife, Irene looks on, praying for a quick death due to extreme sea sickness !

Skellig Michael. If you blow up the image you can see the steps the monks fashioned out of the rock, leading up to the beehive huts where they lived on the Northwestern peak of the island. Skellig Beag is in the background, giving an idea of the distance between both islands.

Werner Herzog remembered the island in his commentary on the Heart of Glass DVD - I love this place, it’s actually Skellig Rock…a settlement of medieval Irish monks who exactly in the year 1000 were tossed off the cliff by marauding Norsemen, by Vikings and since then its uninhabited, but some of their igloo type huts, stone huts are still remaining. (You could get out) by boat but not during the winter months when the waves are too high, its too dangerous, you can’t land on this rock island… Don’t ask me how difficult it was to get out here, I was in a small boat and everybody was getting sick and vomiting and freezing and rain… Its is a spectacular place, I truly love it, that is ecstatic landscape for me…this vista is almost like the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich looking down from the rocks of Rügen Island...

The islanders prepare to sail out to the edge of the world in Heart of Glass. This final sequence filmed at Skellig Michael can be viewed here

Video Nasty #23 - Gestapo's Last Orgy

Gestapo's Last Orgy from 1977 holds the dubious honour of being the best of the Italian Nazi Exploitation films, far superior to fellow DPP detainees, the trashy Beast In Heat and the incredibly dull SS Experiment Camp. Having said that, any pretense that director Cesare Canevari's film is a serious Holocaust drama is quickly dispelled by the sheer amount of sleaze and decadence on show. Arriving towards the end of the short lived cycle of Nazi exploiters, audiences were demanding ever increasing amounts of depravity and they were not to be disappointed.


The story concerns a love affair between Starker, the commandant of a House of Dolls style concentration camp for Jewish women, and Lise a beautiful inmate Starker is drawn to, by her determination to die. Starker refuses to give in to her request and sets about brutalizing Lise with various forms of torture and sexual humiliation, but slowly his will breaks down and he falls in love with his captive. Some years following the war Starker rendezvous with Lise in the dilapidated ruins of the former camp to rekindle their love affair but Lise has some other ideas...

At times Gestapo's Last Orgy suffers something of an identity crisis - it's never quite sure if it wants to be a serious meditation on the nature of power and control, or a tow-the-line sexploitation shocker. Mostly it's the latter and beyond the accomplished photography, evocative score and decent performances, the film serves up enough sexual sadism to give even the most jaded sleaze fan pause for thought. At one point Lise is made fellate the barrel of Starker's pistol, while in another scene, a menstruating girl is savaged by a pack of Alsatian dogs wild with the smell of blood. Canevari doesn't skimp on the violence either - inmates are seen lowered into baths of caustic quicklime, and in one of the film's most tasteless moments, some elderly and pregnant women are seen writhing in the flames of a crematorium.

Gestapo's Last Orgy has a certain sophistication uncharacteristic of the films of the Nazi cycle, with Canevari riffing on two obvious films - The Night Porter (the director borrowing the framing device and the flashback structure from Liliana Cavani's film); and Saló, for its scenes of excess and perversion (like a scene where the camp officers are dining on the roasted flesh of an Jewish infant). Unlike Pasolini's film, Canevari has little to say about politics and history and the film is resigned to some well worn clichés of the genre, like a female gestapo dominatrix, and the kindly camp doctor who restores Lise's will to live, both indulging in a truly cringe worthy love scene (to the strains of the mawkish but strangely infectious theme song).

Exploitation Digital's DVD of Gestapo's Last Orgy (available as part of a triple set including The Beast in Heat and Red Nights of the Gestapo) is a mixed affair. The transfer is decent enough, but falls short of the stellar Beast In Heast image. Framed at 1.85, the picture is for the most part sharp and in fine condition however the last five minutes of the film has been culled from a very degraded VHS source. Still, the film is fully uncut. Audio is offered in English and Italian. The English track is good although there are some instances when it gets rather hissy, usually in the absence of dialogue or effects. The Italian track is much cleaner but inexplicably no English subs have been supplied. Extras consist of a gallery of promo materials and the film's Italian trailer under the L' Ultima Orgia del III Reich, and trailers for four other Exploitation Digital titles.

Video Nasty #22 - Forest of Fear

Forest of Fear from 1980 is the quintessential example of a terminally obscure horror film damned to fame by the DPP. Considering there's nothing remotely contentious about the film, it remains a mystery why it became one of the 39 outlawed titles, its inclusion on the list is the only reason the film is still spoken about some 31 years later...


The plot of the film is strictly routine stuff. In a isolated stretch of woodland, two FBI agents have a field of marijuana sprayed with an experimental and untested chemical known as Dromax. Exposed to the poisoned crop are its hippy owners who have turned into homicidal mutant maniacs with a taste for human flesh... Made in the wake of Dawn of the Dead, but perhaps for budget concerns, director Charles McCrann's sole cinematic outing takes its inspiration from Night of the Living Dead with a touch of The Crazies (and I Drink Your Blood) thrown in for good measure. McCrann even borrows John Amplas, the actor who played the title role in Romero's classic vampire film Martin. Sadly, Romero's skill at extending his films far beyond their meager budgets has not rubbed off on this decidedly ramshackle 16mm effort.

Almost every aspect of Forest of Fear is dull and nondescript. A few members of the cast turn in some decent performances (Amplas not included) but it's something of a losing battle against director McCrann's flat set ups and insipid direction. A tension-generating subplot about a teenage girl and her autistic brother, lost and separated from their parents is spoiled by the casting of some obvious twenty-somethings to portray the babes-in-the-woods. And there's an unintentionally ridiculous moment when a camping couple are set upon by the zombies and the husband sprints off lightning fast leaving his genuinely confused wife behind! Even the "zombies" hardly look the part, their traditional shuffle is all that distinguishes them from the rest of the cast, and the fleeting gore is utterly amateurish.

One would like to be kinder to Forest of Fear, considering it's Charles McCrann's only film and an obvious labour of love. As well as directing, McCrann produced, wrote, edited and took the lead role (and bears something of a resemblance to a side-burned Warren Beatty). Interestingly the British VHS removed a 5-min coda which concludes the original film on a somewhat bittersweet note, the version that Monte Video distributed in the UK is considerably more dour and is perhaps all the better for it. Tragically, Charles McCrann was killed on September 11th 2001, while he was working in his office at the World Trade Center. There's an online tribute page (hosted by the corporation he worked for) and reading some of the comments by friends (and fans) McCrann remained proud of his maiden voyage.

Forest of Fear in available in the US courtesy of Televista, under the Toxic Zombies title. Don't let the inflated price tag of this disc fool you - this DVD is an abysmal effort, so lo-fi it would be better placed in one of those Mill Creek 50-pack multi-sets. The fullframe transfer is poor, sporting a soft image and smeary colors, evidently taken from a VHS copy judging by the odd stray tracking line and picture-jump. The audio tracks fluctuates in volume and a stills gallery - some captures from the DVD, are offered as an extra. One to avoid, but if you must see everything on the Video Nasties list, the complete film can be seen in one sitting here...

Video Nasty #21 - Flesh for Frankenstein

It's not recorded what Andy Warhol thought of the DPP's decision to ban his 1973 film Flesh For Frankenstein on VHS in Britain, but he was probably pleased with the controversy - "Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches", Warhol once quipped. The film (and its companion piece Blood For Dracula, shot back to back) was a milestone in the history of the Factory - Warhol's Cinema had broken free of its New York moorings and gone trans-atlantic, the film shot at Cinecittà in Rome with European money by an Italian film crew. But more significantly, the film would mark the departure from the Factory of Flesh For Frankenstein director Paul Morrissey, Warhol's most valued cinematic collaborator.


In the film, Baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier) has created two zombies from various body parts, and from the spawn of this living dead Adam and Eve intends to raise a superhuman race to do his bidding. Frankenstein is short of a head for his male specimen and duly collects one from the shoulders of a local shepherd boy leaving a whorehouse. However, the shepherd's best friend (Joe Dallesandro) is not about to let this matter slide and has other plans for the Baron. Of course the whole thing ends in tears... and lots of spilled organs.

You’d be forgiven for initially mistaking Flesh for Frankenstein for a latter day Hammer picture – a few early scenes look like they might have strayed from the studio’s Karnstein Trilogy. But Morrissey’s film is a far more demented offering, a deliciously warped concoction of surgical gore, deviant sex and outrageous comedy, quite apart from the usual drive-in fare from this era. Originally the film was shot in 3D (or “Space Vision” as the credits attest) and apparently it looks rather good when projected in three dimensions.¹ Thankfully Morrissey avoids much of the showboating seen in the likes of Friday the 13th Part 3D, where the cast are endlessly shoving objects into the camera lens, and the film loses nothing when seen in its flat version, bolstered up by some fine photography and excellent set design – check out the very 70’s flashing electronic console when the Baron re-animates his zombies !

In the US the film secured an X rating thanks in part to Carlo Rambaldi’s riotously gory effects – no bodily appendage is hacked off without geysers of blood erupting from the wounds. But it’s the film’s depiction of sexuality that troubled the ratings board. Morrissey’s own absurd view of sex is even more skewed here. Frankenstein’s children are the result of a union between him and his sister - the sex-crazed Baroness is even partial to some necrophilia. In the film’s most memorable scene Frankenstein fist-fucks the female zombie’s abdominal cavity (“To know death…”),² while in another scene Otto, the Baron’s assistant is driven crazy by pent up sexual frustration and starts tonguing the female zombie’s stitching. In a sense this kind of eroticism of wounds and surgery pre-dates the obsessions of David Cronenberg, and shares a similar conceit of the narrator of JG Ballard’s novel Crash of “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”

Unlike Morrissey’s previous films, the director had to forgo his loose improvisational style as the foreign actors had to wrestle with Morrissey’s English dialogue. Although every line reading seems mangled by thick accents (“I need his brain for my zambie!”), there’s tremendous fun from the cast - Monique van Vooren as the Baron’s snobby nymphomaniac sister/wife, Arno Juerging’s perpetually bug-eyed Otto, Joe Dallesandro playing another one of his pissed-off proto-slackers and of course Udo Kier as Baron Frankenstein, delivering a performance of such hysteria, it's worthy of Klaus Kinski at his most derailed.

Flesh for Frankenstein is available courtesy of Image in the US and Tartan in the UK, in near identical DVDs. Both editions feature a very solid 2.35 anamorphic transfer with vibrant colors and little of the grain and ghosting issues of other 3D films. Audio is also decent for what it is. For extras, both editions feature a very interesting commentary track ported over from the Criterion laserdisc, which stitches together (appropriately enough) contributions from Paul Morrissey and Udo Kier. Morrissey returns for more commentary, this time over a 24-min montage of stills and a short 4-min screen test. The Tartan edition also features an extra supplement - a nice booklet entitled The BBFC, Morrissey and the Horror Genre which gives a fascinating insight into the workings of the British Board of Film Classification in the 70’s…

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Notes
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1. According to Morrissey the idea for shooting the film in 3D came from Roman Polanski who had planned to make his 1973 sex-comedy What ? a 3D feature. Ultimately Polanksi scrapped the idea for his film but Morrissey felt the 3D process perfectly suited his proposed Frankenstein film.

2. The film's famous line "To know death, Otto, you must fuck life in the gall bladder" was Morrissey's parody of similarly ridiculous line from Last Tango In Paris. However, the line has assumed a spooky resonance - in 1987 Andy Warhol died from complications following routine gall bladder surgery.

First look at Any Gun Can Play (FAB Press)

FAB Press' long awaited book on Spaghetti Westerns arrived at home yesterday. I grabbed a few quick pics of the book and as you can see it looks like another excellent FAB production. When you get passed John Coulthart's gorgeous front cover artwork, the book is packed with a bewildering amount of rare, international posters, stills and ad mats (where do they get them from?) and beautifully laid out text. I started reading the book last night, getting in only a few pages of the Introduction but author Kevin Grant's writing is intelligent, thoughtful and accessible. Overall Any Gun Can Play looks like an essential purchase for fans of the genre...

Inside page autographed by author Kevin Grant and Django himself Franco Nero!. This is limited to the first 500 copies

Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind

Tsui Hark's film from 1980 remains a high water mark of the Hong Kong New Wave, an extraordinary action thriller so unruly and anarchic that Hark was forced by the British Colonial Government to revise the film, diluting some of it's political subtext. For many years this original version was thought lost, but in 2004 the film was remastered for a French DVD release with the censored material imported from a poor quality VHS source - this is the version under review.

Japanese VHS sleeve featuring the international title Don't Play With Fire

In the film, three high school boys with a taste for making mischief using homemade explosives forge an uneasy alliance with a teenage girl who harbors a death wish and gets her kicks from torturing small animals. After catching the boys rigging a bomb in a cinema, she blackmails the amateur terrorists into taking part in increasingly crazed pranks. But trouble looms when the gang of four steal a package of Japanese bank bonds from some US arms dealers - and they mean to get them back...

Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind with its brutal nihilistic violence, teenage angst, caustic political commentary and whiplash action is so volatile a mix, the celluloid itself seems in danger of catching fire as it runs through the projector gate. Hark's vision of Hong Kong is relentlessly grim and unglamourous - an overcrowded society driven by money and inflamed by triad violence. His view of foreigners is especially abrasive and Hong Kong is seemingly infiltrated with them at every level, from the chief of police to the US mercenaries doing business with the Japanese on Chinese soil, and even some Americans spreading the Mormon message.

Feeding off all this are Hong Kong's sociopathic youth. For the 3 high schoolers, their interest in urban guerrilla warfare seems little more than thrill seeking but Pearl, the gang's de facto female leader and self-destructing dark star at the heart of the film, is clearly unhinged, seen torturing mice by sticking pins through their brains for a slow agonizing death, and throwing a cat out of a window to land tangled up on a barbed wire fence. She's a formidable presence in the film, taking on the triads and the mercenaries with ruthless determination. Her awkward relationship with the three boys, the shrinking violets of the story, remains one of the most interesting aspects of the film.

Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind is made with such verve and energy it could fuel a dozen films, and Hark manages to balance the socio-political concerns of the story with a distinct atmosphere of unreality, similar in feel to A Clockwork Orange or Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva. One can imagine the film leaving a deep impression on Takashi Miike. There's also the wonderful hit and run soundtrack, which samples some of Goblin's music from Dawn of the Dead, and featuring entirely unexpected appearances from Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène, and the opening submarine pings from Pink Floyd's long form epic Echoes.

The French DVD of Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind is available in a 3-film Tsui Hark boxset that sadly contains no English subtitles - luckily the copy I have was tweaked to include some English-language fansubs. The transfer of the film is generally excellent, the 2.35 image looks fresh, vibrant and sharp. The scenes culled from the VHS source - see below, are very tatty - but watchable and not extensive, and worth remembering that this may be the only way to see the film as originally planned...

Visions of Light: the Art of Cinematography

This excellent documentary made in 1993 by the American Film Institute and the Japan Broadcasting Network is the perfect way to restore your faith in Cinema should you find yourself jaded from too many bad movies (a occupational hazard around here lately). Visions of Light serves a dual purpose – it’s a fine introduction to the often hidden art of cinematography while also providing a nice primer on the technical and stylistic evolution of American Cinema – from the early primitives, to the Birth of a Nation, the years of experimentation before the sound era came in, the signature films of the studio years, and the emergence of auteurist Cinema in the late-60’s.

Visions of Light gathers together over 20 directors of photography, among them some of the most important in modern American Cinema, to discuss the art of cinematography, illustrated with almost 100 well chosen film clips. The first section of the documentary concentrates on the great master cameramen of the studio system, who very often defined a particular style of the studio - the glamour of MGM or the hard gritty look of Warners. From the early 40's some outstanding painters of light began to emerge - Gregg Toland (The Long Voyage Home, Citizen Kane), Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, Night of the Hunter) and James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success, Hud). The spare stylistic look of Film Noir allowed cameramen to widely experiment with light and shade - the extraordinary starkness of John Alton's black and white photography on The Big Combo, the expressionist look of Russell Metty's work on Touch of Evil, and the hard New York street style of films like On the Waterfront, Naked City and later films like The French Connection and Dog Day Afternoon

Citizen Kane (Gregg Toland)

The Big Combo (John Alton)

 Days of Heaven (Néstor Almendros)

Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters (John Bailey)

The best moments are when the cinematographers discuss their own work - Haskell Wexler remembers pleasing James Wong Howe with a second unit shot on the film Picnic, Conrad Hall reveals the famous reflection of rain running down Robert Blake’s face in In Cold Blood was achieved purely by accident, William Fraker explains Roman Polanski's idea for a peculiar shot in Rosemary's Bay, Vilmos Zsigmond discusses his signature soft lighting for McCabe and Mrs Miller, Gordon Willis confesses he might have good too far with his customary dark lighting in a scene from Godfather Part II, and Néstor Almendros describes shooting film at magic hour for Days of Heaven.

Cynics might feel that Visions of Light is no more than a show reel for the AFI - the selection of films is decidedly mainstream, and there’s little reference to European Cinema, but the documentary is undoubtedly a fine resource, and you might find yourself revisiting some old classics with a new set of eyes. Visions of Light is available on DVD in the US courtesy of Kino and in the UK on the BFI label. Both discs have similar transfers, the BFI from 2006 is perhaps the better of the two, but still somewhat lacking. The interview segments generally look good, but the film clips are sometimes poor. The b/w films look the best, but the colour films often look ragged, the colours at times blown out and the films are cropped from their original ratios. A shame considering the documentary is all about the images, but perhaps one day Visions of Light will be overhauled and remastered to full strength.

Altered States: The Autobiography of Ken Russell

Picture the scene - A hotel in London, sometime in the late 70's... A drunk and naked Ken Russell finds himself locked out of his room. Carefully making his way to the reception he hisses at the night porter who's busy dealing with some new arrivals. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" the night porter demands. "I've locked myself out of my room" the beleaguered director replies. "You silly old fart", the night porter sneers, "What's your number?"

Just one of the many stories from Altered States (the 1991 US edition of A British Picture: An Autobiography), a lively, charming and funny account of the life of one of the greatest wildcards of British Cinema. Typically, Russell throws out the conventional structure of the autobiography - there's only a vague sense of narrative, as he jump cuts to various episodes throughout his life and career. Worth mentioning up front for fans of The Devils, that Russell dwells little on his most infamous work, perhaps the film inspired some painful memories - it was during the making of the film that his marriage began to crumble, as well as his Catholic faith. There's some good stories from his other films - his early career making artist biopics for the BBC television series Monitor, how he convinced Oliver Reed and Alan Bates to perform the nude wrestling scene in Women In Love, and Kathleen Turner's reluctance to get dirty in Crimes of Passion. The meatiest memories are reserved for his 1980 sci-fi Altered States, Russell describing his battles with the film's writer Paddy Chayefsky, who was obsessed with controlling every aspect of the production leading to a bitter fallout with the director and Chayefsky disowning the film.

One of the strengths of the book is Russell's honesty - the slow and painful dissolution of his marriage to Shirley, the death of family members like his parents and a beloved cousin from childhood, as well as a candid critique of his work. Russell admits that the work dried up after the failure of his 1977 film Valentino - the dismal performance of the film in the US made him a pariah among the major studios, and the director had to cope with increasingly long spells of unemployment. Russell is highly critical of his work on Gothic, a failure due to the "monumental miscasting and hysterical pace" and alleges that he was Warners' 27th choice to direct Altered States (among the previous 26 film makers the film was offered to, was Andrei Tarkovsky!).

Another revealing aspect of the book is Russell's near misses - at one stage he spent over a year of pre-production of the musical Evita, before it was abandoned, and Russell was also set to direct a version of Dracula, with Mick Fleetwood as the Count, only for it to be cancelled due to three other rival productions in the works. Russell also discusses his work outside of Cinema - throughout the 80's and early 90's he directed a number of controversial but visually striking operas. His 1982 opera The Rake's Progress saw him collaborating again with Derek Jarman who was the set designer on The Devils and Savage Messiah. Russell also directed the video for Elton John's 1985 hit, Nikita, and confesses that when he wrote the treatment for the video - about a man's crush on a female East German border guard, he assumed Nikita was a woman's name.
In 2008 the book was revised under the British Picture title and brings Russell's life up to date, including recent events like the fire that destroyed his home in April 2006 and his ill-advised appearance on Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. Ken Russell's loyal fans are used to taking the rough with the smooth, but this memoir is a treat and the book is highly recommended.

Video Nasty #20 - Fight For Your Life

I always thought a great intro to an episode of sci-fi TV series Quantum Leap would be if the time-displaced Sam Becket leaped into the body of a white man alone in the middle of a crowd of black people at a screening of Fight for Your Life, and as the enraged crowd were yelling “Kill that honky cracker’s ass”, a confused and dismayed Sam would utter his signature line “Oh boy!”


The film is essentially a rethread of William Wyler’s Desperate Hours, refitted for the 42nd St crowd. Three convicts have escaped during a routine prisoner transfer. Led by Southern white trash Jessie Lee Kane, the convicts hide out at the home of a middle class God-fearing black family and subject them to an ordeal of abuse, violence and rape, that is until the tables are turned… Also known as Getting Even, I Hate Your Guts and in the disco era Stayin' Alive, Fight for Your Life is one of the most incendiary exploitation films ever made. While the power of most horror films is diluted over time, Fight for Your Life looks and sounds even more astonishing nowadays as actor William Sanderson (who went on to play the doomed replicant designer in Blade Runner) lets loose a humiliating tirade of racial slurs upon his hostages. Besides the sickening racism, the film is also critical of organized religion – when the head of the family, a pastor chooses to turn the other cheek in the face of such tyranny, Kane beats him senseless with his bible.

Subtext aside, Fight for Your Life is a shameless button-pusher and gleefully plays the race card to the hilt specifically to infuriate black audiences – at one point Kane makes the pastor do a jig and call him “master”, while in another scene, Kane tries to lynch the wife in the woods. Producer William Mishkin was notorious for his spartan budgets but the film is surprisingly competent and well shot, perhaps making the film a little easier to withstand. Had the film the same raw power of say Last House on the Left, scenes like a little boy having his head smashed with a rock, or the moment when the daughter emerges from a gang rape battered and bruised, would have rendered the film unwatchable. Good work too from the cast – it’s William Sanderson’s show all the way as the spiteful and sneering Kane, and Robert Judd who plays the much abused pastor gives a fine, gutsy performance. Fight For Your Life is a significant moment in the annals of American Exploitation, and perhaps one day it will finally claim the honour of being the final Video Nasty on the DPP’s list to remain banned in Britain.

Blue Underground’s 2004 DVD of Fight For Your Life is marvellous. The transfer framed around 1:77 looks great and does a fine job of reproducing the film’s autumnal look. The image is sometimes soft looking and there are one or two weird motion blurs but this is faithful to the way the film was shot and developed. For extras Bill Lustig joins writer Straw Wiesman, and DP Lloyd Freidus for an engaging commentary track. Sadly director Robert Endleson and William Sanderson are absent, both notoriously reticent to discuss the film. There’s also a gallery of publicity material for the film as well as two trailers, both tailored to white and black audiences.