CRUCIBLE OF THE VAMPIRE (2019)

Now available in the UK on the Screenbound label, Crucible Of The Vampire is director/writer/editor Iain Ross-McNamee’s second full-length feature. It cleverly utilises the topography of a bucolic Shropshire landscape as well as the history behind the manor house used as the film’s primary shooting location, in order to evoke beautifully the golden era of British horror. But the film is a transparently low budget affair, so brilliantly steeped in a mix of the early‘70s folk horror tropes of Tigon British and the racy lesbian vampire action that writer Tudor Gates made a cornerstone of Hammer Films’ Karnstein Trilogy  -- The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Twins of Evil (1972) -- during the same period, that it really is a mystery why Ross-McNamee also allows proceedings to deteriorate, towards the end, into a mire of cheapo CGI digital effects and choreographed fight scenes. Such tactics quickly ruin the genteel air of old school charm that defines the diffident sort of British exploitation it was presumably intending to mimic the tone of in the earlier portions of the picture, only to replace it with a crude low budget aesthetic that’s a dime-a-dozen everywhere else you look in indie horror circles. Nevertheless, before we reach that final act when it goes slightly off the rails, there’s plenty else here for aficionados of 1970s Brit horror to recognise and doubtless appreciate.

The story itself will seem instantly familiar, being entirely built from tropes and narrative strands that appear countless times throughout the genre and are central to many of David McGillivray’s screenplays for British horror movie directors such as Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren. Ross-McNamee and his two co-writers, Darren Lake and John Wolskel, do a particularly convincing job in the first half of the movie of channelling their interest in Hammer’s ‘70s vampire output and the ‘Big Three’ associated with the Folk Horror subgenre, into what essentially becomes a re-working of Warren’s Satan’s Slave, from 1976 -- with witchcraft, necromancy, a dysfunctional family with a dodgy history and an attractive innocent who is led unsuspectingly into a carefully prepared trap set by devilish forces. This gets combined with an awareness of the methods of construction of supernatural tales by the likes of M.R James and Arthur Machen, which are often uncanny historical palimpsests that reveal their concealed layers through an exploration of architectural and landscape history.  

The film begins in a traditional fashion for this genre, in this case with a black-and-white 1649 prologue in which John Stearne, the main associate of the real-life Civil War-era Witchfinder Mathew Hopkins, hangs an old peasant called Ezekiel Fletcher (played by Brian Croucher of Blake’s 7 fame) from an Oak tree in the Shropshire woodland for the crime of necromancy. His next act is to break into two pieces the cauldron suspected of being used by Ezekiel for his sorcery. Ezekiel’s dead daughter had been seen roaming Jacob’s Wood at night, which is more than enough reason for finding the old boy guilty on the spot without further examination of the issue. Three-hundred-and-fifty years later, though, and one half of what has subsequently become known as the Stearne Cauldron now rests in the University Museum of a young assistant curator called Isabelle (Katie Goldfinch). Conscious that the owners might be attempting to scam the university to pay for repairs, her supervisor sends her to a Shropshire manor house being renovated by a family who claims to have uncovered the other half of the cauldron in their basement while preparing to lay a new gas pipe. It is Isabelle’s job to examine the artefact and decide whether or not the claim is genuine.

Karl (Larry Rew), the owner of the house, tells Isabelle about the history to the building, which was originally built by secret Catholics during the reign of James I, then adapted and expanded during the Victorian era. When he mentions in passing how the Neo-Jacobian pile was formerly a Girls’ School, it sounds like a knowing line included in the script with the intention of it being picked up on by viewers as an obvious reference to Hammer’s Lust For A Vampire from 1971. In fact, a little light research into manor houses in the Shropshire area unearthed the film’s shooting location to be one Acton Reynald Hall: ‘a Victorian mansion incorporating parts of a building dating from early to mid-17th Century’. The building was the home of the Corbett family for generations; but they first moved there in 1644, after their former home became a Royalist garrison during the English Civil War and was destroyed by Cromwell’s soldiery. It was expanded on in the early 19th century by Shropshire architect J.H. Haycock, when the entire village of Acton Reynard, along with several farms, were demolished to make way for the surrounding park. In 1919, though, the building actually was turned into a Girls’ School, and remained one up until 1995! One of the nice things about Iain Ross-McNamee’s film is how it manages to incorporate little bits of the local history of the area into its B movie plot about sorcery, witches and vampirism. At one point Isabelle finds a diary written by a former owner of the house during the Victorian era, which prompts a flashback in the style of M.R. James, where we find out how the half of the Stearne cauldron now buried in the basement was discovered. Jeremiah Cain (Charles O’Neill) describes being led by an unearthly melody floating on the wind in the woods, to the site of the hanging of Ezekiel Fletcher, seen in the 1649 prologue.  It also leads him to the cauldron, which he then takes back to the manor, only to unleash a ghostly presence in the form of a pale, ghostly woman in a black dress who comes to be known as the Dark Lady.

By this point, Isabelle has also been experiencing similar visions of a scary ghostly woman in the night. And there are also countless other odd episodes to deal with involving the, frankly, strange inhabitants who are Isabelle’s hosts up at the mansion: Scarlet (Florence Cady), the rebellious daughter of Karl and his foreign wife Evelyn (Babette Barat), steals Isabelle’s phone and even some of her underwear. And Evelyn insists on providing Isabelle with mysterious bedtime drinks and then hanging about to make quite sure she drains the glass before leaving. These mysterious ‘tonics’ seem to prompt erotic dreams (or are they dreams?) involving white horses and the ghostly pale woman. Even a trip to the local pub results in Isabelle meeting the gardener who works on the estate (played by Neil Morrissey) who then tells her about the terrible fate of his predecessor. The former gardener’s seemingly hostile son follows her back to the mansion along a moonlit path after she leaves the pub that night (providing an opportunity for some very Hammer-like day-for-night photography) issuing incoherent warnings about what might happen to her if she stays at the mansion any longer. Karl himself also becomes more suspect, refusing to allow Isabelle to remove the cauldron from its present site in the manor’s basement and demanding that she arrange to have the museum’s half of the artefact brought out instead to Shropshire in order to find out whether or not they fit together. 

When Isabelle reveals to a barmaid at the local pub that she has just broken up with her boyfriend because he couldn’t accept her religiously derived belief that there should be no sex before marriage, it doesn’t take a genius of a viewer to figure out that Isabelle’s virginal state might have also had some ulterior Wicker Man-style role to play in her being selected to come out to the manor house in the first place. The latter thought is made rather more explicit by the exceedingly forward behaviour exhibited by Scarlet who, not content with confronting Isabelle with the knowledge that she is attempting to seduce her while wearing Isabelle’s own purloined underwear, ends up exploiting a particularly disturbing encounter Isabelle has with the Dark Lady in order to successfully initiate her into the pleasures of Sapphic love!

The plot elements and the sometimes theatrically antiquated performance styles of some of the cast members make it quite plain that Hammer’s trio of films that were very loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla are the main models for the narrative, and for the lightly eroticised style of the movie. The problem with any attempt to recreate this bygone era in the present day is that actors of the personality and stature of Peter Cushing and Ingrid Pitt are not around anymore to do what they so often were able to do for Hammer Films: bring a degree of prestige to the productions they worked on that elevated those films beyond their nominal worth. For instance, the role of head of household Karl is played perfectly convincingly by the performer tasked with the job here, but you can’t help noticing that his role is precisely the kind that would have at one time been played by someone like John Carson if this were a real Hammer film -- and once you see that, it immediately draws your attention to the fact that the actor taking his place can never be an adequate substitute. 

That being said, Florence Cady does make a seductive might-be-a-lesbian/might-be-a-vampire antagonist; and newcomer (and Brie Larson-look-alike) Kate Goldfinch is a suitably engaging lead, although she inevitably struggles with the inconsistency of character that is demanded of her by the script when she goes from being a naïve, out-of-her-depth academic who falls for the same ‘drugged drink’ trick twice in close succession, to an ‘arse-kicking’ superwoman, slashing throats and crushing heads with seemingly no problem whatsoever, who manages to take out a coven-full of robed cult members about to drain her of her virgin’s blood so that they can fully restore their vampire-witch queen to her full glory. Neil Morrissey receives top billing on the cover of the DVD, but in truth turns up for only a handful of scenes, mainly concerned with delivering exposition. He is also given a scene at the climax of the movie just to make it worthwhile his turning up presumably -- although his role in the events depicted is, to be honest, rather minimal. In his director and editor roles Iain Ross-McNamee makes evocative use of the exterior and interiors of Action Raynard Hall to deliver many atmospheric moments in the build-up to the easily predicted climactic reveal; and a dream-like sequence that takes place in total silence and in slow motion is directed (probably unintentionally) like an ethereal Jesus Franco fever dream -- although there’s nothing in the film that's anywhere near as pervy as what ol’ Jess would have presented us with, I’m sure.

But if you can ignore the terrible digital FX, one or two weak performances and a resolution that seems to aim for charged ambiguity but just ends up feeling slightly unsatisfactory instead, there’s still an overall old-school feel about Crucible of the Vampire that is undoubtedly attractive, and will please many fans of the classics of 1970s British horror. It does, in the end, draw many strands of influence together in a way that feels utterly natural and convincing. It’s just a shame the pay-off seems rather rote, and plays by the rules of a more modern breed of horror rather than having the courage to stick with the original low-key style it began with. Screenbound Entertainment has just released the film on dual format Blu-ray/DVD and on digital platforms after it garnered many festival plaudits and awards, so this is a film that will definitely be of interest to many, despite its flaws.                 

         

THE ORCHARD END MURDER (1981)

WARNING: This review contains spoilers throughout

Christian Marnham’s tawdry offbeat thriller The Orchard End Murder furnishes audiences with a curious viewing experience in 2017 for a number of reasons, not least of which being the fact that – uniquely for a film of its kind -- it presents us with a very particular (and rather twisted) outlook on a mid-1960s milieu filtered through a lens which has been shaped by the equally distinct and time-locked cultural perspectives of the early-1980s  --  which is when this was filmed and then distributed as a fifty-minute second feature to play opposite current Hollywood movies of the day as a means to take advantage of the tax break being provided back then by the Eady Levy. Thus, it’s also now a time capsule whose oddly inappropriate comic excesses and warped tonal peccadilloes seem, ultimately, to flag up how much it embodies an outlook with roots in societal developments that have a lot to do with past ideas about the notion of a divided England: more specifically, the memory of a perception of there-having-been, at one time, an encroachment of suburbia and its ideals on the time-honoured ways of the English countryside, which continues to affect the relationships previously crucial to the functioning of traditional village life. In fact, such developments might be traceable all the way back to the post-war period, when the divide first began to form between a cultural heritage that takes its values, traditions and customs from a way of life that's guided primarily by the needs of agriculture and the rhythms of the surrounding landscape it depends upon, and the demands of an affluent middle-class commuter set that began to move in from surrounding areas from the mid-1940s onward -- sending commuters traveling in and out by rail each day who eventually also take control of local institutions without necessarily sharing the emotional investment in the area that comes of being an indigenous, integrated part of the community. For British viewers, this short, brutal-but-comic domestic horror thriller is as loaded with cultural subtext as Tobe Hopper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre no doubt was for U.S. viewers of the mid-1970s. And now, in a period when the UK seems as divided and as uncertain of its future as it ever has been since the Second World War, this often deliciously grubby exploitation piece seems vaguely to grasp its way towards becoming a pertinent critique of short-sighted provincial middle-class mores and Little Englander-ism because-of rather than despite being an iteration of the theme rooted in a now-largely vanished world of steam trains, British Rail branch lines, and tea and scones with vicar at the cricket pavilion. 

In many ways, The Orchard End Murder was taking up the baton of low-budget British Horror where the independent filmmaker Pete Walker left off. Walker arguably perfected the optimal blend for the times of sensationalism and titillation with his grungy, pessimistic 1970s thrillers, which were informed by and made possible through a combination of the new social permissiveness of the 1960s and the relaxing of censorship laws in the UK which took place in the early ‘70s, helping to create a climate guided by what Walker chronicler Steve Chibnall has termed, ‘the commercialisation of sexual display.’ While stately bastions of the genre like Hammer Productions struggled to adapt to this state of affairs, Walker’s savvy breed of new independent filmmaker flourished by integrating contemporary themes and exploitation subject matter, discovering a knack for the business of generating publicity in the process; whether it was the positive or negative kind didn’t much matter to them!  

By 1981, though, even Pete Walker was finding it difficult to operate successfully in an increasingly financially-straitened, moribund British film industry. His latest film at the time, House of Long Shadows, was a knowingly arch post-modern take on the hoary old Gothic Horror genre, but it was a throwback nonetheless, attempting to mine for nostalgic appeal the popularity of its quartet of veteran Horror stars: Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, John Carradine and Christopher Lee.  The Orchard End Murder, which came out at about the same time, though, operates in a similar way to Walker’s classic trio of Horror thrillers by generating a dread atmosphere and conjuring an ineffable sense of despair still discernible despite, and in some sense because of, the prosaic mundanities of the contemporary English country way of life it frames, pointedly set during the decade whose sexual attitudes first spawned and enabled Walker’s best films. The film even borrows the talents of cinematographer Peter Jessop, Walker’s go-to camera man and collaborator on nearly all his projects -- although, ironically, Jessop had been unavailable to Walker for the filming of House of Long Shadows -- and recreates a blissful, lost idyll of quaint Home Counties gentility which the film then proceeds to deface with lurid dabs of queasy sex, comic perversity and the macabre. What strikes one almost immediately is how confident and efficiently fine-tuned these 50 minutes of suspense are, considering the fact that the film effectively constitutes a writer-director feature debut for Marnham. In fact Marnham was already much steeped in the craft of film-making, having been forced to begin working as a young trainee assistant editor in a film processing lab because the job offered the only means at that time of earning his union card from the Film Producers Guild. He became friends with Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson during this period, and was later presented with a golden chance to to hone his skills as a director by making commercials for the advertising firm Cammell-Hudson Associates for several years during the period when Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg were also busy working on their masterpiece, Performance. 

From its opening seconds The Orchard End Murder impresses with the quality of its direction and writing, combined with the gorgeous cinematography and clever sound editing it showcases throughout; Marnham establishes his central character, her circumstances, and the situation she is about to face at the start of this tale with a simple but perfectly judged device: as the title credits role – simple white text against a black background – the usual title music is replaced by an awkward phone conversation in which a young woman called Pauline Cox (Tracy Hyde) -- who, it is quickly established, comes from the leafy south-east London suburb of Sidcup -- rings up a man she evidently barely knows, called Mike Robbins (Mark Hardy), after having previously obtained his number after meeting him on a night out in town. Hopeful expectation born of sheer boredom is a succinct summery of the frame of mind we sense from Pauline, and which has led to the making of this call, perhaps looking for stimulation and thrills in random sexual assignations to distract from the emptiness of suburban inanity. At first curt and formal towards her tentative inquiries, then solicitous and ingratiating when he recognises Pauline as the woman he has previously had a fumble with in a local car park, we immediately peg Mike for a bit of a player; and although both parties are ostensibly looking for 'a good time' with 'no strings attached’, there is an unvoiced intimation throughout of the uneven power imbalance that's manifested by the social dynamic in operation behind their words to each other during the setup of this assignation between a working class cinema usherette with few prospects and a public school-educated chartered accountant.

Mike isn’t available to take her out that night, though. Instead he suggests she join him for a Sunday drive out into the Kent countryside. For there’s a "lovely little place" there called Charthurst Green where he will be taking part in a cricket match with some work colleagues and social acquaintances. Pauline’s rather incredulous response (“a cricket match?!”) to the idea of being made a party to this impeccably middle-class pastime is eventually tempered by Mike’s plan that they go off and ‘have some fun’ afterwards: perhaps, she contends hopefully, they might pick up where they left off in that car park? But when Mike remembers that he doesn’t yet know where she lives and  hurriedly asks her for her address so that he can pick her up ‘in his sports car', Pauline pointedly hesitates before answering. Then, without exactly refusing him, she replies by asking that he simply pick her up ‘under the clock’ in Sidcup high-street. We are given to think then that, despite everything else, Pauline is at least sensible enough not to impart her address to somebody who at this stage she barely knows – yet this turns out to be a wariness that will dessert her utterly later in the film, when the plot calls for her suddenly to become bizarrely reckless in her desperate need for human contact.  At this stage, though, we have yet to actually clap eyes on either Pauline or Mike, yet we already feel we have grasped the situation and obtained some knowledge of the personalities of both protagonists, as well as got a handle on the social dynamic underpinning the uneven relationship that has defined their interactions thus far. A title card then lets us known that events are taking place in 1966, and a high-angle crane shot above the cricket ground at Charthurst introduces the familiar and comforting sights and accompanying sounds of a traditional English sporting pastime. Maintaining its altitude, suspended above the scene of play, the camera pans to the right, past an adjacent country lane and above a substantial plantation of apple trees in a neighbouring field -- which is where we find Pauline and Mike, whom we see as small figures canoodling under cover of the orchard’s canopy. But the scene also includes another figure, over towards the edge of the frame, observing them furtively and skulking behind the cover of nearby trees and bushes … 

In just one shot, Marnham has indicated the terrain this film will inhabit throughout its running time -- both a geographical and a psychological terrain. Images of countryside activities and locales associated usually with peacefulness and calm will be constantly invaded by a sense of unease and tension; the mundane becoming infused with a feeling of profound dread because of the intrusive appearance of something that doesn’t quite fit the scene: this is British Home Counties Horror 101. When Marnham cuts from Pauline and Mike’s tryst to a shot of the bowler at the crease in the next field, rubbing the seam of the cricket ball against his crotch as he prepares to bowl, the juxtaposition of the two shots, though innocent in isolation, becomes a sly innuendo – a strategy Marnham employs throughout the film to suggest the darker undercurrents of sexual threat contained within apparently harmless situations and activities. This is a theme encapsulated in the Garden of Eden symbolism expressed through the film’s various manipulations of the visual motif of the apple. Apples are first seen growing in a young orchard, then being collected by child ‘scrumpers’; one is later picked by Pauline herself, presaging terrible developments -- before, finally and ominously, we later see a great mountain of discarded rotting apples dumped at the site of a remote chalk hole: a trajectory that indicates this fruit represents loss of innocence leading to death. 

The first half of the film is structured like a cautionary parable, taking a traditional slasher movie form that begins with that familiar, viewer-implicating POV voyeur’s shot from the bushes we’ve become used to seeing in so many slashers, which then cuts to a close-up of Pauline as she breaks away suddenly from Mike in reaction to an apparent noise in the distance that alerts her to the idea that they might not be alone, and giving her: “a horrible feeling … like somebody just walked over my grave!” With the spell of amour momentarily broken, Mike suddenly realises that he is up next to bat, and thereby instantly lets Pauline in on the lowliness of her ranking on his list of concerns for that day: he is here primarily for the cricket, with hanky-panky being merely a pleasant but inessential bonus addition to the proceedings. He hurriedly leaves her, not wanting to let the side down. 

Our identification with Pauline’s escalating feeling of isolation and creeping loneliness -- her sense thereafter of not belonging in these surroundings, or among these people – provide, in the following moments, the context in which we view these scenes, and informs our understanding of what she does next. Although we have been told that these events take place in 1966, Pauline is the only person whose fashion sense and styling gives that fact away on screen: with her Op art print-patterned dress and Vidal Sassoon-like bob cut hairstyle she stands out amongst the traditionally uniformed cricket players and the staid, mostly elderly middle-class attendees frequenting the picnic area. Yet Tracy Hyde’s naturalistic performance indicates not a modern, hyper confident ‘It’ girl of the High Sixties, but someone who has scrimped and saved to afford the occasional trip to Biba at the weekend where she can find something ‘hip’ to buy and wear on her nights out. The soundtrack becomes laden with audio cues that intimate the stultification a conventional upbringing in the semi-rural suburban outskirts of a big city might produce in a young woman seeking to forge an independent identity in those surroundings during the 1960s: the gentle rustling of leaves in the summer wind; the drowsy but insistent buzzing of insects as village church bells toil politely in the far distance … these are the sounds that provide the backdrop for the polite chit-chat over tea and scones that emanates from one of the trestle tables at which the vicar is busy holding court while light-heartedly discussing what turn out to be ominously relevant subjects -- such as the nature of the Biblical Adam and the concept of fate. Taken together, all such elements seem to conspire to produce in Pauline a feeling of alienation and disconnection from her apparently idyllic milieu, and she is soon tempted by the uncomfortably bourgeois atmosphere generated by these surroundings, to go wandering alone in the nearby orchard to escape the unpleasantness of the unwanted sensation they have left her with.

From here, the film skilfully constructs an uneasy and almost uncanny atmosphere using the most prosaically kitsch of materials: Pauline ends up at a quaint Gatekeeper’s cottage, situated a little way up the road from the leafy local railway branch line its occupant oversees, and production designer Simon Haynes (whose credits at IMDb seem rather sparse beyond this title) contributes to the viewer’s rapidly dawning sense of there being something slightly ‘off’ about the whole scene by constructing an environment for the cottage that appears, deliberately, just a little too picture-postcard-perfect to feel completely real. With its neatly manicured lawn and the picturesquely arranged ivy that adorns a surrounding, pristine-white picket fence, this chintzy cottage design looks like something from a fairy tale picture book, and it puts you on edge as soon as you see Pauline ambling unsuspectingly up its winding gravel pathway in much the same way as do the first daylight sightings of the Sawyer household in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To add to the absurdist sense of unreality which attends the scene, the garden is heavily adorned with dozens of ornamental garden gnomes. When the beckoning personage of the Gatekeeper/Stationmaster -- hunch-backed, bearded, and wearing little bottle-top-shaped spectacles -- appears at an upstairs window, looking like a novelty figurine popping out of a cuckoo clock and resembling one of his own colourful gnome collection as he welcomes Pauline to this “proper little gnomes’ fairyland”, inviting her in for “tea in my parlour”, one can’t help feeling that Pauline’s weird-o-meter should be buzzing off the scale by this point -- especially when he casts the gnome menagerie in terms of them being just like his “little friends”.

But even when the Stationmaster (an enjoyably creepy performance by Bill Wallis) follows up his initial invite with a (one would have thought) unnecessary reassurance that he ‘won’t bite!’ there is so clearly a sinister glee being indicated when he also notices in passing that some wasps have been caught in a ‘honey trap’ jam jar left out in the garden (“look where your sweet tooth has got you now!”), that for Pauline to accept his offer appears a positively suicidal decision on her part. The interior of the cottage is reassuringly drab in an English provincial sort of way, as china tea sets and lugubriously ticking pendulum clocks abound; a gloomy silence prevails that is only punctured by the Stationmaster's forced cheeriness as he merrily regales Pauline with an anecdote over tea and a slice of fruit cake, about how the former owners of the abode committed suicide by lying together side-by-side with their heads lined up along the railway tracks outside! It’s this mixture of bland domesticity and outrageously macabre detail which puts the piece broadly in the same bracket as Pete Walker’s best work, with the emphasis being on the quiet desperation that belies the cosy picture of contentment such surroundings generally denote to the outside world while usually disguising a multitude of sins. In some ways, the image that emerges of the Stationmaster’s rustic existence here has parallels with the depiction of Pauline’s solitude in suburbia, suggested earlier  when she found herself reluctantly seated among the great and the good of village life: with a disguised passive-aggressive note of bitter animosity just discernible beneath the amiable badinage, the outlandish host chats about how he has lived in this village all his life, and how he used to know everyone by their first name, as they once knew him; but now that city dwellers have taken up residence in so many weekend homes here, the village has become full of people who …”have no idea what I think … or what I do!” This is a comment that also carries intimations of a sinister double meaning, of course, but Pauline’s life in bedsit land in Sidcup seems similarly isolated, despite her insistence that “I live my own life.” A comical air of creepiness attends the Stationmaster’s attempts to ingratiate him-self with a young woman who he clearly thinks might be of ‘easy virtue’ as he tries to elicit sympathy by complaining to her about how “strangers can be very cruel … and make fun of my little deformity”; he even manages to persuade her, tentatively, to touch his hump at one point!

It also turns out that the Stationmaster has adopted a hulking, mentally challenged young man called Ewen -- an orphan Borstal boy who also lives with him and helps out, through his work as a local handyman, the various dignitaries and weekend residents whose needs clearly now dictate the rhythms of village life. Unfortunately, poor Ewen isn’t quite so practiced in the art of leaving a pleasant first impression with young women: he appears at the tea table cradling a cute bunny rabbit in his arms, but before Pauline has even reached the end of her first exclamation of appreciation for the cuddly creature, Ewen has started slamming it into the table, his features contorted as he lets out a bloodcurdling scream! Given the level of insanity now clearly on display as Ewen stalks off with a large kitchen knife promising to “take it out and skin it”, you’d think the shaken guest would now be making every excuse under the sun to be on her way by this point, despite the Stationmaster’s timid explanation that Ewen is “a very mixed up young man!” Instead she takes pity on him and agrees to go for a walk with him in one of the orchards, thus sealing an extremely unpleasant fate to come … 

Marnham’s script takes the Psycho route when determining the structure of the piece: it introduces Pauline as the central character, and therefore the site of the audience’s sympathies – but then kills her off before the half-way mark. Not unsurprisingly, Ewen turns out to be unable to control his spasmodic sexual urges during the couple’s saunter amongst the ripening apple trees; and indeed, at first, Pauline, despite having witnessed his disturbingly bizarre behavior earlier, seems more than willing to entertain the possibility of indulging in at least some light petting, if not a full sexual liaison with the lumbering manchild -- although we don’t get any insight into why exactly she would choose to take this course of action other than maybe out of sheer boredom. Here the film fully embraces the exploitation feel of many Pete Walker projects -- from Cool It Carol to Home Before Midnight -- in its depiction of a sad, grotty little enclave of a repressed (and repressive) England where the prospect of some rushed, cheap sex on a filthy mattress in a damp chalk hole dump for discarded fruit provides the acme of recreational entertainment. Clive Mantle, in one of his earliest screen performances, plays the taciturn, sexually immature hulk with a quiet desperation which allows the film to almost get away with attempting to make him the sympathetic party later on, even after we’ve just seen him attempt to rape Pauline in a violently graphic sequence during which her dress gets pulled off and her breasts pawed at, and which culminates in her finally succumbing and getting throttled to death during the course of Ewen’s unsuccessful attempts to have sex with her on a slag heap of rotting apples (oh, the symbolism!). 

The rest of the film develops the Stationmaster as an equally sexually freakish miscreant, and goes all in on the idea of rural England being a hotbed of twisted vice and sexual perversion behind the pastoral gentility of its homely village décor and mock Tudor heritage façades. The interior of a track-side railway sidings shed becomes a macabre shrine when Ewen transfers Pauline’s corpse to it so that he can indulge in a grim make-believe parody of domestic living, with some necrophilia on the side; and when the Stationmaster finds out, his reaction is to throw a hissy fit and accuse Ewen of cheating him because he “stole my flower!” The remainder of the film plays as a, frankly, tasteless piece of comic farce involving the mad Stationmaster and Ewen attempting to dispose of Pauline’s body in the middle of a large-scale police manhunt, after her disappearance is reported on the national radio. They seek to transfer it in a cardboard box on a trailer that’s attached to the back of a bicycle they normally use for collecting jumble for the Girl Guides (“I don’t think Brown Owl would approve of this!”), hoping to bury it in a secluded field after the site has already been searched by the Police. The film ends on a dismally facetious note with Pauline’s corpse finally being discovered in a shallow grave and a forensic pathologist assiduously dusting her exposed buttocks for prints as they emerge from the excavated dirt: a sight which results in Ewen losing it again, jumping into the grave, and attempting to ravish the soil-besmirched corpse in full view of some by-now-very-suspicious police detectives! Throughout this portion of the film, we’re constantly reminded how true the Stationmaster’s earlier exhortation actually is about nobody really knowing what he thinks … He and Ewen occasionally interact with a well-to-do out-of-towner called Mr Wickstead (Raymond Adamson), who wants Ewen to come round and trim his garden topiary sometime – but who is clearly otherwise not in the least bit curious about the lives of these suspiciously furtive locals.   

With its TV episode runtime length (50 minutes approx.) and the stylistic flavour of its excellent, melodic musical contributions from composer Sam Sklair -- which often imitate the kind of fretless base-dominated cues one would’ve been routinely exposed to in episodes of contemporary television shows such as Bergerac in the 1980s -- the film cultivates the disreputable air of something that feels like it may have been at one time commissioned for TV but then got subsequently side-lined for being far too explicit to actually screen – although this was never in fact the case. The way the tone shifts between a jokey nudge-nudge, wink-wink furtiveness and a grim atmosphere of incipient sexual violence informs the quirky melancholy character of the piece, which emerges from the film being, ultimately, both an example of sexist objectification and a critique of social alienation at the same time. One also senses that the central murder scene ended up being more powerful and disturbing than its makers intended when it was originally shot; Marnham’s apprenticeship as a director on numerous commercials imparted to him the ability to maximise the impact of his material, and he employs a number of techniques (discussed in the BFI release’s interview extras) which add such a gut-punch to the reception of that murder scene that it sets it apart from the lighter tone of the performances being given elsewhere. Nevertheless, the resulting contrast adds rather than detracts from the film’s uneasy reconstruction of the English countryside as a macabre but picturesque site of domestic solitude and sexual desperation.

This being a little-known programme-filling short rather than a main feature does not take anything away from its watchability, and anyone who prizes British Horror from the ‘60s and ‘70s will find this early-80s offering equally as fascinating. The new BFI Flipside release offers a gorgeous 2K digital restoration using the original 35mm film print preserved in the National Film Archive as a source. The image is almost perfect, although the audio track does get a little crackly in places towards the end. The dual-format presentation comes with a number of extras that make the release a valuable historical summery of the culture of independent filmmaking as it stood in the early 1980s, just as the programme short was about to die out with the removal of the tax break system of finance which made it possible. Christian Marnham’s first films outside of the advertising industry were documentaries and the disc includes a 25 minute short made in 1970 called The Showman. It’s a fascinating, and almost equally as macabre record of the career of the variety circus showman Mr Wally Shufflebotttom Snr: a portly, elderly sideshow host who toured British fairgrounds in the early 1970s touting his flaming knife-throwing act, which incorporated striptease  performances enacted by vacant-looking ‘dolly birds’ who we get to see jiving to a Gary Glitter track in order to tempt the shifty-looking punters in. What could sum up the 1970s in Britain better than that image? It’s yet another cultural document which appears to prove that the ‘60s/’70s were another country in terms of how sex was dealt with back in the day and, Marnham’s short account of the development of his career during this period, and of the making of this particular film, is extremely compelling. There is a longer 38 minute account of the making of The Orchard End Murder included, which is again fascinating; and Tracy Hyde has also been tracked down to discuss her previous life as an actress in a 12 minute interview. Actor David Wilkinson, who plays one of the cricketers in the opening section of the film, also talks of his memories about the filming of the feature. The accompanying booklet features two astutely perceptive articles by Josephine Botting on The Orchard End Murder, and Vic Pratt on The Showman: both writers are curators and historians at the National Film Archive who offer perceptive analysis of this bizarre lost period from the nation’s film history.  

                 

THE EXTERMINATOR (1980)

The popular vigilante exploitation movie The Exterminator, written and directed by a then twenty-nine-year-old James Glickenhaus and released in 1980, starts with an explosive prologue set in war-torn Vietnam, which was actually shot in just four days as an afterthought to the main storyline (California strategically standing-in for the steamy Vietnamese jungle), with the film’s original eight week production schedule having long since wrapped. An action-packed, visually arresting pre-credit opener, almost certainly designed with the intent to lend Apocalypse Now-style grandeur to what was  otherwiseset to be a guerrilla-esque low budget enterprise, this sequence dramatizes the mentally destabilising wartime experiences of one  John Eastland (Robert Ginty) and his Bronx buddy Michael Jefferson (Steve James), using the lion’s share of the film’s budget to produce a sharply edited conflagration of red gel-lit  pyrotechnics, Viet Cong-style POW brutality, and an early, Stan Winston-created, slow-motion decapitation, that’s considerably ickier than the campy gore of most of the grindhouse-level horror flicks who’s audience the film was marketed to appeal to.

Glickenhaus and his canny producer & friend, Mark Buntzman, seem to throw every penny they must have had at their disposal at the screen during this bombastic opening first couple of minutes, concluding the dazzling firestorm spectacle of dynamite blasts and blood with a sharp jump-cut that takes us precipitously from a helicopter shot of the Vietnamese jungle set aflame, to similarly framed aerial shots of neon-lit skyscrapers decorating the Manhattan skyline. The ensuing rawness of the urban experiences of The Exterminator’s boyish-looking anti-hero -- in which the harsh lessons of the crime-ridden, politically corrupt New York mean streets to which he returns become seemingly indistinguishable from the brutal, soul-corrupting, kill-or-be-killed survivalist creed that was necessary for him to physically endure through the horrors and hardships of jungle warfare, seem to back up this deliberate editorial conflation and are further reinforced later by repeated flashbacks to those opening Vietnam shots which occur at strategic points throughout the film. Almost every time, in fact, Eastland feels compelled to dish out more of his inventive brand of vigilante justice to the assorted hoods, pimps and sleaze merchants who make up the dirty denizens who infect the city’s unforgivingly amoral landscape, here: this is an exploitation action movie’s shorthand for the kind of deep character study that was memorably essayed by Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader in Taxi Driver, several years before the film’s release, in which Robert De Niro’s portrayal of the flawed Travis Bickle as an unstable, disorientated and increasingly violent ex-marine, is juxtaposed with his reception as an unlikely hero, after his instability happens to erupt successfully against East Village pimps rather than the political candidate he first targets for assassination.

John Eastland is positioned as someone who emerges through the same creative wellsprings that created Travis Bickle, and the film occasionally plays to similar narrative and character beats. But he’s also presented as being far more straightforwardly sympathetic, lacking the troubling caveats and problematizing ambiguity so evident in De Niro’s characterisation.

Robert Ginty plays Eastland as gentle, mild-mannered and soft-spoken. Physically, he’s even less prepossessing than the then-mega skinny De Niro. And he’s also apparently much better adjusted to civilian life -- at least at first (he holds down a blue collar job in a meat packing warehouse and maintains a good relationship with at least one friend) -- and is therefore likely to be identified as an unambiguously ‘good guy’ by the audience. As the film progresses and Eastland becomes publically identified as the vigilante known as ‘the Exterminator’, the superhero connotations become hard to miss -- an aspect of the film that’s emphasised even more boldly by its poster campaign, in which the fetishized image of Eastland’s dark-visored motorcycle helmet (only really ever seen during one scene, as is the welders’ mask, also associated with the character) becomes symbolic of his double identity.

But the explicit importance atributed to Eastland’s past as a veteran of Vietnam (mirrored by the similar background given to the city cop charged with the task of hunting him down, who is played by Christopher George) and its role in determining his responses to the violence and unjustness that surround him on the street (‘It was like we were back in Nam,’ he confides to his paralysed buddy, after tracking down and disposing of his attackers; ’it didn’t matter whether it was right or wrong … I just did it.’) in fact also happened to provide the precedent for Ted Kotcheff’s similarly-themed movie First Blood when it later appeared, in which Sylvester Stallone also experienced flashbacks to POW jungle horrors in the midst of contemporary violence, as he struggled to adjust to life outside the discipline of the army.

Glickenhaus considers the surprisingly nuanced First Blood to be a far more authentic sequel to  The Exterminator than producer Mark Buntzman’s own self-directed follow-up The Exterminator ll, but the director’s juxtaposition of the action movie dynamism which featured heavily in the film’s prologue, with his depiction of a grimy, urban milieu of vigilante street violence, wrought in the wake of the success of the Death Wish franchise (which Glickenhaus purposefully declined to see before shooting in order to avoid its exerting  undue influence on his approach), in a way provides a justification and precedent for Stallone’s character, John Rambo, to later transmute from the conflicted veteran of Kotcheff’s slightly more mature First Blood into the uncomplicated  gung-ho action hero who became a pin-up totem for Conservative America, and, embarrassingly, went on to pal up with the pre-Taliban Mujahideen in the cause of expelling Soviet Communism from Afghanistan during the rebarbative Rambo lll.
This film being the unwitting template for the “Rambofication” of the genre is an accidental by-product of Glickenhaus’s love of unalloyed action cinema (the first couple of minutes of The Exterminator feel more like the unabashed action flicks of Glickenhaus’s later years, such as McBain, than anything else in the movie); but for the most part, the film looks just like one of the seamy, faintly disreputable exploitation flicks that would have been seen playing round the clock in the kind of theatres glimpsed on those "pre-clean up" 42^nd Street sidewalks, which are caught on film here when we see Ginty’s John Eastland character traversing these famously sleazy environs in disconcertingly vérité-like sequences that capture the place and the period, and the people who frequented the area, in all their greasy, sleaze-ridden glory.

In fact, The Exterminator makes for a perverse kind of love letter to some now-mostly vanished (or newly varnished) areas of New York, which, at the time, were quite infamous  -- mostly because of films such as this one -- for being illustrative of a history of urban decay, poverty, riots and racially divided gang culture; but a “love letter” to these locales is nevertheless exactly what the film was for the two men behind it's making, though a love letter rendered in the starkest, most graffiti-covered imagery of dereliction and decline possible.  

For Buntzman and Glickenhaus however, engaged as they were in the making of a hard-hitting, low budget exploitation flick, their gritty surroundings largely freed them of the need to bother with spending time and money on building costly sets, when all they had to do instead was step outside their front doors to find plentiful, evocative evidence of political and social apathy in a fully-realised showcase: a real-life soundstage of urban decay sprawling before them thanks to a decade's worth of neglect. On this UK Blu-ray’s featured commentary track, producer Mark Buntzman waxes nostalgic about many of the locations captured on film here, most of which have long since been redeveloped or gentrified, and have therefore -- to him -- subsequently lost most of their character. Areas of the Bronx, circa 1979, which in this film look literally like uninhabitable bomb sites, their tenements merely burned-out husks surrounded by piles of wood and rubble left over from the widespread arson and riots of the 1970s when the area was at its poorest, also serve to provide the film with its squalid urban ambiance, and make a fitting backdrop for the screenplay’s feral gangs of long-haired, denim-clad criminal goons. Meanwhile, Central Park is depicted here as a bleak concrete hole, daubed in spray-painted graffiti  and roamed at night by gangs of druggie wasters wielding flick-knives, who prey on poverty-stricken little old ladies -- taking great delight, during one provocative sequence, in stamping on their unfortunate victim’s grocery bags and stealing the few dimes she has left in her purse.

The images of the infamous 42^nd Street seen here, captured in those previously mentioned shots from a hidden hand-held camera (and lionised by Basket Case director Frank Hennenlotter on one of the disc’s featurettes, as the colourful centre of his education in Grindhouse cinema) recall a time before the area’s current renovation, when it was still a gritty, grimy inferno of neon-lit peep show emporium hoardings and dirty Grindhouse theatres -- its crowded, litter-strewn sidewalks jostling with a colourful, semi-destitute army made up of every type of pimp and pervert, hustler and whore.

These days it’s a tourist stop-off for upmarket theatre and musicals.

When the film starts setting out Eastland’s tough New York environment down at the city docks, in which the meat packing warehouse firm he works for is shown as prey to jive-talking youth gangs and opportunistic mobsters alike (the latter collecting protection monies in the full knowledge of the corrupt authorities), we can see Glickenhaus really was shooting these scenes at the original dockside market locations, and many of the background ‘extras’ are just the local people who happened to be around at the time. There’s a sense of gritty verisimilitude borne up on the authenticity of this street-level setting, even if the plot follows a customary ‘vigilante flick’ trajectory.

While the travails of returning veterans of the Vietnam conflict were to provide a context for the many Hollywood films that went on to document the alienation of the battle-damaged solider who comes home to a country that just doesn’t understand what he’s endured, The Exterminator gains traction by identifying the buddy movie-style relationship between the doe-eyed Robert Ginty’s John Eastland and former stuntman Steve James’s Michael Jefferson as the initial motivating factor for everything that subsequently happens in the narrative.

We saw Jefferson save a grateful Eastland’s life back in that action-packed 'Nam prologue. A year later and they’re both scratching a living working as packers in neighbouring New York dockside warehouses. When he catches a bunch of Bronx hoods helping themselves to crates of Mike’s employer’s stock of beer, Eastland confronts them and, with his old pal's help, delivers some swift and humiliating justice, leaving the unprincipled looters reeling, but later, even thirstier for revenge than they had been for stolen beer. Unbeknownst to Mike though, these “Ghetto Ghouls” track him back to his neighbourhood, which, unfortunately just happens to be in their own rough, tough part of the Bronx, where Mike also lives in one of the cramped semi-derelict tenement with his adoring wife Marie (although the set-built interior looks a great deal more habitable than the locations used in the exterior shots of Mike's neighbourhood). They attack him from behind with a clawed meat hook and leave him permanently paralysed from the neck down -- unable to live independently of an artificial breathing apparatus and unable to speak or move. The two friends, who survived everything the Viet Cong could throw at them, thus find the streets of their own neighbourhood have become a much greater threat to wellbeing – in fact, the place is now effectively a warzone. So Eastland responds to his best buddy’s cruel plight in the only way open to him: he prepares for battle! He tracks down one of the Ghetto Ghouls and gets him to divulge the whereabouts of his gang’s clubhouse … with the aid of a flamethrower! Then, armed with a rifle, he slaughters the hoods one by one to the strains of ‘Disco Inferno’ by The Trammps -- which is blaring out of the sound system in their hideout at the time (quite an unusually catholic bunch of street hoods this lot really, what with their unusual taste in camp disco, combined with the trendy Che Guevara poster in their wall!).

Having reassured his mute, immobile friend that he’s taken care of business, Eastland’s next priority is sorting out Mike’s family financially. This brings him into open conflict with the mob, and indirectly with the CIA and a corrupt city Mayor, who, between them, have the city’s police force in their pocket. The right wing, anti-liberal agenda of most vigilante flicks would usually see Eastland’s mission to clean up the streets portrayed as the tough antidote to years of soft-hearted, lily-livered liberal tolerance; but here, it is notable that the blame is put at the door of paranoid security services who see a Soviet plot behind the activities of this self-styled Exterminator, and mob and city officials who are complicit in maintaining the status quo -- both of them making a pretty packet out of things staying exactly the way they are!

Eastland’s ludicrous method of disposing of the mob boss who’s behind that extortion racket that’s being run at the expense of businesses and warehouses down at the loading docks, finally convinces the viewer that Glickenhaus is not taking this stuff as deadly seriously as most of the other films in this sub-genre tend to take themselves: after lowering the offending Mafioso into a giant meat grinding machine (we see raw mince spewing out the other end, accompanied by profuse screaming on the soundtrack!) the film takes more of an episodic turn as Eastland goes hunting the streets on a more generalised superhero-like remit -- dishing out his brutal instant justice to those he finds posing a danger to the public. The influence of Taxi Driver can perhaps be detected in Eastland’s relationship with a prostitute he meets by chance while idly drifting along the sidewalk one evening -- who’s been subjected to torture by one of the pervert clients of the sleazy pimp who forces her to work in a filthy 42^nd Street brothel.

Eastland’s mental state remains somewhat enigmatic throughout all this: on the one hand, he never appears to be as deranged and anti-social as Travis Bickle does; on the other, the episodes that define his war against crime on the city streets are always accompanied by flashbacks relating to his experiences in Vietnam, thus giving the distinct impression that some kind of inability to adjust to civilian life lies behind his violent actions. The episode in which a pumped up, pistol-wielding Eastland (firing with mercury-tipped bullets for added harm!) invades the brothel -- which turns out to cater to an obese, paedophilic Congressional senator (David Lipman, who later turns up again as a more comical variety of sleaze merchant in Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker – which was also produced by James Glickenhaus), a particularly grim specimen who enjoys raping young boys and taking a soldering iron and superheated vaseline to the breasts of nubile young women -- provides the movie with its quota of sleaze and briefly introduces antagonists so heinous that it’s probably figured nobody will mind seeing them reduced to blackened heaps of charred bone by the Exterminator’s excoriating flamethrower.

Meanwhile, the mounting toll of expired scumbags now clogging up the city morgue thanks to Eastland’s enthusiasm comes to the attention of detective James Dalton (Christopher George) who sets out to track down the helmeted vigilante, unaware that he and his prey are both merely being used as pawns in the cynical Machiavellian schemes of the powers that be. Christopher George migrated to low budget euro horrors and exploitation flicks during the 1980s and is always a likable persona in these movies; here though his easy-going detective is underwritten and gets little to do but chat-up Samantha Eggar’s Dr Megan Stewart (rather a minor role for Eggar, from during a period in her career she now disowns) over the heavily-bandaged remains of the ground-up mobster (later they steal a private hospital room to make out in – obviously no regard for bed shortages here!), but he does give us a glimpse of Eastland’s law-abiding alter ego, George’s character being also a veteran of the Vietnam conflict and a natural maverick; someone who doesn’t quite fit with his surroundings, but who has nonetheless found a way to accommodate the mismatch by throwing himself into legitimate detective work. The fact that both Eastland and Dalton in the end are rather similar types of person who have simply taken a different route in life, one that eventually forces them into conflict with each other, leads to a rather poignant and inevitable confrontation and a conclusion that is surprisingly downbeat and unforgiving for this genre.

The Exterminator in HD strikes just the right balance between presenting an authentic low budget classic in its best possible incarnation and staying true to the film’s original grainy Grindhouse origins. Arrow Video have done a good job here with a transfer in the original 1.78:1 aspect ratio which is quite capable of reproducing the film’s unexpectedly vivid colour gels in rich hues when they’re needed, while the general documentary feel of the work isn’t betrayed by overdoing the contrast. The basic uncompressed LPCM mono audio provides probably the best way to hear the film in this format – the upgraded stereo mix on the US release is thought to be too weak by many.

Arrow Video Blu-ray Extras

Commentary: Producer Mark Buntzman recalls the making of the film during conversation with moderator Calum Waddell, in this engaging and informative track. Waddell always manages to combine a witty conversational style with an ability to ask the right questions, and Buntzman is a good subject, delivering plenty of anecdotes about these early days in the film business and his attempts to make the film stand out in the marketplace. He talks about the casting, the shooting and the subsequent reception of the movie by the censors in various parts of the world.

Fire and Slice: Making The Exterminator – an interview with James Glickenhaus: Glickenhaus is no-longer a filmmaker but looks back with fondness on the making of this movie, which was only his second, and remembers lead actor Robert Ginty and the many experiences encountered during the eight weeks of shooting.

42^nd Street Then And Now: Director Frank Henenlotter takes us on a video guided tour of the area which was once infamous for its rows of trashy Grindhouse cinemas, where everything from sexploitation to horror could be found in abundance. Henenlotter spent most of his youth here, catching as many screenings of the dubious delights this place once had to offer as he possibly could. He has plenty of unsavoury stories to relate, as well as providing the viewer with a sketched history of the development of the area over the last few decades. The place is rather different now, the Grindhouse havens having been swept away in the drive to make 42^nd Street a tourist hotspot. Henenlotter regrets the loss of the area’s charm and claims it was never as dangerous as it was often claimed to be. A fascinating and funny nostalgia piece memorialising a vanished age of exploitation.

The disc comes packaged with the usual and much-appreciated Arrow Video regulars: a reversible sleeve offering several alternative covers, as well as the new artwork especially commissioned for this release. There's a double-sided foldout poster and, last but not least, a collector’s booklet featuring brand new writing on the film by film critic David Hayles.  

TITLE: The Exterminator/MOVIE RELEASE DATE: 1980/BLU-RAY RELEASE DATE: 7 November 2011/GENRE: Action/LABEL: ARROW VIDEO/REGION: B/ASPECT RATIO: 1.78:1/DIRECTOR: James Glickenhaus/CAST: Robert Ginty, Steve James, Christopher George, Samantha Eggar