Bedtime with Rosie (1975)

Not a British sex comedy, despite its title, the director’s previous film being Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, the presence of Diana Dors, or the fact that the lead actor has the rather rude sounding name of Ivor Burgoyne...I’m sure he had.  Bedtime with Rosie has the feel of a passion project for Burgoyne (1926-2002), a little known Welsh actor whose career was otherwise restricted to television bit-parts and Northern theatre.  Not only does Burgoyne play the male lead here, for the first and only time in his career, but he also came up with film’s story and script.  Although it isn’t credited as such Bedtime with Rosie bears all the traces of being a filmed play.  It’s extremely set bound, largely confined to just the one location and pretty much a three hander between Burgoyne, Diana Dors and Una Stubbs.  The titular Rosie, played by Stubbs, is a heavily pregnant Scouse bird, who has made it down to London to stay at the seedy guest house run by her Aunt Annie (Dors).

Full of tall tales and a vivid imagination, Rosie claims the baby’s father is a Mr Perfect type and that she’ll soon be off to a bright future in Amsterdam.  Trouble is that Aunt Annie already has a lodger, Harry (Burgoyne) an uptight, sexually repressed Southerner...who is surely going to object to living under the same roof as an unwed mother to be.  Comical misunderstandings and verbal boxing matches between all three ensue, as does lots of jibber jabber about the permissive society... the North/South divide... free love... the generation gap... sex before marriage... etc, etc.  Characters laugh, cry, fall out, fall in love and fall out again...all during the space of just one night.  It’s very much a stage piece, occasionally opened up with ‘wacky’ fantasy scenes.  Rosie imagines her dream man (played by Stubbs’ real life husband, Nicky Henson) in various disguises...a biker, a hippie, a movie star.  Harry has a dream/nightmare in which he wanders around a building site, wearing a cardboard box and being chased by a man in drag.  Rosie flashes on the idea of Harry being a vampire who prowls around graveyards at night....far out, man!!

Bedtime with Rosie might have been a big deal and an after dinner conversation piece had it been made in the mid-Sixties, what with its once daring dialogue (“having it off”, “bloody”, “fairy”) but by 1974 the shock value of this type of kitchen sink realism must surely have seemed a little out of time.  Dors and Stubbs are both terrific, and given allot more to do here than their usual big screen appearances of the period.  Burgoyne, who often appears to be channelling Harold Steptoe in the role, doesn’t disgrace himself in the company of bigger names either.  Initially grumpy and condescending, Harry gradually becomes an understanding, shoulder to cry on as the film progresses, especially when Rosie’s facade begins to crumble.  She eventually admits that both she and her brother were molested as children, and that her pregnancy is the result of rape by her abusive boyfriend...rather than the happy union she’d have people believe.  Harry himself isn’t the middle aged virgin who has never slept with anything other than a hot water bottle, that he makes out to be either.

For a film that takes place on an obvious set, the sense of characters living on the low down in mid-1970s London is strongly evoked.  In that respect Bedtime with Rosie does have a slight ‘ships passing in the night’ kinship with director Wolf Rilla’s previous film Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, another tale of a fish out of water trying to make it in the big smoke.  Sets and props here are a meticulous study in period detail, Tretchikoff paintings, out of the packet steak and kidney pies, HP Sauce bottles, wresting paraphernalia, a stash of dirty pics, a TV set blasting out static after shutdown. Then of course there is the 1970s Diana Dors, cutting both a sexual and grotesque figure as a middle aged man-eater...hoppling around with a walking stick and one leg in plaster, yet still shamelessly flaunting herself in a baby doll nightie. 

 

Ultimately though Bedtime with Rosie is a film about finding an unlikely friend and huddling up close to them in a big, bad world.  Rare excursions outside of the guest house paint London as a dirty, unfriendly place to be.  Rosie gets hassled by a drunk at an underground station whilst en route to her Aunt’s, and Harry visits a late night greasy spoon cafe where eternal jack-the-lad Johnny Briggs threatens to give him a “knuckle sandwich” for looking at Briggs’ girlfriend...sorry, ‘Bird’.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Bedtime with Rosie exists, but I’d be hard pressed to figure out who the intended audience for this film was.  It amounts to 70 minutes of life losers yelling, bickering, airing their worse moments and generally not getting along.  Surely the exact thing that working class audiences went to the cinema to escape from back then, rather than be confronted with.  Equal parts bedroom farce and miserablist drama, without fully committing to either, it is no real surprise that Bedtime with Rosie didn’t exactly trouble the box-office or find an audience back then.  Briefly on video in the early 1980s, the releasing company, Iver Film Services, took to sexing up the title to Bedtime with Rosie (the theatrical and onscreen title is simply ‘Rosie’) a move that has more than a touch of desperation to it.  Chalk it up as another unloved and forgotten British film from the 1970s.

It is unlikely Diana Dors herself ever shed a tear over Bedtime with Rosie’s lack of success, especially as the film resulted in much legal drama and bad blood between herself and its director Wolf Rilla. The behind the scenes stuff about Bedtime with Rosie is a fascinating story in itself.  During the making of the film Dors and Rilla became close, socialising on set and at a health farm where Rilla extensively interviewed Dors about her private life and career and recorded their conversations on audio tapes.  Recordings that later became the subject of a legal battle between the two, after Dors tried to prevent Rilla transcribing the tapes and using them as the basis for a biography of her ‘Dors and Diana’.  It remains a question mark whether Dors was successful in shutting down Rilla’s biography of her.  The British Library doesn’t hold a copy of said book, and is of the opinion that it went unreleased.  Boston University, to which Wolf Rilla willed his personal effects, owns his original manuscript for ‘Dors and Diana’ but also records it as an unpublished work.  However, a Dors collector has recently come forward with claims to own a second hand copy of the book, even posting photos of it on Facebook in 2017, indicating that a few copies of Dors and Diana did indeed make it into the hands of the general public. It’s likely that the immediate threat of Rilla’s biography was a motivating factor in Dors writing the first of her own autobiographies, ‘For Adults Only’ which came out in 1978.

Aside from being the catalyst for this legal fallout and ensuing mystery, Bedtime with Rosie also offers up the sight of Nicky Henson in full biker regalia, blowing raspberries and breaking the forth wall by sticking two fingers up to the audience, as well as some (brief and presumably accidental) nudity from Una Stubbs.  So if you want to cross ‘watching Nicky Henson play a biker in a film that isn’t called Psychomania’ and ‘seeing Aunt Sally’s tit’ off the bucket list, then Bedtime with Rosie is the film you have to track down.      

 

Special thanks to ‘Soundtrack68!’ for help researching ‘Dors and Diana’

Evils of the Night (1983, released 1985)

 

Everything producer Mardi Rustam touched seemed to turn to soft porn, be it The Female Bunch…Tobe Hooper’s Death Trap… Pets (released in some countries in a version with explicit inserts) or Evil Town. So its no real surprise that when Rustam shuffled into the director’s chair in the 1980s the end result was a trashy, hypersexual affair. Evils of the Night finds Rustam cluelessly attempt to court the ‘golden turkey’ crowd with a preposterous sci-fi plot that harks back to the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space, has alien costumes right out of Rocky Horror, jock and bimbo characters from the era’s slasher films, porn star cast members whose acting and dialogue does little to disguise the nature of their day jobs, and a great roundup of B-Movie veterans…Aldo Ray, Neville Brand, John Carradine, Julie Newmar…seemingly only Cameron Mitchell was busy elsewhere that week. Aldo and Neville play slobbering mechanics who don balaclavas to abduct horny teenagers, then deliver them to space vampires –headed by Carradine and Newmar- who have taken over the local hospital.

Evils of the Night embodies low-end 1980s Hollywood, the down on their luck name stars, the adult industry connections, the constant name dropping of the rich n’ famous (Bo Derek, Shirley Temple, Sophia Loren, Prince Andrew), the two mechanics’ daydreams of hitting the big time. The film convinces you that everything good about The Female Bunch and Death Trap was the result of Al Adamson and Tobe Hooper respectively, and everything leering about those films was the result of Rustam’s interference. Thanks to Mardi’s corny, horndog dialogue even the younger cast members who aren’t moonlighting porn stars come across like moonlighting porn stars. Saying that, one movie wonder G.T. Taylor is quite adorable as Connie, the blonde bubblehead who is besotted by Prince Andrew (why do I get the feeling that particular reference isn’t going to age well).

I’ve often thought of Evils of the Night as being the exploitation film equivalent of one of those gargantuan burgers that American diners challenge their customers to finish off, it piles on layer after layer of beef, cheese, fried chicken, fries, bacon, peanut butter, onions, mayo then squeezes them all together between a bun. In theory it should be the meal to end all meals...the exploitation film to end all exploitation films. In reality its all kinda sloppy, haphazardly thrown together and guaranteed to leave a greasy aftertaste. I suppose the kindest thing you can say about Evils of the Night is that its exactly the movie you’d expect a sleazy, artless, bottom feeder to make- an XXL sized serving of 1980s Hollywood schlock. Care to chow down on it?

Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (1973)

Now that’s what you call a movie title…worthy of Tony Tenser in the amount of buzzwords they managed to cram into just the one title. There is a definite anglophile leaning to Love Brides of the Blood Mummy, an eccentric Spanish/French co-production that looks to Hammer horror for inspiration, somehow encompassing elements from their Frankenstein and Dracula series, in spite of this being a film about a mummy. For its third act, Love Brides of the Blood Mummy also becomes a crawling ‘severed hand’ movie, suggesting that Amicus weren’t immune from being pilfered from here either.

Spanish B-Movie veteran Frank Brana plays either an Egyptologist or a policeman pretending to be an Egyptologist (that particular plot point is never resolved) whose investigations take him to Dartmoor and the castle of the Earl of Dartmoor, a powerful occultist who can turn people to stone, magic up snakes and has the power over life and death. The Earl also fancies himself as Dartmoor’s answer to Baron Frankenstein and brings a lustful Egyptian mummy back to life. Soon of course, that plan backfires on the Earl, as the Mummy imprisons him in the castle’s dungeon, turns out to have vampire like tendencies, takes control of the Earl’s manservant John, and uses John to murder local wenches for their blood.

The person you most feel sorry for here is the poor sod playing the long suffering John, who despite being no spring chicken is given a role which requires him to get spat in the face, pelted with rocks, knocked off a ladder, thrown into a moat, climb a cliff face and get kicked in the nuts by the Mummy…who’d be a faithful manservant in ye olde Dartmoor. Compared to the actor playing the Mummy itself, who is relegated to leisurely pursuits like horse riding and molesting various women, or the actor that plays the Earl, who spends most of the film sitting behind bars, its clear which cast member has drawn the short straw here. Come to think about it, if the Earl of Dartmoor (he is sometimes referred to as ‘Count Dartmoor’ as well) is so powerful and a bigwig when it comes to magic…why doesn’t he do bugger all but sit in a jail cell for the majority of the movie, even while the Mummy is terrorizing his household and murdering various people, including a member of the Earl’s own family. The film’s depiction of Dartmoor doesn’t exactly hold up to close scrutiny either…then again some suspension of disbelief is called for here, especially since we're dealing with a film about a vampire, Egyptian mummy running loose on Dartmoor.

For a piece of Euro-horror that is now as obscure as they come…never making it to DVD or Blu-Ray and only surfacing on VHS in a Spanish language version (the VHS rip on Youtube has optional English subs) its surprising to discover that Love Brides of the Blood Mummy had a UK cinema release in 1973 as ‘Lips of Blood’. It also made it to Canada, two years later, as part of a Euro-sleaze double-bill with ‘Secret Love Life of the Invisible Man’…a Eurocine production more commonly known these days as The Invisible Dead or Orloff Against the Invisible Man. So, a dubbed English language version must have existed at some point, possibly with more nudity in it. The Spanish language version that is around these days does bear all the traces of being a ‘clothed’ version of the film, prepared for the censorious climate of 1970s Spain. Meaning the Mummy might get away with rape, flagellation and branding women in this version, but he remains gentlemanly enough to only strip them down to their bloomers while doing so. Of course if you have a thing for hysterical women wearing bloomers, that not even Mrs Slocombe’s antics in Are You Being Served can satisfy, this is the version for you. For everyone else…well as no other version of this film has ever re-surfaced…its bloomers for the rest of us as well!!!

Sonny Capone (2020)

 

Once in a while a very special kind of movie comes along...one that is intoxicating in its ineptitude, to the extent that it will leave you dizzy afterwards, and possibly laughing uncontrollably about it for days on end. Samurai Cop...Manos, the Hands of Fate...GETEVEN...Verotika...the latest addition to this family is made man Sonny Capone, and he is here to make "so bad it's good" movie merchants an offer they can't refuse.

A Mafia epic relocated to an Irish council estate, there is a dozen or so plot strands running around in circles here, seemingly designed to let any local resident who fancied their chances playing an onscreen hard man their moment in the spotlight. What plot that is legible evolves around Sonny Capone (Gerard Daly), a Dublin born gangster who gets elected the head of the Mafia in Rome, only to then discover he has terminal cancer, only to then discover he has a son he never knew about, only to then have to travel back to Ireland to avenge the death of the son he never knew about...who has been murdered on the orders of local drug dealer James "The Predator" Barrett. Production values are next to zero, if not minus zero, scenes supposedly taking place at the headquarters of the Mafia in Rome look that they were shot upstairs at the local job center, with someone's granddad cosplaying as a cardinal, and someone else's granddad dusting off their impersonation of Brando in the Godfather, the one that went down a storm at the local working men's club about forty years ago. For a scene where Sonny stages a kidnapping at the Israeli embassy, the set designer's idea of evoking the location appears to have been to draw the Star of David onto blank pieces of paper, sellotape them to doors and hey presto an instant Israeli embassy is born. When it comes to cost cutting audacity you have to hand it to them, Sonny Capone is a film with very big balls. Along the way there is plenty of feckin' swearing and plenty of feckin' fighting all delivered with the amateurish enthusiasm of authentic, but hard to understand Irish accents and put on, even harder to understand Italian accents. Sonny Capone amounts to ninety odd minutes of yelling "WTF am I watching" at the screen. In a beyond distasteful subplot, Palestinian terrorists, who having become downhearted at the lack of 'likes' their beheading videos have been getting on YouTube, attempt to increase their number of YouTube subscribers by murdering naked Jewish men in a makeshift gas chamber...which also allows the film to throw full frontal male nudity into the mix. There is also the revelation that one of the gangsters has been keeping a decaying female corpse around...Norman Bates style...a prop that looks straight out of a joke shop...you're only amazed that the Sonny Capone crew remembered to cut the price tag off it.

Aimed squarely at the post-pub supermarket DVD crowd... Sonny Capone is the type of entertainment that under normal circumstances might be described as a "beer and curry" movie...only I doubt either could be consumed during this film without being spat out of your nose and mouth. Sonny Capone writes its own eulogy when one of the eye-talian goons remarks "get the fuck out of here with this leprechaun crap"... or as the philosophical Sonny himself might put it "dares more tar life dan deet". I implore you to "catch yourself on" and see this film, if only for the entirely selfish reason that I don't want to be alone in my suffering.

Erotic Green (2015)

 

From the Xtro school of "Cronenbergian body horror relocated to a grotty, Brit backdrop" comes this short film, centered around Max (Edward Carlton), whose libido takes him in the direction of an underground strip club, where the strippers are hibernating green eggs inside themselves. In an extremely unwise move, Max is persuaded to take one of the eggs home with him, by a dying stripper who has just given 'birth' to it. Max then keeps the egg in his fridge where it initially does wonders for his sex life, but of course you just know it is all gonna end in tears, as well as lots of blood and green slime. There's plenty of gross, sexual disgust at work to make this a lively 24 minutes, with detours into the zombie and geezer crime genres too. I don't know whether this was the filmmaker's intention but Erotic Green feels far more like an Xtro sequel than the actual Xtro sequels. Like Xtro itself though if you're looking for a satisfactory explanation for all the weird shit that is taking place onscreen you've come to the wrong place, and it is never particularly involving with characters you don't really care less about, despite all the body horror indignities the film puts them through. 1980s worship abounds both stylistically and musically...to the degree that you half expect Bryan Ferry to show up and start crooning during those opening credits.

Video link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IEAzEVF3Y8