Curse of the Killer Computer: My 12 year quest to see Derek Ford’s The Urge to Kill (1989)

 

Many years ago I remember the assistant director of The Urge to Kill telling me stories about working on this film, how the main character was called Bono Zorro, that there was a scene where someone is killed by an electric toothbrush, and in another scene a woman’s breasts explode under a sun bed.  At which point I knew there was no way I could go through life without seeing this movie.  Little did I know that it would take me 12 years to do so.

I first became aware of The Urge to Kill when I arrived on the internet back in 1999, the IMDB was in its infancy back then, and one of the first people I ever searched for there was either director Derek Ford or producer Dick Randall.  At the end of both of their filmographies was this mystery movie The Urge to Kill...hmmm, never heard of that one before.  Details there were very sparse, but one of the few other people listed as also having worked on the film was a guy called Paul Hart-Wilden.  Anyway I got hold of Paul’s email address, and asked him about it.  As it turned out, it was actually Paul himself who’d gotten that film listed on the IMDB.  Paul had written a movie for Dick Randall called Living Doll, and had gotten a job working as assistant director on this other movie Randall was making, which was then known as Attack of the Killer Computer, but later became known as The Urge to Kill.  The film was shot over a week, mostly at Dick Randall’s house in London, with a day’s worth of filming done at the Surrey home of its star Peter Gordeno, and another day at a recording studio in Swiss Cottage.

Dick Randall judging a beauty contest in the 1960s

Dick Randall was an American who spent many years in Rome, where he produced just about every conceivable form of exploitation movie...Kung-Fu films starring people who looked like Bruce Lee, Emmanuelle imitations, horror, mondo movies, etc etc.  In the early 1980s Randall started showing up in London, he had an office in Hammer House on Wardour Street, where he began producing horror films like Don’t Open Till Christmas and Slaughter High.  He was also something of a magnet for people who’d previously worked in the British sex film industry...Derek Ford, Alan Birkinshaw, Ray Selfe, Alan Selwyn, Michael Armstrong, all those guys were on the Randall payroll at some point.  Birkinshaw and Randall were particularly close, with Birkinshaw acting as best man at Randall’s wedding.  There is some debate over whether Randall ever became a British citizen, he and his wife apparently spent 6 months of the year in London, and the other 6 months living in Hong Kong.  A few years ago, I was told by someone who claimed to have seen the paperwork for the horror films Randall made in London that all those films were registered as Hong Kong productions.  Even though there is nothing remotely Chinese about those movies, apart from maybe the Chinese takeaways Randall was ordering from the sets. 

Randall's business address in the 1980s

Edmund Purdom, the star and (sort of) director of Don’t Open Till Christmas, once claimed that Randall never paid British tax, and jobs from Randall were a cash in hand affair.  Purdom also claimed...and I do have some misgiving about this...that Derek Ford found out about this tax situation, and used that to blackmail Dick Randall into letting him take over directing Don’t Open Till Christmas from Edmund Purdom.  Thus thwarting the ambitions of Purdom, who felt he was a ‘born film director’, an opinion not shared by the rest of the human race.  As I say, I do question that...the story about Derek Ford and Don’t Open Till Christmas is that he either got sacked after a couple of days of directing it, or walked away from the job. So if Ford was blackmailing Randall, how did Randall manage to fire him?  Alternatively, why would Ford walk away from the film when he’d apparently gone to the lengths of blackmailing the producer?  Another flaw in the Purdom story is that if Ford had made this failed attempt to blackmail Randall, surely it would have caused bad blood between the two and they’d never have worked together again.  Whereas in reality there was at least two Ford-Randall collaborations after that.  Once for a sitcom pilot called Park Lane, which never went beyond script stage, and this, Ford’s final roll of the dice as a film director. 

In Urge to Kill, Peter Gordeno plays Bono Zorro, wealthy music producer and God’s gift to women.  Bono has no problem with the ladies, but he does have problems with the computer system- called  S.E.X.Y- which controls all the mod-cons in Bono’s house.  S.E.X.Y develops human feelings for Bono, and begins killing off all the bimbos and sex workers who come a knocking at Bono’s door.  S.E.X.Y can also materialise in the form of a topless, green skinned woman with Kabuki style make-up, in order to cause further mishaps around the Bono household. Needless to say, Peter Gordeno’s initials are the only thing in this movie that’s a PG.

From what I’ve been able to work out over the years, the plan for this film was to release it on UK video in the early 1990s, through a label called RTV, which I think stands for Randall Trading Video.  Since Randall’s production company was called Spectacular Trading, that does make sense as an acronym for RTV.  The only video that RTV ended up releasing was the Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925).  This was a ‘special edition’ of Phantom that Randall had put together, for which he’d commissioned an intro, hosted by Christopher Lee and directed by Michael Armstrong.  Phantom was also an unlikely collaboration between Randall and the musician Rick Wakeman, who’d composed a new soundtrack for the film, which was also released as a standalone Wakeman album called ‘Phantom Power’. 

My guess is that The Urge to Kill was intended to be the second RTV release, but for whatever reason...maybe Phantom didn’t sell well, maybe Randall became ill...it sat on the shelf.  For many years the only people who owned copies of the film were the people who had directly worked on it.  Paul Hart-Wilden was my first port of call when it came to looking for a VHS of it, but while he owned a copy, it was in storage in the UK, and Paul had since relocated to the States, where he continues to work in the film industry, including writing the 1993 film ‘Skinner’, starring Traci Lords.

Around this time I had gotten friendly with a guy called Steve, who was in the business of buying and selling rare videos, pre-certs, imports, video nasties...the whole shebang.  Steve was also involved in the professional side of the video industry and had started a label called Satanica, whose niche was British horror films, particularly those by Pete Walker and Norman J Warren.  He put out The Comeback and The Flesh and Blood Show by Walker, and Terror and Satan’s Slave by Warren. Films that are readily available these days, but back in the 1990s, hadn’t been in circulation for well over a decade.  It was then that I had this well meaning but ill-conceived brainwave that Satanica would be the ideal company to finally release The Urge to Kill on UK video, and in fairness it would have fitted in nicely with the kind of titles they were releasing.  Cut a long story short, this culminated in me getting a phone call from Corliss Randall, widow of Dick, who seemed a little confused, and maybe a little suspicious about my inquiries into this movie.  The fact that anyone outside of the people who worked on the film knew about it, seemed a surprise to her.  As it had never been released though, Corliss was understandably wary about letting copies of it get out there, for fear of bootlegging.  I can’t remember if she told me this at the time, or whether I heard this later, but I believe she was in the process of transferring ownership of the Randall back catalogue to an American agency.  A deal that I’m told was brokered for her by Pete Tombs, later to go on to found the Mondo Macabro label.  What I remember the most about Corliss was her website, which was about her singing career.  Prior to marrying Dick she’d been a singer (she provided Ajita Wilson’s singing voice in the 1978 film ‘Erotic Fantasies’), and after he passed away, she was getting back into that.  Anyway, if you left your computer cursor stationary for even the shortest amount of time on her website, a flying penis would appear onscreen and buzz around your cursor, then you’d panic and move your cursor around, and the flying penis would give chase and follow you around the computer screen.  All very distracting when you were trying to read this seriously written website... about how Corliss combined elements of jazz and blues...while being bothered by this penis with wings.  So, as long as I shall live I shall never forget Corliss Randall and her flying penis.  Pity the Satanica idea never came to anything.

By 2011, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to see this film and had all but given up looking for it.  Around this time I was involved in the writing of a book called ‘Dead or Alive’ which was about British horror films of the 1980s, in which myself and the other contributors had taken it upon ourselves to review every British horror film made during that decade. 

One of the obstacles we faced was what to do about The Urge to Kill, which nobody could see, so nobody could review.  I volunteered to provide ‘coverage’ of it, and collect all the info I knew about the movie, then write the second best thing to an actual review.  I think I was in the finishing stages of that, when doing one last search of the internet for any more information on the movie that might be out there, I came across a website called DriveinclassicsDVD offering ‘rare, hard to find movies’ on dvdr.  The type of site that used to be legion before boutique labels came along, and before YouTube allowed people to upload full movies.  DriveinclassicsDVD was only around for about a year before going to internet heaven, and only accepted payment in Canadian Dollars. 

Anyway, low and behold, one of these rare films they had for sale was The Urge to Kill. Naturally I was very sceptical over whether they genuinely had it, since all my own efforts to see this film had come up empty handed.  Further alarm bells were set off by the fact that this site carried no stills from the film and the plot synopsis had been ripped off from the IMDB. I mentioned this to Darrell Buxton, the editor of Dead or Alive, and as it happened he was already aware of this website and was planning to order a few rare British titles from them that he needed for the book, so what the hell he added The Urge to Kill to his shopping basket and said he’d let me know what showed up. I don’t think either of us held out much hope that they’d actually send a copy of The Urge to Kill, but that is indeed what popped through Darrell’s letterbox soon after. So, he quickly ran me off a copy, and sent that to me so that I could ditch what I’d written and do a proper review of it for the book.  Obviously what leaked out there was a screener copy, since it had a time code on it and ‘RTV video’ watermarked on the picture.  I guess Randall anticipated problems with the BBFC, as the screener copy removes the shot of the exploding breasts, which fortunately is retained in the film’s trailer.  As to how that got out there, your guess is as good as mine.  Unfortunately, the leak occurred while a legitimate company had expressed an interest in officially putting The Urge to Kill out.  “We had been considering releasing the film on DVD via our Sarcophilous Films Label” remembers Wayne Maginn “At some point, a copy had leaked but that certainly was not from us, as we wanted to keep this film under lock and key until we could discuss terms with the licensing company.  The DVD-R of the time coded copy was sourced from a videotape master provided to me by an individual acting on behalf of Corliss Randall.  Corliss had inherited the rights, materials and elements but was unsure how to handle it all, so had entrusted the rights to an agency in America who would deal with interested parties, whilst the film elements and tape masters remained in the UK I believe.  Someone else must have also seen the film listed in the agency’s catalogue and requested a screener before leaking it, because I know I never did...that person who ran that dodgy site (DriveinclassicsDVD) may have just contacted them himself and expressed interest in ‘releasing’ it, and then sold DVD-Rs of it’.

After its appearance on the DriveinclassicsDVD site, The Urge to Kill quickly began showing up on file sharing sites.  I believe it appeared on one such site called ‘Cinemageddon’ which is run like a gentleman’s club, in that you have to be nominated by someone who is already a member, in order to join the site. I was once asked by someone who was ‘in the club’ whether I wanted to be put forward for membership there, but sensing an invitation to trouble, declined to join what sounds like the film collectors equivalent of the freemasons.  It was only after it had done the rounds of the file sharing sites that The Urge to Kill started to show up on Youtube in a version that optically censored the RTV logo.

Ridiculous as it sounds I remember having butterflies in my stomach, when... after 12 long years... this film finally unravelled before my eyes.  Now, never in all those years did I ever imagine that this would be a conventionally ‘good’ film...which is just as well, but I will say that The Urge to Kill was everything I imagined it would be, and everything I hoped it would be.  Dick Randall and Derek Ford really went out on a bang, and the film does capture the personalities of these two, very different men.  There are moments in The Urge to Kill, when you can just imagine Randall slightly off camera, giggling to himself in a corner about the nonsense that was playing out in his own house.  By all accounts Randall was a man who never took himself too seriously. 

I saw someone recently describe this film as ‘a poor man’s Demon Seed’, which I’d go along with to a certain degree but in no way, shape or form was Dick Randall a poor man.  As you can tell by the fact that this film mostly takes place in his house, Randall did quite well out of the film industry, and lead an A-list lifestyle on the back of making B-list movies.  Apparently he could have comfortably retired years and years before making this film, but he was a workaholic and loved the whole rollercoaster ride of being in the film industry, which sadly seems to have been what put him into an early grave.  I know there are probably some gross stories out there about Dick Randall, he comes across quite badly in Stanley Long’s biography.  Long’s connection to The Urge to Kill being that his girlfriend, who later became his wife, worked on the crew, and apparently has only horrendous memories of this film, due to Dick Randall trying to talk her into doing a nude shower scene in it.  Cos’ what this film really lacks is nude shower scenes, right! It’s not like every goddamn actress in this film takes a shower at some point, Randall’s water bill must have gone through the roof that month!  In his book, I think Long calls Randall ‘thoroughly revolting’ but in fairness there are a few dodgy stories out there about Stanley Long filming more nudity than an actress had agreed upon, and hiring at least one young lady who worked for an acting agency that was later busted by the News of the World for having underage runaways on their books.  There are no saints in the exploitation film business.

Randall was, I’m sure, in his element here, its allot more of a surprise to see Peter Gordeno headline such a cinematic bacchanal.  Gordeno was mainly a dancer and chorographer, that was where his talents lay, although he did enjoy some success as an easy listening singer, occupying similar territory as Des O’Connor and Engelbert Humperdinck.  Gordeno was an infrequent actor, perhaps best known in that capacity for Gerry Anderson’s UFO series.  He’s not someone you’d automatically think of as leading man material, but I can’t help but like Gordeno.  While way out of his comfort zone, Gordeno does take an agreeably tongue in cheek approach to the lead role, and throughout the film wears a facial expression that says ‘just what has Dick Randall roped me into here’.  I’ve never known everyone to say a bad word about Peter Gordeno, he was a well liked guy, and the sleazy image this film gives him is in no way a reflection of the man himself.  We’ll perhaps never know, but I wonder if Gordeno may have had money in the film, when actors allow people to make movies in their own home, it is usually a sign that they had a financial interest in it.  I do know that during filming Randall discovered that Peter Gordeno’s son, who is also called Peter Gordeno, was an aspiring musician, and talked the kid into re-recording a song Randall owned the rights to called Urge to Kill.  Which is why the film went from being called Attack of the Killer Computer to The Urge to Kill.  The song did pre-date the film by a number of years, there is an earlier version of it around, which is close to being a rap song, and may have been intended for the soundtrack of Don’t Open Till Christmas.  Gordeno Jr’s second version of it has slightly altered lyrics, written to suit the plot of the film.  Incidentally, Gordeno Jr ended up becoming a member of Depeche Mode...I guess we all have to start somewhere.

Gordeno Sr’s co-stars found themselves being collectively billed in the film’s trailer as ‘a host of centrefold girls who die in the strangest manner’ and there is truth in advertising there.  Bono’s initial ‘love interest’ Melanie, is played by Sally Ann Balaam, a famous Page 3 girl of the time, fresh from the pages of The Daily Sport.  Sally Ann was of course hired for this film purely on the basis of her tremendous acting ability, nothing at all to do with the fact that she was a page 3 girl, had been in top shelf magazines and had won a Wet T-Shirt competition.  There was a trend during the late 1980s of using Page 3 girls in British horror films, obviously this would result in the film’s getting free publicity in national newspapers, and give the papers an excuse to publish topless photos of a girl, not that they ever needed an excuse to do that.  The leading lady in Living Doll had been a Page 3 girl, so that film got a few mentions in the tabloids because of that.  Edge of Sanity, the 1989 film with Anthony Perkins as Jekyll and Hyde, also had a Page 3 girl in it.  I’m blanking on her name now, but the story there was that after making Edge of Sanity, she was afraid of leaving her house, because she feared Jack the Ripper was after her.  This despite the fact that the rippers murders had been committed 100 years ago, and therefore chances are that Jack was no longer around by 1989.  All bullshit of course, but the kind of bullshit that sold newspapers back in the 1980s.   Had this film come out then, I’m sure Sally Ann Balaam would have been splashed all over the papers, drumming up publicity for it.  Sadly it wasn’t to be, and in The Urge to Kill you can (literally) watch her career go down the plughole.

Saying that there is an element to this film that may have wound up the owner of one tabloid newspaper the wrong way, and made Randall a powerful enemy there.  Towards the end of the film there is a scene where S.E.X.Y recruits two sex workers to cat fight in Bono’s living room, whilst playing him a video of a mud wrestling competition.  The mud wrestling footage originates from a 1983 film called ‘Hellcat Mud Wrestlers’, produced by David Sullivan, who’d go on to found The Daily Sport, and is now the co-owner of West Ham.  As there is no accreditation for the mud wrestling footage in the end credits of The Urge to Kill, I’m inclined to think Mr. Sullivan’s permission was not sought for its use here.  If that is the case then Randall must have had balls of steel to rip-off David Sullivan, who by accounts does not take kindly to people getting one over on him...no one puts David in a corner.

Bono Zorro's favourite video

The Urge to Kill is to Derek Ford what Monstrosity was to Andy Milligan, it’s that mad last movie that is both preposterous in terms of plot, yet also highly personal.  Even if you watch this film blind, without knowing who Derek Ford was, I think you can tell this film was made by someone who was obsessed with swinging, women in leather, pornography...and could never be any other way.  Unlike Randall, Ford isn’t meant to have had much of a sense of humour, and there seems to have been a self-hating aspect to his personality.  He has been described to me as a disappointed, unfulfilled man who felt he never achieved his full potential.  Although people around Ford never thought he really had the right character or dare I say right amount of talent to pull off the kind of major, big budget movie projects that he felt he should have been making.  What genuinely surprised me about The Urge to Kill, with regards to Derek Ford, is how chauvinistic it gets at times.  In his earlier films Ford tended to gravitate more towards female characters and called out sexist male attitudes, Ford was almost a feminist for a while.  Whereas The Urge to Kill does a 180 on that, all the women in the film are bimbos, backstabbers or cold hearted sex workers, and we’re meant to have the back of Bono Zorro and laugh at his corny jokes and cheer on his sexual prowess.  I’m curious what brought about this switch of elegance, I’ve heard rumours that Ford and his wife had split up by this point, and that she divorced him, so if true maybe that factors into this change of attitude.  He is meant to have been badly exploited by a woman towards the end of his life, but I believe that happened after this film and had to do with a book deal.  So it is disturbingly ironic, not to mention prophetic that Ford’s last movie should be about a sexually offbeat man who is bought down and destroyed by a woman, albeit a computer who identifies as a woman. 

The Urge to Kill eventually had an official DVD release in France in 2014- 25 years after it was made- which finally sprung this from the ‘unreleased films’ category.  We may have nearly gotten a UK release as well, if you look it up on the BBFC’s website you’ll see the film was submitted to them in 2012 by a company called Firefly entertainment.  Their big plan was to put it out as part of a Dick Randall box-set, which was being heavily hyped on their website at the time...alongside claims that the release of the box-set was to be accompanied by an article about Dick Randall, written by Kim Newman and due to be published in next month’s issue of Empire magazine.  Well come next month’s issue of Empire...and this Dick Randall retrospective by Kim Newman failed to appear, as did the box-set.  A Randall box-set clearly being too much Dick for any of us to handle.  This film does however have a fully paid for BBFC certificate and the rights owner has a 35mm print.  So the means and incentive are there for one of those boutique labels to put out an all singing, all dancing deluxe edition of this, and bring S.E.X.Y back...you never know.

unreleased Randall box-set

By rights this story should then have a happy ending, after all I finally got to see the film, as can you as long as you can put up with a time code and a missing exploding titty shot.  For me personally though there is an unpleasant twist in the tale.  Perhaps due to the fact that I’ve gone on about this movie a bit over the years, this has led some to think that I had a hand in it being leaked.  A couple of years ago a certain book even came out claiming The Urge to Kill sat on the shelf until I uploaded it onto YouTube...which came as news to me.  Now, I’m by no means a litigious or censorious person, but in this instance I had to get in touch with the publisher and ask them to remove that claim because...well it has no basis in reality, and opened me up to potential legal action from the rights owner.  The ‘leak’ of the film didn’t even originate on Youtube, and for the record this film has never appeared on my Youtube channel, and besides I only have a basic Youtube account, which means I can’t upload videos longer than 15 minutes. So there’s no way I could be guilty of what I was accused of there.   Unfortunately, there were other parts of that book where things had been taken way, way out of context in order to attack a friend of mine, in a manner that is so inaccurate and unfair, and as a result that book did kill my relationship with its publisher, who I’d previously gotten along well with and had even written the introduction to one of his earlier books.

So, yes, my interest in this film has come back to bite me on the ass in these last few years, but c'est la vie.  People today have it easy though, these days you can just go on Youtube and watch The Urge to Kill, in my day you had to try and talk someone into releasing it on VHS, or unsuccessfully plead over the phone to the producer’s widow to see it.  At least this once Holy Grail of British exploitation cinema is now out there though, with Bono and S.E.X.Y’s exploits no doubt bringing joy to the lives of thousands and thousands of people, just don’t credit or blame me for it.  I plead not guilty, your honour.        

We Need To Talk About Derek

If you've ever wanted to see me participate in a zoom conversation about Derek Ford's Diversions (1975) and The Urge to Kill (1989), your day has come.

Snakes (Guy N Smith, 1986)

Snakes is yet another book that paints Guy N. Smith as the disreputable ol’ curmudgeon of British horror.  Smith’s usual characteristics can be hunted down and ticked off in this 1986 tale of lethal snakes, who thanks to a motorway pile-up, escape from a truck whilst being transported from one rundown zoo to another.  There is the typical Smith anxiety about the hero being fast tracked into marriage, due to an unplanned pregnancy... a character effectively signs her own death warrant by engaging in masturbation (self-abuse rarely ends well in Smith’s world)... and if there is a single mother with a child born out of wedlock in a GNS book, you can be certain something very nasty is going to happen to the illegitimate kiddo.  While Smith wasn’t able to work explicit sex scenes into this one per se, there are the expected pornographic flourishes, including the death throes of a naked snakebite victim being the source of eroticism for a police onlooker “the shapely thighs parted, legs wide and kicking frantically as though she had just hit a climax”. 

The tone of Snakes is one of fist shaking misanthropy, if I didn’t already know that Newman was his middle name, I might be persuaded into believing that the ‘N’ in Guy N. Smith stood for ‘No Filter’.  GNS pisses over just about everybody in this book.  Children are annoying brats who deserve to die in motorway accidents, one female character has value that ‘began and ended between her thighs’, and the working classes are mostly bone idle and unemployed, save for the hero Keith Doyle, a jobbing gardener.  Saying that Smith didn’t appear to have much time for middle class snobbery either, with Doyle’s marriage opposed to by the girl’s elitist father, a bank manager no less...and no horror author in the entire history of literature had it in for bank managers quite like Guy N. Smith, himself a former bank employee.  Smith’s bee in his bonnet about trade unionism also manifests itself with one Thatcherite character being distracted from the threat of the snakes by thoughts of a despised leftish nemesis, whose unionist and anti-hunting antics are “part of a Marxist plot to bring about a revolution”. 

Rich or poor, capitalist or socialist though, a shared stupidity unites just about all of the characters in Snakes.  I mean everyone is meant to be on high alert for the escaped snakes, and yet two separate characters, a policeman and a solider both lay their eyes on what they think to be a large hose, and it doesn’t occur to either of them that this hose could in fact be –duh, duh, duh- a bloody big snake.  Elsewhere a woman hears a rattling noise, and rather than be concerned that it could be the sound of a rattler, instead thinks it must be coming from a child playing with a rattle. Whilst a sexually frustrated widow mistakes the head of a boa constrictor for....well you can fill in the blanks yourself there.

GNS could never be mistaken for an animal rights type of person –heaven forbid- but I do detect a secret empathy, maybe even an admiration for the snakes here.  Long suffering reptiles who have spent their entire lives imprisoned in tourist trap zoos (I think we can add zoos to the list of things Smith hated) and on some level might be justified in their revenge against man.  As the book is keen to point out, its two suspenseful set pieces- Doyle being trapped in a garage by the snakes, and later trapped again in his van- are role reversals of the zoo situation “you paid a quid or so to go into a reptile house and gawp at snakes through glass” thinks Doyle “but this bugger was getting a close-up of humans in a cage for free”. 

One problem with Snakes in terms of a horror novel is that the kills, mostly characters being momentarily bitten and then dying of snake poison, don’t really carry the same visceral charge as people being ripped apart by giant crabs.  An issue that Smith does in fairness attempt to rectify with the introduction of a massive boa constrictor, which provides a few gore highlights towards the end “a human intestinal explosion had taken place, whoever had been in this room had been crushed with such force that they had burst”.

For the seasoned Smith reader, Snakes makes for a cosily familiar experience.  Even so it is hard to ignore the feeling of no new ground being covered here, as if the book was a contractual obligation, and Smith went into it without any fresh ideas to hand.  Snakes is akin to visiting an elderly relative, knowing full well that they are going to regale you with same tall tale that they tell you every time you come to visit.  It’s a book that delivers what you’d expect from Guy N. Smith without really being a standout in his busy bibliography.    

 

 

 

Only Fans Allowed (2022) / Pro God-Pro Gun (2022)

Rene Perez returns with a double-dose of conservative exploitation filmmaking, that sees the director run with the outlaw status bestowed upon him when his 2020 action film ‘The Insurrection’ was effectively blackballed by his usual distribution outlets.  Since both ‘Only Fans Allowed’ and ‘Pro God-Pro Gun’ were likely to suffer a similar fate, these two have bypassed traditional distribution with Perez and his producer Joseph Camilleri opting instead for the 21^st century equivalent of four walling.  Setting up a website ‘Rebellion Flix’ to release these two new movies themselves, as well as the frequently suppressed The Insurrection.  Perez seems to be in his element when he is pushing the buttons of people with opposing politics, and in that sense the Rebellion Flix site is a master class in Perez’s brand of provocation.  The site bloodying its gauntlet with fighting talk along the lines of ‘watch the movies that liberals don’t want you to see’, ‘indie films that fight against the Government’s Covid scam’, while hyping Pro God-Pro Gun as ‘an anti-woke movie starring a straight white male hero’.  The Insurrection, filmed pre-pandemic, had attracted trouble by suggesting that a virus was about to be released onto the masses.  Something that proved to be disturbingly prophetic, and unsurprisingly made the film a hard sell when a minor plot point in a Rene Perez film turned into a global reality.  Never one to run from controversy, these two new productions offer an extremely vocal voice to anti-vax theories,  essentially tying The Insurrection, Only Fans Allowed and Pro God-Pro Gun together as a loose trilogy of Covid themed movies.

Part radical manifesto, part slasher movie, the focus of Only Fans Allowed is a cam girl (Viveann Vankeith) who uses the internet name ‘Pluto the Relentless’.  However it is her audiences’ minds, rather than the flies of their pants, that Pluto really wants to open.  Once Pluto’s stream switches from public to private, she drops the prick tease shtick, swaps lingerie for army combat clothing, and lets loose her politics with both barrels.  Urging her followers to resist the vaccine “unless we comply and wear the mark of the beast, meaning either a mask or proof that we’ve been vaccinated. They restrict our travel, our job opportunities. What’s next, no vaccine, no entry to supermarkets?”, as well as encouraging them to join militias “guns and mass disobedience are the only things that will save us” and remove their children from state education “schools are 80% indoctrination to conformity and only 20% of actual education, and now on top of that schools are explicitly teaching children about sexual perversions”.  In short, Pluto has all the qualities Perez looks for in women: non-vaccinated, conservative minded, and willing to undress in front of a camera.  Philosophical quotes validating Pluto’s stand against authority flash onscreen throughout the film, sourced from such diverse individuals as Albert Einstein, George Orwell, Emiliano Zapata, Bruce Lee and James Brown.  Pluto serves as an appropriate mouthpiece, if not proxy, for Perez: a lone wolf who has turned to the internet as a means to shake the masses out of what she believes to be a sheep like mentality, but who has otherwise removed herself from society, preferring to bury herself away in the Shasta County wilderness.  As with all his movies, Only Fans Allowed serves as a love letter to the great outdoors –if you take nothing else away from Perez’s films it is that Shasta County isn’t short on gorgeous views or gorgeous women- with Pluto the Relentless taking time out from online rebel rousing to marvel at the breathtaking, mountainous views that surround her.  Only Fans Allowed and Pro God-Pro Gun also bring a new wrinkle to Perez’s movies, a love of dance, the two films bonded by sequences that reveal their leading ladies to be exceptionally gifted dancers.  Pluto’s outdoor routine being where the James Brown quote comes in “the only thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing”.  In a visualization of Perez’s anti-vax, anti-compliancy concerns, Pluto meets a small boy during her woodlands excursion, immediately striking up a friendly relationship with him.  That is until the boy’s mother shows up, and upon discovering Pluto’s unvaccinated status, reacts as if she and her son had encountered Frankenstein’s monster lumbering around in the woods.  Shielding her son, and warning Pluto off in a hysterical, hateful rant.  In a distressing turn of events, she then roughly slaps a mask on her son, as if she was muzzling a dog, before confiscating his G.I. Joe toys as punishment for talking to the unvaccinated lady. 

To her core audience Pluto is rather apologetic about having to use Only Fans to stream her covert political broadcasts (although ‘Only Fans’ is never mentioned by name in the film itself).  “I have to hide here on this platform pretending to be some kind of temptress and you all have to pretend to be bloody wankers”.  However the film’s horror elements kick in when the illuminati get wise to her online antics, and considering Pluto the Relentless to be a threat to them, mark her down for political assassination.  Enter illuminati bigwig Dr Bieger, a returning character from Perez’s Cabal (2020) once again played by the film’s producer Joseph Camilleri.  Having been concerned with harvesting the organs of young ladies in order to keep the aged members of the super rich alive in Cabal, Bieger here oversees a plot to transform one of Pluto’s followers into a drug fuelled, super strong maniac who will serve the illuminati. The unfortunate man in question, known only as Patient X (Tony Jackson), having been one of few Pluto fans to have been vaccinated, done before he came round to Pluto’s way of thinking.  Something which allows Bieger to test the hidden potential the vaccine has to control the will of those who take it “this construction worker is about to go from an all-round nice guy to homicidal maniac”.

Having been a talky, political diatribe until this point, the last 25 minutes of Only Fans Allowed goes full on, balls to the wall horror as Pluto plays a suspenseful game of cat and mouse with the berserk Patient X who has been given a sledgehammer to do the job and now sports a leatherface type mask.  Perez holds nothing back in terms of gore or nudity, one female victim is viciously beaten, stripped naked and has an eyeball ripped out, another discovers that not even the vaccine can protect you from a sledgehammer to the face, as Only Fans Allowed takes on the appearance of an alternate universe Friday the 13^th movie.  One where being vaccinated, rather than having sex, is what gets you killed, while being unvaccinated earns you final girl status.  Viveann Vankeith’s angry, dedicated performance is the glue that holds the film together, with lengthy sections of it being one woman monologues, and Pluto’s soul searching culminating in the admission that guilt over a youthful abortion is what transformed her from liberal party girl to born again conservative.  A revelation which also allows Perez to work in the pro-life themes that dominated his previous film, the Western ‘Righteous Blood’. 

To me though the real discovery of Only Fans Allowed is Chelsea Evered, who is wonderfully evil as one of Bieger’s underlings.  Evered shines as an utterly conscienceless character who’ll sends shivers down your spine, whether it is in her ruthlessly ambitious plan to climb the ladder of power, or presenting Patient X’s mask to a male co-worker, then explaining with sadistic glee “I’m going to have this bolted to his head so he can’t pull it off. Scary, huh?”  Evered is an actress that Perez should definitely keep on the payroll, indeed she returns for further standout villainy in Pro God-Pro Gun, and is also in the cast of Perez’s as yet unreleased vampire movie ‘Nightfall’, which I believe has British involvement on the financial side.

The final act of Only Fans Allowed inevitably evokes memories of Perez’s Playing with Dolls series, what with a maniac whose murderous actions are being controlled and gloatingly observed by a far greater bunch of degenerates.  I still suspect that Perez has a decent Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the 13^th movie in him, were someone to hand him the keys to either of those franchises.  Realistically though these Rebellion Flix productions appear to signal a retreat away from the mainstream for Perez, and into self-imposed exile to an obscure area of the internet where he can be himself and make the type of movies he wants to make.  Whereas Perez’s ‘above ground’ movies like Cabal and Cry Havoc...the ones which receive DVD releases and show up on mainstream streaming services... contain political content that may go over the head of the average viewer, Only Fans Allowed and its Rebellion Flix bedfellows are far more direct, capturing the director at his most incendiary, opinionated, and in your face.  Due to its anti-vax, anti-government, pro-life stance, Only Fans Allowed is –depending on your political viewpoint- either going to strike you as an incredibly brave film, or an incredibly repulsive one.  It is a divisive film, made in divisive times.

      

        

“You’ve seen the conservative car bumper stickers, now watch the movie” could have been the tag-line of Perez’s Pro God-Pro Gun.  The proud owner of what –hands down- has to be the most contentious, fuse lighting, attention grabbing movie title of 2022.  One seemingly derived from the ‘Pro God, Pro Gun, Pro Life’ slogan that decorates the cars of conservative minded Americans, presumably abridged slightly for the movie because unlike in Only Fans Allowed, Perez wasn’t able to work an anti-abortion message into this one.  Its 1974 and ‘First Blood’ vibes are strong as Vietnam Vet Joe Colton (Chase Bloomquist) walks the roads of rural America on a mission to deliver a precious locket to the family of his slain Nam buddy Emilio.  From the outset there is an across the decades connection between Colton and the heroine of Only Fans Allowed.  They are both persecuted loners who want little to do with society, and carry albatrosses around their necks which cause them to be the subject of open hostility when they do interact with others.  In the case of Pluto the Relentless it is her unvaccinated status, while Colton’s cross to bear is his dishonourable discharge from the service.  In First Blood fashion this instantly brings him into conflict with the local sheriff, Buford, who berates Colton as a spineless hippy who has failed to live up to the heroism of the older generation.  Colton gets a warmer reception from Emilio’s father, a priest (Joseph Camilleri) whose attempt to reach out to the troubled young man is rejected by Colton, who having lost his faith in Vietnam feels uncomfortable being around a man of God.  After a frosty introduction, Emilio’s sister Alma (Ana Isabel Rosso) also offers Colton an olive branch, picking him up on the road and inviting to an impromptu picnic where God, 8 track tapes and disco music are the main topics of conversation.  Like Pluto the Relentless, Alma is another conservative gal who loves to dance, with leading lady Ana Isabel Rosso proving to be quite the mover, as well as the definition of cuteness...where does Perez find these women?

The peace is shattered by the arrival of four criminals, on the run after shooting up the local bank, who invade the priest’s house and lie in wait for Colton and Alma.  The two most memorable of the unnamed foursome being one (Michael Jarrod) who models himself on John Shaft, while the sole female member of the bunch (Chelsea Evered) is dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.  Colton’s dishonourable discharge status quickly earns him a beating from the patriotic crims, Evered’s character sneering “my father didn’t die in Korea so cowards like you could get out and save their own skins”. 

Pro God-Pro Gun is another Rene Perez film distinguished by Chelsea Evered’s ability to be really good at playing really bad people.  She is more than capable of filling the boots of the lead antagonist in a home invasion movie, the type of role usually assigned to male actors.  A wolf in John Travolta’s clothing, her character bullies the other male criminals around, and isn’t above shooting innocent people in the back, or moments of sexual perversity.  Chloroforming Alma, exposing the unconscious girl’s breasts and tormenting Colton with the prospect of turning her rape-ready male cohorts on Alma.  “Look at how mad you’re getting just by having a woman fondle her, imagine how badly you’ll feel if I let the men each have a turn with her”.

Pro God-Pro Gun treads a similar path to Robert A. Endelson’s Fight for Your Life (1977) only with Christianity rather than race relations being the bone of contention between captors and captives.  It’s a film which questions the compatibility between faith and military service, pushing the idea that wars ultimately suit the elite of society, but can compromise and shatter the religious beliefs of those who fight them.  “If soldiers followed God’s laws instead of following the laws of men, he wouldn’t be fooled into fighting wars that only benefit politicians and money tycoons” claims Alma.  An opinion surprisingly shared by Evered’s character, who turned to crime after her father’s death plunged she and her mother into poverty “my father died in Korea thinking he was fighting for our freedom, but really he was fighting for some hidden Wall Street interest”.

Perez isn’t unsympathetic to the hatred of the government and people of power that fuels the bank robbers’ outlaw lifestyle.  However this bunch are no latter day Robin Hoods, and the film backs away from endorsing their viewpoint when it comes to their abandonment of God and embracement of nihilism.  Evered’s lady bank robber reminding her captives “Yes, we are godless, but at least we aren’t cowards”, only for Alma to argue back “you should have followed God’s light instead of turning into a murderous thief”.

Theological debates spill over into bone breaking punch ups and bloody shootouts, as Colton escapes... but beaten and wounded in the wilderness has to confront the two things he has really been running from, God and violence, in order to take on the atheist bank robbers, save his life and protect Alma’s virtue.

As has been commented on elsewhere, Perez does break the mould when it comes to conservative filmmakers. A type that tend to pride themselves on making family friendly movies, while finger wagging at the use of violence and nudity in Hollywood movies, yet Perez is once again all over gore here, and I’ve never seen a film of his that reneges on the promise that if there is an attractive woman in his cast, Perez will find a way of showing her naked at some point.  An elegance to red blooded audiences, and knowledge that excessive violent and female nudity have a tendency to wind woke minded people up the wrong way, seemingly being his motivating factors there.  As much as Perez is Pro God-Pro Gun, he is also very much Pro Blood-Pro Boobs. 

Although the two filmmakers are miles apart geographically, and I suspect politically, Pro God-Pro Gun is a worthy cinematic blood brother to the recent Charlie Steeds movie Death Ranch (2020).  Both are films with a jones for 1970s culture in general, and grindhouse cinema and blaxploitation in particular.  While Pro God-Pro Gun and Death Ranch can get heavy handed at times when it comes to emphasizing their 1970s settings “an 8 track tape player, they’re kind of new” these are two films made with a greater understanding and love for their cinematic source materials than are usually found in faux-grindhouse films. 

As is the norm for Perez, he acts as his own soundtrack composer on Only Fans Allowed and Pro God-Pro Gun, but shows another side to his talents, by coming into his own as a vocalist on the latter film.  The no nonsense bravado that plays out over Pro God-Pro Gun’s opening titles is the perfect primer to the two fisted movie that follows “put your guns down and fight me like a man, if you can, here I am”.  The repeat use of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 as a love theme does unwittingly bring forth unwanted memories of Eric Carmen’s All by Myself, but Perez’s belated contribution to the disco craze ‘Cross the Dance Floor’ (just wanna dance) is a belter that would have gotten them on the floor at Studio 54, and sees Perez vocally channel The Bee Gees “I..I..I..I..I..I just wanna dance with you”.

While both Only Fans Allowed and Pro God-Pro Gun have their merits, for my money Pro God-Pro Gun is the stronger of the two.  Only Fans Allowed comes across as a small scale echo of what Perez has done before, the online whistleblower theme from The Insurrection, and a masked killer as a puppet for the super rich from Cabal and the Playing with Dolls series.  On the other hand, Pro God-Pro Gun is livelier, faster paced and fresher, the 1970s setting and the home invasion theme being something we’ve never seen Perez attempt before.  Both Only Fans Allowed and Pro God-Pro Gun see Perez edge closer and closer to becoming a modern day Ron Ormond, employing exploitation film techniques in order to preach hard-line Christian ideology, and creating films that flit from Grindhouse to Pulpit. 

Pro God-Pro Gun, Only Fans Allowed and The Insurrection are available to stream on rebellionflix.com  $1.99 buys you access to all three movies.  

 

                  

Portsmouth Babylon

Three PDF files documenting the films that played Portsmouth cinemas from Dec 1969 to Dec 1979, researched and compiled by Dr Peri Bradley for the now off-line website 1970sproject.co.uk. Collectively it is a fascinating look at a decade's worth of cinema going, as well as a clandestine peek into the lesser documented area of 'membership only' cinema clubs...aimed at the 'sophisticated, unshockable, with-it audience of today'. Many films which played to that crowd are now MIA including Michael Findlay's All Night Rider, The Sex Serum of Dr Blake (Voodoo Heartbeat), Andy Milligan's Tricks of the Trade, Layout for 5 Models, and another sighting of the lost Harrison Marks film Fornicon, which played Portsmouth in Feb 1976. 'The Happy Hooker and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue' must surely lift the prize as the unlikeliest double-bill, with honourable mentions for 'Ransom + Ooh...You are Awful' and 'Holiday on the Buses + Fear is the Key'. The Tatler cinema's 'cine-cabaret' policy of live striptease and movie screenings sounds right out of the 'chocolate sandwich' scene in O Lucky Man! I wonder if Desiree who graced that stage in May 1971, was the same Desiree whose 'girl and the gorilla' routine was filmed by Stanley Long in the early 1960s. I have seen the advertised act 'The Devil and the Virgin' attributed to her, so they could be one in the same, but do keep in mind that there was nearly a decade between this live appearance and the Long film.

Thanks again to Dr Peri, for allowing me to (re) upload these bits of history to the Internet.

 

1970-1972

1973-1975

1976-1979

Graphic Designs (2022)

 

The British sex film gets a 21st century upgrade with this cautionary tale of freelance web designer Franklin (David Wayman) who finds himself drawn into 'Smasher', the hottest new dating app on the block. When Franklin's girlfriend Candida (Sian Altman) leaves for a business trip to Berlin, Franklin uses Smasher to sexually hook up with an ex-pat American called Atlanta (May Kelly). However the intended one night stand soon spirals out of control, Atlanta mysteriously disappears without a trace, and Franklin becomes convinced that she has fallen victim to human traffickers. Atlanta also becomes an obsession for Candida who makes her own separate attempt to track the American down, initially out of revenge, before finding herself on an erotic journey through camming and fetish clubs.

 

Graphic Designs (which appears to have undergone a last minute re-title to 'Graphic Desires') suggests its makers' own fetish was for erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, with stylish photography that hero worships that sexy neon noir aesthetic. At the same time this is a self-consciously modern movie, with Uber, Tinder, Instagram and deep faking all getting a namecheck, and Franklin depicted as a bored victim of the post-pandemic working from home lifestyle. Graphic Designs must also be the first British sex film to address the issue of Brexit, thanks to Franklin's girlfriend "I cannot cope with that look that Europeans give us, y'know that kind of pitying, patronising one like we're all children who've done something stupid". Despite making his name as a producer of cheap and cheerful horror films, Graphic Designs harks back to Scott Jeffrey's very beginnings, his earliest productions 'Darker Shades of Elise' and 'Dirty Work' clearly owing their existence to the box-office success of 50 Shades of Grey. It is a little surprising to see Jeffrey return to sexploitation here, given that the 50 Shades boat must surely have sailed now, but Graphic Designs is several notches above his recent horror productions, both in terms of acting, writing and direction. It's sexy in all the right places, has a thriller plot thats intriguing enough to stick with it and introduces bewildering plot twists towards the end that indicates Videodrome was a possible influence (ditto calling a room at the Cam girl business 'New Flesh'). Proof that the British sex film is alive and well and now using dating apps, Graphic Designs might well be the naughtiest thing Britain has done since leaving the European Union.