The Perils of Mandy (1981)

Like ‘Take an Easy Ride’ before it, The Perils of Mandy is another short film (just under 40 minutes) by Kenneth Frederick Rowles that crams in more exploitation film incident than movies triple its length.  The Perils of Mandy manages to cross off- a gratuitous shower scene, lesbianism, comedy transvestism, sex in a haystack, a cat fight and spanking- from its perv check list, and that is just within the first 10 minutes.  Even the opening titles double as T&A material, with credits appearing as lipstick drawn onto the boobs and buttocks of two gyrating starlets.  Such is the high sleaze content of The Perils of Mandy that in 2010 plans to include it as an extra on the DVD release of Take an Easy Ride were met with concerns that the inclusion of Mandy would ‘lower the tone’.  Just let that sink in for a minute, people were worried that this film might bring Take an Easy Ride into disrepute!!!...plans to include Mandy on the Take an Easy Ride DVD were dealt the final blow when it emerged that original elements to the film are now missing, and that all director Rowles owned was a poor quality, VHS dupe.

The Perils of Mandy is as if Rowles had thought The Wildcats of St Trinians (1980) had chickened out of providing an X-rated version of the long running schoolgirl themed British comedy series. Then decided to steal Wildcats’ thunder by making a knock-off production that would really go for the pornographic jugular. 

The Perils of Mandy elevates second string glamour model and sex film actress Gloria Brittain- who’d had a bit part in Wildcats- to leading lady status for the first, and only, time in her career.  Her character Mandy, is an 18 year old schoolgirl, spending summer at a private girls school.  Mandy’s closest friends at the school are Gloria, the school’s resident nymphomaniac, and Natasha who being “a foreign bird” loves to get into fetishistic cat fights with other schoolgirls.  The trio’s energetic, boob bouncing, early morning jog catches the eye of a horny photographer, who frets that he can’t get any decent shots of them.  Enter the villain of the piece, ‘The Teacher’ (Derrick Slater) a mortarboard sporting pervert who never misses the opportunity to ogle the girls or make a quick buck.  “You’d be surprised at some of the pranks they get up to in the showers” he leeringly tells the photographer, then with a flash of Thatcherite entrepreneurialism demands cash in return for a front row seat “everything costs nowadays, my boy”.  Posing as an honorary sister, the photographer dons a woman’s wig in order to take snaps of Mandy and Natasha making out in the shower, but the girls quickly see through his disguise.  Suddenly the photographer’s wig goes flying and he is dragged into the shower and overpowered by the man-hungry girls.  It’s a hard knock life.  In scenes right out of fetish mags like Janus and Roué, the teacher uses any opportunity to bend Mandy over his desk and cane her in his office.  “I’m sure this isn’t legal anymore” complains Mandy.  “This is a very private school...little girls who misbehave must be punished” the teacher barks back.  Mandy’s reply “but I’m not a little girl” is acknowledged by a grope of her big breasts.

“He’s always picking on you, it’s because you’re pretty” another schoolgirl tells Mandy, and suggests Mandy could earn some pocket money from nude modelling and film work in London.  Inspired, the schoolgirl sneaks off behind the Teacher’s back to the West End, where an audition for a “sexy send up film on disco dancing” is being held.  A scene likely shot in the makers of The Perils of Mandy’s own office, since its decorated with early VHS paraphernalia, as well as posters for the type of B-level movies that were being given a second lease of life thanks to video.

Mandy manages to upstage the other three actresses auditioning for the role, by tripping at the producer’s door and landing on her bum in his office.  One flash of her cleavage later, and the cigar chomping producer is convinced she has the right amount of sexiness and innocence for the part.  One of the other actresses refuses to go quietly into the night, vowing “that was my part and no stuck up schoolgirl is going to take it away from me”.  She immediately gets on the phone to the Teacher who is alarmed that Mandy becoming a sex symbol will bring shame on his school.  “If only I could get my hands on her, I could trash some sense into her” he complains.  Thus this bad time S&M duo concoct a plan to kidnap Mandy, which would leave the rival actress with the lead role and the Teacher with a victim to his corporal punishment kicks.

Whereas Take an Easy Ride used the pseudo-documentary approach to present a cavalcade of kinks and bare flesh, The Perils of Mandy opts for the facade of cheeky comedy, while thoroughly delivering the sexploitation goods.  Echoes of the St Trinians and Carry On movies reverberate throughout The Perils of Mandy, but Rowles uses the opportunity to push the envelope further than either of those comedy series were prepared to go.  Rowles’ dirty old man tendencies are firing on all cylinders in The Perils of Mandy.  True to its Perils of Pauline punning title, The Perils of Mandy pays tribute to movie serials of the 1930s and their S&M inclinations.  ‘Cliff-hanger’ moments that find Mandy tied up and having to be rescued from the baddies, pop up regularly in the film.  In one such scenario Mandy gets called to a filthy warehouse which turns out to be a trap set by the Teacher, who is soon canning her and bellowing sentiments like “young girls must be punished”, while his actress cohort strips Mandy to her underwear and pulls her hair.  Mandy makes a run for it, but is quickly re-captured and chained topless to a bed.  The two other schoolgirls, Gloria and Natasha, smell a rat and have a male friend drive them at top speed to the warehouse, arriving just in time to overpower the actress and give the Teacher a good kicking, who ends up with Natasha’s stiletto shoes being grinded into his chest.  By the end of the film, Mandy is once again kidnapped by the grudge bearing actress who in time honoured movie-serial fashion has Mandy tied to train tracks as a train approaches.  “Is Mandy’s next big bang to be her last?, will this be the last ride Mandy sees” asks the film’s plummy voiced narrator “watch out for the next Perils of Mandy...coming soon”.  No further Perils of Mandy instalments emerged though, leaving the audience in suspense over the heroine’s fate, not to mention Mandy herself in suspenders.

the clippings of gloria

At the dawn of the 1980s, productions like The Perils of Mandy and Precious Jewels, suggested the British sex film might yet still have a future, maintaining shot on film production values but being aimed squarely at the direct to video market, where they could take advantage of the then unregulated nature of video.  Of course, it didn’t quite pan out that way, the days of unregulated video weren’t to last, British pornography quickly did away with the need for narratives and took the step down to shooting on videotape.  As such The Perils of Mandy ended up representing the end of the British sex film, rather than a new beginning.  Fittingly it also served as a last reunion for several veterans of British sexploitation.  Co-producer and director of photography Douglas Hill had been the cameraman on The Playbirds, Night After Night After Night, and Rowles’ own The Ups and Downs of a Handyman.  The Perils of Mandy also reunited Rowles with The Ups and Downs of a Handyman writer Derrick Slater, who played the mad rapist ‘Mr Black Gloves’ in Take an Easy Ride.  The Perils of Mandy offers Slater another chance to molest sex film actresses onscreen, a role he attacks with such perverted enthusiasm that it is tempting to view The Perils of Mandy as a quasi sequel to Take an Easy Ride, with Slater’s Mr Black Gloves character hiding out from the police by donning a mortarboard and calling himself ‘The Teacher’ instead.

The Perils of Mandy has no qualms about parodying the very section of the British film industry it sprung from, revelling in clichés about Soho smut peddlers.  The producer of the film within a film, Sid Creep, is a slippery, bewigged medallion man, played in an exaggeratedly Jewish manner.  Creep’s director is a bald headed Von Stroheim type who auditions actresses whilst fondling a cat o’nine tails.  If anything though, the real life criminal element that helped create The Perils of Mandy is far more eye opening than their cartoonish onscreen counterparts.  The film’s co-producer Toni Muldoon, also ran the VHS label ‘Vision-On Video’ which distributed The Perils of Mandy on tape.  Muldoon led a life right out of a British gangster film, and not one of the good ones either.  As well as his above counter involvement in Vision-On Video, Muldoon had his fingers in the illegal side of the VHS trade.  Muldoon would later proudly boast to be the first person to have pirated Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the extra terrestrial in the UK.  Allegedly, the result of Muldoon bribing a night watchman into ‘loaning’ him a print of the film, which Muldoon used to make counterfeit videos of E.T, prior to its UK cinema release.  Muldoon’s 15 minutes of fame however would mainly be played out in the Costa Del Sol, where Muldoon lived a millionaire lifestyle on the back of running fake escort scams, money laundering, timeshare and debt elimination schemes.  Muldoon left a trail of misery wherever he went, and laughed all the way to the bank about it. The house of cards came crashing down in 2013, when Muldoon was arrested and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.  Toni Muldoon died in 2019 at the age of 71, and was seemingly mourned by few.  His own son described him as “a heartless, immoral and unconscionable person who destroyed and bullied people with devastating affect”.

As you might expect from a film made in such shark infested waters, the production of The Perils of Mandy was a troubled one, with rumours of promised funds never materialising and the film going unfinished.  The messy results are all up there onscreen to see.  Since scenes depicting the shooting of Mandy’s big movie obviously never made it in front of the cameras, Rowles resorts to inserting brief, behind the scenes footage of The Perils of Mandy’s own filming as a kind of facsimile.  A sequence meant to depict Mandy’s star on the rise, is actually made up of footage from an earlier promotion film Rowles had shot of Gloria Brittain, a sort of ‘day in the life of Gloria Brittain’ that saw the actress feeding pigeons in a park, buying a pineapple from a fruit and veg stall and shopping in central London.  As with Take an Easy Ride, Rowles also throws lots of local colour into the mix, working in shots of the Raymond Revuebar, the Dilly cinema club, striptease routines and Soho backstreets...a beat that you just know all those involved in this film had walked many, many times.

This dazzling tour around all the fleshpots that early 1980s London had to offer belies the fact that the bulk of The Perils of Mandy was shot in Medway, out in Kent.  It later emerged that sexy scenes in The Perils of Mandy had been filmed at a local sports centre, with the town councillors and sports management claiming they’d been duped into believing that The Perils of Mandy was an innocuous ‘sports film’.  When they cried foul to The Sun newspaper, the authorities only played into Muldoon’s crooked hands by giving The Perils of Mandy free publicity in a national newspaper “I was inundated with phone calls asking when the video will be made available” he claimed. 

Due, I suspect to Muldoon’s involvement, few people are willing to talk about The Perils of Mandy these days, and how it came into existence.  The film gives the impression of being commissioned by someone who was completely besotted by its lead actress Gloria Brittain, and threw aside the concerns of others that Gloria’s limited acting and slight speech impediment made her unsuitable leading lady material.

The Perils of Mandy constantly plays fairy godmother to Gloria’s Cinderella, waving its magic wand and bringing to life her dreams of stardom.  The film allowing Gloria to play out the fantasy of making it in the big city...photographers swarm around Mandy, supporting characters remark on how lucky Mandy is getting the lead role in a film, and Mandy gets to be the focus of attention at a glitzy film premiere.  Even the character name Mandy had autobiographical resonance for Gloria, ‘Mandy’ being one of the names she’d used in her real-life modelling career.  The Perils of Mandy unashamedly dotes on Gloria, portraying her as an innocent child-woman who is devoid of the exploitativeness, meanness and vindictiveness that defines the characters who pursue her.  The highlight of the film’s erotic infatuation with her is a slow, seductive striptease Gloria performs to Shirley Bassey’s 1970 cover version of ‘Light My Fire’, a sequence that ends with Gloria totally naked and blowing kisses at an appreciative audience.

The reality of Gloria’s career never quite measured up to the fantasy of The Perils of Mandy.  Strictly at the low end of the British sexploitation pecking order, Gloria was last heard of working for Scottlee Studios in 1982, where amateur shutterbugs could take photographs of her for £2 an hour.  The Perils of Mandy brings to life the dolly daydreams of a minor starlet, but Gloria does come across as genuinely lovely and sweet, a far cry from the mercenary divas who usually get such vanity vehicles built around them.  So surely only a perverted headmaster, or a bitter rival would begrudge Gloria her one and only queen for a day moment.  Hey Teacher, leave those schoolgirls alone.