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.