Don’t Open Till Christmas revisited

Santas and good taste watch out as Clive, Nick and Me chat about Don't Open Till Christmas and it's behind the scenes documentary The Making of a Horror Film.

As an extra Christmas treat, here is a transcript of my prep notes for the video:

I first encountered Don't Open Till Christmas during my VHS collecting days.  We had a local indoor market –long since demolished and converted into an ASDA- called Pendlebury market which on the Wednesday served as a flea market.  It was there you'd have stalls selling videos, second-hand books and generally junk that people didn't want.  Older pre-cert tapes were still relatively cheap in the early 1990s, I paid just two pounds for The Magic Curse on the Hokushin label back then and two pounds for Cain’s Cut Throats on VTC.  In those pre-internet days you just tended to grab anything from the pre-cert era and hope for the best.  Of course, it wasn't long before you learned the life lesson that not everything pre-cert was gold. I remember picking up Frankenstein Island from Pendlebury Market for £1.75…complete cinematic dog shit, but at least back then it didn't cost you too much to step in it.  Anyway there were these two old guys who had a VHS stall at Pendlebury market on Wednesdays and for some reason their nickname for me was ‘The Kung Fu Kid’.  So I must have been buying a few kung fu movies from them.  Although I honestly can't remember having done so, and whatever allegiance I had to martial arts movies went out of the window when I picked up a VHS of Don't Open Till Christmas from them.  If the Kung Fu Kid is the nickname they came up for me for buying too many martial arts movies from them, I shudder to imagine what nickname was bestowed upon me when I started buying movies like Don't Open Till Christmas.  I have to credit Don’t Open Till Christmas with igniting this fascination I have for second rate British cinema, along with a lot of the B-level crime film from the 1960s, mostly made by an outfit called Butchers films, that were still showing up in graveyard slots on TV at the time.  Films which Don't Open Till Christmas does accidentally resemble at times, especially those scenes of Edmund Purdom and Mark Jones doing their sleuthing in a mock-up of a Scotland Yard office, which come across as a throwback to the Butchers and Edgar Lustgarten cheapies from two decades earlier.  I love how the UK video release of Don’t Open Till Christmas hard selled the murder mystery angle “Scotland Yard is on the trail but every clue points them in a different direction, the culprit is right under their nose” then on the back cover had a still of Alan Lake murdering Belinda Mayne’s character.  Thus revealing who the killer in the film is, and that the main female character dies at the end.  I did recently float the idea that this was the biggest spoiler to ever appear on a UK video sleeve, but someone managed to go one better by pointing out that there was a UK video release of Planet of the Apes, that had the final image from that film on the front cover… which does tend to give the game away a bit. Accidentally revealing who the killer was on the back of the video cover does rather typify a production that seemed to be ridden with disaster after disaster.  According to the credits of Don’t Open Till Christmas, this is a film directed by Edmund Purdom, with ‘additional scenes written and directed by Al McGoohan’.  However according to the late Ray Selfe, the insider story was that the film was begun by Purdom, who made a hash of directing it.  Direction of the film was then handed over to Derek Ford who either got sacked or walked away from the film, and Ray Selfe ended up finishing directing it.  More recently however Alan Birkinshaw, who like Ford and Selfe had a background in British sex films, has fessed up to directing parts of it, and having a hand in rewriting and recasting the film when it ran into trouble.  So the film had four directors in all.

 

According to some, Edmund Purdom only agreed to star in the film if he could also direct it.  Now, I'm not sure if that is completely true, since Purdom was fairly indiscriminant about the type of films he was appearing during this period, and never seems to have a hankering to direct any of them.  I suppose the chance to direct may have been a carrot on a stick incentive for Purdom to leave Rome behind and come to freeze his ass off in London.  Purdom later claimed he'd always felt he was ‘a born director’ a view not widely shared by the rest of humanity.  Despite the fact that he was a Brit, Purdom had been away in Rome and before that Hollywood for so long that his parts of Don't Open Till Christmas have this excitable tourist mentality when it comes to filming all of the well known London landmarks.  Purdom really, really loved to film that New Scotland Yard sign.  A mentality that you also tend to get when overseas filmmakers shot horror movies and giallos in London.  Where they were obviously determined to see that the extra money it cost to film for a few days in London was all up there on screen, and frog marched their casts around just about every London landmark they could find.

On account of Don’t Open Till Christmas, Edmund Purdom did become a member of that fairly exclusive club of actors whose one stab at film feature film directing was a horror movie.  Alongside David Hess, John Saxon and Roddy McDowall, and you might also be able to include Larry Hagman, Tony Lo Bianco and Darren McGavin…. although those three did also direct TV show episodes as well.  Alan Birkinshaw later remembered “the problem with Edmund was that he was a bit eccentric and he was also a bit of a sex maniac”.  I'm not sure being a sex maniac was a hindrance when it came to directing Don't Open Till Christmas but Purdom’s eccentricity might have gotten the better of him.  One story about Purdom and Don’t Open Till Christmas involves him directing a scene involving a guard dog.  Where rather than explaining to the dog’s handler what he wanted the dog to do, Purdom went straight to the dog and tried to explain to the dog what it's motivation was and what it needed to bring to the role, as if the dog could understand English.

 

In a later interview Purdom claimed the only reason he had to stand down as the film's director was that Dick Randall had been avoiding paying tax and everyone involved in this film was allegedly being paid in cash only.  This situation was discovered by Derek Ford, who Purdom alleged, then used this information as a way of blackmailing his way into the director's chair.  While the idea of Randall not paying tax sounds as if it could have basis in reality, as for Derek Ford’s blackmailing of Randall, perhaps less so.  If Ford did go to the extreme lengths of blackmail his way into the director’s chair why then did he walk away from directing the film after only a couple of days?  Alternatively, how did Dick Randall manage to fire Derek Ford if Ford had that kind of leverage over him.  It also strikes me that if Ford was blackmailing Randall, it would have led to a rift between the two of them.  Whereas in reality Ford and Randall worked together on at least two other occasions. 

 

Anyway whatever the reason, Derek Ford took over directing the movie and I think because of that, coupled with the fact that he also wrote the film, is why there are a lot of Fordian themes going on in this film.  Ford had a consistent downer on male photographer characters, as if Derek Ford… sex filmmaker and swinger… had the right to look down on anyone.  This goes back to Tony Booth’s character in Corruption, the 1960s horror film Ford wrote with his brother.  Other predatory, obnoxious male photographers show up in Ford's film ‘Suburban Wives’, the Ford scripted ‘Scream and Die’ and Don't Open Till Christmas gave Ford the opportunity to give this stock character of his a 1980s makeover in the form of Cliff's porn photographer pal Gerry. For a British sex film director, Ford was always one to call out male chauvinism.  There's a scene in Ford’s film ‘The Wife Swappers’ where a husband is trying to coax his wife into some girl on girl action for his swinger pals.  Only for her to fume “animals, animals all of you… you've taken the act of love and dirtied it” and ends up breaking up the party by ordering all the swingers out of her home.  A scenario Ford sort of revisits here when Cliff sensitively suggests that his recently bereaved girlfriend Kate can overcome the grief of her father's death by doing a girl on girl porn photo shoot with a glamour model called Sharon.  All of which results in Kate seeing red and sending her into “animals, animals all of you” mode.  This leads to Sharon being threatened by the killer who runs a cut throat razor over her naked body.  Which I suspect might be Derek Ford bring you one of his kinks to the movies... there's a similar scene in Diversions (1975) when a lady Nazi touches up Heather Deeley with a switchblade.  Ford himself also shows up in Don’t Open Till Christmas playing a Santa Claus at a circus, whose eyeball ends up falling out.  A fairly rare in front of the camera appearance by Ford, who by all accounts was the type of bloke who liked to watch others rather than be the one who was being watched himself…if you know what I mean.

 

Don't Open Till Christmas does go against the grain for an early 1980s slasher film.  One of the accusations frequent aimed at that genre is that you can always work out from the get go that the loud jocks and the female bimbos are going to get theirs and the nice girl who doesn't put out is going to be the one who defeats the mad killer.  Whereas Don't Open Till Christmas doesn't so much rip up the rule book, rather it gives the impression that no one could be bothered to read the rule book.  In this film you can be a topless model with the morals of an alley cat and live… you can work in a Peep show and live… you can be a porn photographer and live… and you can try and coerce your distraught girlfriend into doing porn and live… and yet all the decent and nice characters in this film die horribly.  Say what you will about Don’t Open Till Christmas, but it is difficult to second guess who gets to live and who dies…unless of course you've seen the back of the UK video sleeve which gives away the death of a major character.

 

Another way in which Don't Open Till Christmas stands out from the slasher pack is that it's a very British film.  Lots of London exteriors, lots of British accents… Pat Astley who is from Blackpool is even in the film, and how often do you get to hear the Sandgronian accent on film. I've never worked out why, when people from Liverpool call themselves Liverpudlians, when people from Manchester call themselves Mancunians… why people from Blackpool call themselves Sandgronians, which makes them sound like Doctor Who villains.  

Pat, like a couple of cast members had a background in British sex films, her real name is Patricia Maynard.  This was her last credited acting role in a movie, but Pat always had a second career going as an extra, doing un-credited non-speaking roles on television.  Most famously she was the first of young Mr. Grace’s nurses in Are You Being Served… and it's believed she continued working as a TV extra up until the early 1990s when she stopped acting and went back to Blackpool to live amongst her fellow Sandgronians.  She did resurface a few years ago as a talking head in a documentary about Mary Millington… they got her for that on account of a brainwave I had.  No one knew how to get in touch with her but it was believed that Pat was back in Blackpool and as Sandgronia has its own local paper ‘The Blackpool Gazette’ I suggested to them that they should write a letter to the Gazette, asking the public if anyone knew her present whereabouts.  What ended up happening was that the Blackpool Gazette was so interested in this story that rather than just publish a letter they wrote an entire article about her.  One that politely emphasized Pat’s involvement in Are You Being Served and didn't bring up the porn, for fear of scaring her off or embarrassing her.  Anyway it did the trick and the only person who responded to the article was Pat herself.  I must stress that I was only ever on the very, very periphery of the Millington documentary and even that was a highly unpleasant experience with warring factions of the production trying to drag me into their conflicts and ‘creative differences’.  If you think Don't Open Till Christmas was a troubled production, you should hear the story about that movie. 

One person who did I manage to talk to about Don’t Open Till Christmas was Paula Meadows, who is mainly remembered for porn, but had a cameo in the movie as a short-sighted secretary who ends up being killed and hung upside down naked in the London dungeon.  Paula told me that was horribly uncomfortable to shoot and she immediately began to feel dizzy and nauseous from being hung upside down by her feet.  Derek Ford, who was a friend of hers, came to her rescue and held her head up in between takes, but she couldn't wait to be cut down and leave her stay at the London Dungeon behind her.  Paula told me she has never seen the movie “because I had no desire to see myself as a naked corpse with blood dripping from my throat”.

 

At least Paula admits to be an involved in the movie, which wasn't the case with a certain crew member who shall remain nameless.  I reached out to this person many years ago with regards to a book project I was working on.  I contacted him through the internet explaining that I was involved with a book about British horror films from the 1980s and would he be interested in sharing his experiences of working on Don’t Open Till Christmas.  This he seemed pleased to do, immediately getting back to me and giving me his phone number… which seemed a little odd given that he didn't know me from Adam.  When I eventually called him the number turned out to be his office phone number, so I went through the usual rigmarole of listening to about 10 minutes of elevator music before his secretary answered. I explained to her my reasons for calling, at which point she put me on hold and left me to listen to yet another 10 minutes of elevator music before this guy eventually picked up. I politely stated that I was phoning him with regards to writing a book about 1980s British Horror films and how he’d given me his number to discuss Don’t Open Till Christmas.  This was then followed by a few moments of silence, before he said “I can’t hear you… speak louder”.  So repeating myself, I explained I was working on a book about British Horror Films from the 1980s, how he’d given me his phone number in order to speak about Don’t Open Till Christmas… at which point he cut me dead by saying “I didn't do Don't Open Till Christmas”.  Which immediately killed the conversation dead, since he went into denial mode about working on the very film he’d given me his phone number to talk about.  Clearly forgetting that his name was still on the end credits of the film and that he'd even been filmed working on it in the behind-the-scenes documentary that exists on Don’t Open Till Christmas.  Feeling myself on the verge of laughing at this guy down the phone, but not wanting to be rude, I quickly wound up the conversation by claiming “I must have got the wrong number, sorry”. Jim Morrison was right… people are strange.

 

Having recently re-visited the film for the first time in many years I was struck by how silly and funny Don’t Open Till Christmas actually is, which I suspect comes from Dick Randall and perhaps Alan Birkinshaw.  I can never think of Alan Birkinshaw without remembering a nickname someone wickedly came up with for him a few years ago… Alan Clumsyhands.  I think it was the horror journalist Alan Jones who first dubbed him that. Jones wrote a piece about Killer's Moon, where he made the case for Birkinshaw being the British Ed Wood.  The punch line being that if Tim Burton ever made a biopic of Alan Birkinshaw it would be called Alan Clumsyhands…as a play on Edward Scissorhands.  I don't know if Birkinshaw really does deserve the British Ed Wood tag, his later work for Harry Alan Towers, done when he had a bit more experience and a bit more money behind him, is quite competent and professional.  Even so certain nicknames do stick, and rightly or wrongly, Birkinshaw will always be Alan Clumsyhands  to me.  Years ago Dick Randall's widow offered to give me Birkinshaw’s home phone number… no idea why, I didn't ask for it or even bring him up in conversation.  However after my phone call with the other Don’t Open Till Christmas guy ended so badly, I declined the offer to go a potential second round with another Don’t Open Till Christmas crew member.  I live in fear that if I ever met or talked to Birkinshaw, I'd put my foot in it and accidentally call him Alan Clumsyhands.

 

The film which Birkinshaw's cult reputation rests on, 1978’s Killer’s Moon has a similar trait to Don’t Open Till Christmas of containing dialogue that sounds tongue-in cheek yet is delivered onscreen in such a straight face fashion that I think it disorientates people and leaves them confused as to whether what they are watching is meant to be intentionally or unintentionally funny. This is especially true of the scenes between Alan Lake and the Peep show girl where she promises not to try and escape from him… whilst crossing her fingers in full view!!  Then when she later does try and escape, finds the door is locked and asks him to give her the key so she can get away from him.  Her behavior in the film makes as much sense as what is written on her T-shirt “Ti-Ti  Decontracte  Diffusion No Parking”.  The mystery of what that means has eluded people over the decades… is it product placement? is it an anagram? a coded message for Russian spies? No one seems to know.  The way it is presented, black letters on a white background and with each line of text getting smaller, makes her look like a walking eye test.  Maybe that is the mystery of the t-shirt, maybe it is an eye test for masturbators to reassure them that their visits to Soho peep booths won’t result in them needing glasses.

 

I do find it hard to dislike Dick Randall, while I'm sure that money, slobbering over actresses and dodging tax were part of his motivation, Randall was a genuine showman who liked to give the people what they wanted.  Which in this case was gore, boobs, Caroline Munro singing and a visit to the London Dungeon.  Paula Meadows described Randall as “a good natured man with infectious smile who just wanted to get on and make a movie in the simplest, cheapest way and rake in the most money possible”.  In the case of Don’t Open Till Christmas though, Randall’s timing was spectacularly bad.  The height of the video nasty controversy was not a great time to release a sleazy, gory British slasher film.  You can tell in the behind the scenes documentary that Dick Randall was growing concerned that certain scenes would give him trouble with the censor and that in Britain a film like this is regarded as a ‘nasty’.  The production did have a bit of insider information about that area, since one of the financers of the film was Des Dolan who had been the general manager of Go video, which got into trouble for releasing Cannibal Holocaust and SS Experiment Camp on UK video.  So Don't Open Till Christmas can lay claim to having been partly financed on the back of video nasties.  Should you ever want to put a face to the person who released Cannibal Holocaust on UK video, Des also has an acting role as a policeman in Don’t Open Till Christmas.  Conveniently Mark Jones keeps referring to Dolan by his first name every time Dolan is onscreen “search the place, Des” which was apparently an in joke.

I suspect Dick Randall's name did end up on British censor James Ferman’s shitlist, maybe not up there as high as Michael Winner and Jess Franco but definitely a few names down.  Since everything Dick put out during this period… Don't Open Till Christmas, Slaughter High and Living Doll went out cut back then.  If you think about it Dick Randall was the only person during this period who was consistently making horror movies in Britain.  All the big horror companies like Hammer and Amicus had faded away by this point and we were entering a time when horror itself had become a dirty word.  Leading to the emergence of these unbearable la-di-da filmmakers claiming “we haven't made a horror film, darling… it’s a dark romance… a gothic fantasy…a psychological thriller… but don't go calling it a horror film, darling”.  Don't Open Till Christmas was the square peg in the round hole of such dishonesty and pretentiousness.  I think it would be pushing it to call Dick Randall the Eighties equivalent of Hammer or Amicus but he was definitely the 1980s version of Tony Tenser.  He kept a lot of older exploitation film hacks in employment, gave breaks to younger talent and brought a lot of entertainment to the video shelves in what was a depressing decade for many.  For all the mockery I give Don't Open Till Christmas, it is gentle mockery.  I do have a lot of time for this shambles… some would say too much time.  Don’t Open Till Christmas may be a shambles, but it's our shambles.  Long live disreputable, ultraviolet horror and the bottomless treasure trove of B-movie goodness that Dick Randall left behind.

 

Talking Dirty

Now up on YouTube, I join Clive to talk dirty about The Fireworks Woman, The Divine Obsession and Boy-Napped

Then….me and Clive discuss Under the Counter, the recent book about British blue movies

Fireworks Woman (1975)

 

Angela is ...The Fireworks Woman is a film that could have only been made in the anything goes atmosphere of the mid-1970s and by a person from a strict Baptist background.  This wasn’t made by just any ol’ Baptist though, director ‘Abe Snake’ was better known to the likes of you and me as Wes Craven, and made this foray into hardcore filmmaking during a lean period in-between horror hits The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes.  Religious repression and sexual guilt are the key themes of Fireworks Woman, the tale of Angela, a woman who is madly in love with a man named Peter.  The only problem is that Peter also happens to be her own brother.  After they both act on their sexual desire for each other, the shame of all that hath occurred drives Peter into the priesthood.  Meanwhile, Angela is cast out into the lustful wilderness.  Watching on the sidelines is Nicholas Burns, the Fireworks Man –played by Wes Craven himself- a mysterious figure who visits their small town on an annual basis to stage fireworks displays... and its heavily implied is the devil.  As the film progresses, so does the case that the Fireworks Man is pulling Angela’s strings, and that she is his instrument that corrupts, and brings out the perverted side of everyone she comes into contact with.  Although a few of these people do, in fairness, seem pretty perverted and corrupt to begin with.

Craven’s casting of himself is one of the many unusual factors of The Fireworks Woman, especially as Craven never strikes you as one of those frustrated actor filmmakers, who used his movies as a means of promoting himself as an actor.  Maybe he’d do the occasional cameo, as in Scream and New Nightmare, but he isn’t someone who you’d expect to show up in a significant role in one of his movies, which he does here.  Craven actually has screen presence too, never coming across as the weak link in what is overall a very well acted film.  Sarah Nicolson and Eric Edwards are partially good in challenging roles as the siblings who are tortured by their desire for each other.  I wonder if the casting of himself as The Fireworks Man wasn’t a reflection of where Wes Craven’s head was at during this period.  You hear all these stories about how the controversy over Last House on the Left had caused Craven to be ostracized in the academic, middle class circles that he moved in, and how friends were wary about him being around their children, once they discovered he directed Last House.  Maybe those kind of experiences led Craven to feel like he was the Fireworks Man, this corrupter of goodness and innocent, and that the Fireworks Man character was a manifestation of how Craven felt he was being perceived by others.  He really does look the part with his Satanic beard, top hat and big cigars, it is a shame Craven didn’t use himself as an actor more, and slightly baffling that when he did it was in a porno that he was directing under a fake name.  Then again, you do also find that in the case of David Durston, who never used himself as an actor in the famous horror films he directed, like I Drink Your Blood and Stigma, but did put himself in a relatively important role in his pseudonymously directed hardcore movie ‘Boy-Napped’.

Considering that he is in the film as an actor, Craven’s involvement in The Fireworks Woman went under the radar for many years.  I think the first person to break that story was Bill Landis in his Sleazoid Express book, way back in 2002.  Prior to that, you’d hear rumours about Craven being involved in adult movies in a lowly capacity, but I don’t think anyone suspected he’d directed a porno.  One of the hundreds of questions I wished I’d asked Bill Landis when he was still alive and kicking, was how he’d come by this information that Craven directed The Fireworks Woman.  All I can think of is that for a time Bill was around Jamie Gillis, who provided Bill with a few quotes for Bill’s Kenneth Anger biography as well as the early issues of Metasex and the re-launched Sleazoid Express.  So I suppose that Bill, who was forever on the prowl for Hollywood Babylon type dirt on people, could have managed to get Craven’s name out of Gillis, as one of the more famous people who’d directed Gillis in porn.  Gillis having appeared briefly in the orgy scene at the end of Fireworks Woman.  Given Bill’s propensity for bullshit, there was for a time a backlash against the idea that Craven directed the film, with others suggesting that it was directed by Peter Locke, who went on to produce The Hills Have Eyes, and that Craven was only on the periphery.  Over time however, the case for The Fireworks Woman being a Craven film has grown.  Its dark themes are befitting a horror filmmaker moonlighting in porn, and Craven is in the movie, as is music from Last House on the Left, namely David Hess’ mournful blues number ‘Now You’re All Alone’.  I remember reading a few years ago, a claim that the version of Now You’re All Alone in Fireworks Woman is either a different, or longer take than appears in Last House on the Left.  Meaning that the makers of Fireworks Woman would have had access to original soundtrack recording material for Last House, rather than this being a case of someone lifting the song from a print of Last House.  Which they wouldn’t have been able to do anyway, as the version of Now You’re All Alone that appears on the Last House soundtrack has had sound effects added to it, like Krug shooting the girl in the lake.  Therefore only someone directly involved in Last House would have had access to an un-tampered with ‘Now You’re All Alone’, minus the gunshot sound effect.  The closest we’ve ever come to an official acknowledgement that Fireworks Woman is a Wes Craven film is the latest Scream movie, in which a grocery store is named ‘Abe’s Snake’.  An Easter egg reference to the name Craven directed The Fireworks Woman under.  Recent quotes from actor Eric Edwards have also confirmed that Craven was the director.

It does appear that the version of Fireworks Woman currently in circulation is a cut version, the film having appeared on tape in the early 1980s.  A time when many adult video companies were censoring kinky or violent material from older movies, out of fear of negative legal attention.  Said to be missing from the current version of Fireworks Woman, is a scene where a man has sex with a fish...I kid ye not.  If you remember the mad fisherman character, who rapes Angela...in the uncut version, this character is said to reappear at the orgy scene, where he ends up sticking his dick into a fish’s mouth.  I assume it is the same dead fish he’d used to beat up another guy earlier on in the movie...he sure got his money’s worth out of that fish!!  I like the idea that there may be an elderly actor out there who can claim that the creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street once had him stick his dick into a dead fish’s mouth...now there’s a tale for the grandkids.  The original version of the film is also said to have contained a urination scene, and I suspect there could be some truth there.  In the version we have there is a scene where a sadist couple lead Angela out into the wilderness and become verbally aggressive to her.  Then there is what looks to be a cut, and suddenly the guy is saying “she’s been very messy” and starts cutting off her wet looking clothes with a pair of scissors.  A lengthy plot synopsis of the film, which ran at the time in the December 1975 issue of Flick magazine, makes reference to a scene where the female half of the couple forces Angela ‘to urinate into her eager hands’.  So, could there have been a missing scene where they force her to piss herself? something that would tie the film in with Last House on the Left, which has its own similar ‘piss your pants’ scene.  One of the unnerving aspects of The Fireworks Woman is that Craven presents the same kind of sexual violence and humiliation that he’d depicted in Last House as ugly and horrific, here as titillation material in an adult movie.

Given the taboos that are broken in the version we have, and the inherently blasphemous nature of the film, it is a surprise that The Fireworks Woman wasn’t a bigger scandal than it was.  At the time Screw magazine predicted that the film ‘is headed for more harassment and confiscation than any film since Deep Throat’.  Which- fortunately for Craven’s long-term career- didn’t actually happen.  If anything I see Last House on the Left as being the Deep Throat moment in Craven’s career. Not in the sense that Last House was a pornographic film, but that the notoriety it whipped up changed the lives of everyone involved in it...and not necessarily for the better.  In terms of his acting career, David Hess spent the rest of his life playing variations on Krug.  Craven himself largely ended up being typecast as a horror film director, and Last House became a source of embarrassment for other cast members like Jeramie Rain and Fred Lincoln.  Yet when Craven upped the ante, and strayed even further from his Baptist roots by making a hardcore film about a priest who is in love with his sister, it largely passed without comment and attracted little attention until Bill Landis blew the whistle on Craven being its director in 2002.  I wonder if in later years, Craven had second thoughts about his endorsement of incestuous relationships in Fireworks Woman.  The People Under the Stairs floats the idea that boffing your sister might not be a swell idea after all, and that path may lead you to dressing up in a gimp outfit and blowing holes in the walls.  The Fireworks Woman and The People Under the Stairs stand as Wes Craven’s two, contradictory, takes on close family relations. 

Often when people who’d go on to have careers outside of porn, shoot a hardcore movie early on in their career, the results can be throwaway works, done to gain filmmaking experience or simply work.  I don’t think that is the case with Wes Craven and Fireworks Woman though, it feels like Craven was engaged and involved with the material, and had something to say, especially about religious repression.  This and Deadly Blessing are the two films of his that touch on his own deeply religious background, and stare into that abyss.  Twisted yet highly compassionate, Fireworks Woman finds the influence of European art cinema flowing through Craven’s veins, and rounds it off with a truly audacious ending that’s sure to be a red rag to conservative and religious sensibilities.  So I would say that The Fireworks Woman is an important Wes Craven film, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked by people who are interested in his body of work.  You’ll probably get more out of it than you will The Hills Have Eyes Part 2...and it is better than being slapped in the face with a fish...which does actually happen to somebody in the film.  Should the full version ever surface on Blu-Ray maybe we’ll finally find out whether anything worse involving a fish also happens in the film.        

      

The Divine Obsession (1976)

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It Hungers (2018)

 

It Hungers has been on my radar for the last couple of years, but until now has always remained one elusive step ahead of me.  Cursed with distribution problems, It Hungers briefly showed up on Amazon Prime in Australia, but to date its only appearance on physical media has been a 2019 DVD release in the Netherlands.  In theory this should have made the film relatively easy to track down, in practice...well.  Attempting to order it from the Dutch version of Amazon proved to be a dead end, when it turned out that they were unable to ship copies to the UK.  Personally reaching out to its Dutch distributor, Just Entertainment, also came to nothing, when it transpired that due to a licensing agreement they were only able to sell their DVD release to people based in the Netherlands or Belgium.  Fortunately this embargo on It Hungers was recently broken, with imported copies of the Dutch DVD showing up on Amazon UK and Ebay.  Thus enabling people outside of Holland and Belgium to witness a badass babe being pitted against an evil assed clown.

Don’t be put off by a title that suggests a copycat production attempting to ride on the coattails of It Follows and the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s It, It Hungers is far from just your standard killer clown movie, and instead looks to folk horror and grindhouse cinema for inspiration.  A passion project for singer, model, actress and ‘outright hustler’ Stormi Maya, whose X-rated contributions to popular music includes the likes of ‘Cannabis Cunt’ and ‘Fake Assed Titties’.  It Hungers is very much the house that Stormi built, with this entrepreneurial young lady having acted as producer, raised the finances, found a screenwriter, cast the film, shaved her hair, donned a wig and spent a month at an isolated shooting location cut off from civilisation.   Less a case of Stormi Maya, and more Stormi May-Have-Had-To-Do-Everything.  

Among the many hats Maya wore on the production was that of lead actress, playing Rachel, a stripper who has made off with a hundred grand of C.I.A drop money.  Heading deep into woodlands, with two cops on her tail, Rachel is taken in by Pris, a nervous, unstable, child-like woman who lives in a castle.  There Pris tirelessly serves Master Dominus, a descendant of an ancient race that existed on earth before mankind.  As Master Dominus can only survive on human flesh that has been flooded by the stress hormone Cortisol, he and Pris summon up a demonic clown by the name of Tormentum, whose purpose is to scare the Cortisol out of everyone.

Stormi Maya certainly looks hot stuff in her 1970s throwback attire, which at times borders on Regina Carrol cosplay.  However she frequently has the film stolen from under her by Swedish actress Karin Brauns, whose wild, throw-caution-to-the-wind performance as Pris fully embraces the lunacy of the material.  What with her cute Swedish accent- I love the way she says “vegetables from the garden”- and jittery, unstable demeanour, Brauns’ performance is akin to watching Agnetha from ABBA impersonating Dwight Frye’s Renfield, and reveals a whole different side to Brauns’ acting ability than her comparatively reserved and straight laced performances in ‘The Obsidian Curse’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in Deadwood’.  Making it all the more sad that we’re never going to see any further Karin Brauns performances, the actress passing away from heart failure in 2022 at the shockingly young age of 32.  Godspeed, Karin Brauns.

In its corner It Hungers also boasts one creepy clown in the form of Tormentum, with some fine body acting from J.D. Angstadt that conveys the mannerisms of a creaky, convulsing corpse that has been hastily brought back to life.  Had lady luck smiled brighter on the film, distribution wise, then Tormentum would be the subject of his own franchise and action figure by now.  Master Dominus, a character who spends the entirety of the movie dressed in a suit of armour and a crow-like mask, is another strong and unique element to It Hungers.  The mask necessitated by the fact that Pris’ purity and selflessness produces a body odour that is particularly offensive to Master Dominus’ race.  Dominus’ diatribes to Rachel about the outside world are straight out of H.P. Lovecraft “one day the forest will reclaim the land and new life will grow over every thread of evidence that these primates ever walked this earth, there have been other creatures, far more advanced creatures that this world crushed beneath its weight mercilessly”.     

 

A quite literally Stormi production, It Hungers is a twice orphaned film that went through two different directors, both of whom elected to have their names taken off the final film.  Their work being credited to the pseudonymous ‘D.R. Vonn’.  However, as a film made in the era of social media, posts by various cast and crew members have left a virtual paper trail of who did what and when.  Film Director 1# (to reveal his real identity would be to unleash Havoc, and may even be the Kiss of Death) was still being credited in that capacity up until around March 2018 before his name stopped being associated with the film.   By September 2018, Film Director 2# was at the helm, before his name too disappeared from social media posts about It Hungers.  According to an on-set insider, Film Director 1# “walked away from money, that’s a big deal.  Not sure of the reason but he hasn’t worked with Stormi since then”.  Understand that Film Director 1# is a blue collar filmmaker with a family to support, and wouldn’t be one to walk away from work and money without serious justification. 

As it was made by two directors, at different time periods, the quality of It Hungers does fluctuate.  Exterior scenes are disappointingly bland, bordering at times on amateurish, and therefore are unlikely to have been the work of Film Director 1#.  Since his other horror films display an eye for the American wilderness and a talent for using the woodlands of California to its maximum potential.  A quality that unfortunately isn’t in evidence here.  On the other hand, It Hungers ups its game once the film moves indoors.  Scenes set in Master Dominus’ domain are heads above the rest of the movie in terms of style and professionalism. One, involving Master Dominus rolling a crystal ball down the stairs to Pris, only for it to be intercepted by Tormentum, wouldn’t shame a Dario Argento or Mario Bava movie. 

While It Hungers sounds like a ‘director for hire’ gig for Film Director 1#, by accident or design, it still retains many of his key themes.  A distrust of authority –the two cops on Rachel’s trail turn out to be crooked- and  distain for a modern world that has turned its back on culture and nature...Master Dominus is an obvious mouthpiece for Film Director 1# in that respect.  A liberal baiting insistence on female nudity is another hallmark of Film Director 1#.  At one point, Pris attempts to breastfeed a doll, while Rachel is the subject of a long shower scene that gives even the most horndog minded of 1980s horror film a run for its money.  Indeed, Stormi Maya’s nude shower scene was evidentially judged such a selling point that it appears twice in It Hungers.  Once in its proper narrative context in the film, and also as a pre-opening credits teaser of what’s to come (in fairness it is a scene that grabs your attention).  

For all the female flesh on display, and the grindhouse influences, It Hungers remains true to Film Director 1#’s oeuvre by also having a strong sense of morality at its core.  Rachel has to carry the burden of introducing Pris to vanity, dancing and greed.  A corrupting influence that renders Pris less smelly to Master Dominus, and with Pris no longer giving off the aroma of purity and selflessness, she is earmarked as a potential lunch for Master Dominus.  “I never wanted to eat her...until now” admits Dominus.  At the same time, Rachel is forced into becoming a better, less selfish, person, in order to smell bad to a Lovecraftian creature, who otherwise would seek to cannibalise her. 

As you should be able to tell by now, It Hungers is one of those movie experiences that leaves you asking ‘which way is up?’ and questioning what you are seeing with your own eyes.  Did they really repeat the shower scene twice?  Did I really see Pris impersonate a rabbit and hop up a flight of stairs? Is there really a scene where Stormi runs backwards in slow motion, her big boobs bouncing around all over the place.  Catching the attention of a horny guy, whose pursuit of her is slightly speeded up, a la Benny Hill.  Just when you think It Hungers has nothing more to give, it goes all Hal Needham with comedy outtakes being worked into the end credits (tip to Film Director 2#, if you plan to take your name off a movie make sure the final product doesn’t include outtakes in which your name is still visible on the clapperboard). 

It Hungers then does something I’ve never seen another movie do, by incorporating an interview with the lead into the end credits...as Stormi pops up to tell you about the trials and tribulations she went through to make the movie.  As well as her regret over wearing a wig in the movie and how she is now an advocate for natural, black hair.  Indeed Maya has since gone on to cultivate an impressively enormous afro...suffice to say you wouldn’t want to be sat behind Stormi Maya in a movie theatre.  Under normal circumstances having the lead actress break character and do an interview for the end credits, would be tearing up the rules of filmmaking, but with It Hungers it feels right that a walk-through explanation was needed for what has to be one of the most eccentric American horror films to come along in some time.  It Hungers....you are fucking nuts...and I’m glad to finally make your acquaintance.