We need to talk about Antony

Balch-O-Mania concludes with Clive, Nick and Me chatting about an Antony Balch double-bill of Secrets of Sex and Horror Hospital

Horror Hospital (1973)

Horror Hospital is a childhood favourite of mine….yes, I do have happy childhood memories of watching people being decapitated by a car with a blade attached to it.  I would have been 15 when I first saw this film, after Vipco brought it back out on video in the early 1990s.  This was the second incarnation of Vipco, and they released it a time when my enthusiasm for their releases was beginning to wane.  Their post-cert incarnation had begun strongly with re-releases of their ‘greatest hits’ like Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Deadly Spawn and Shogun Assassin, but the Vipco well was starting to run dry, and this was a period when they began to gain the nickname ‘Shitco’.  I remember picking up their VHS releases of Horror Hospital and John Russo's Midnight at the same time and those two temporarily restored my faith in all things Vipco, however misplaced that turned out to be…the worst was yet to come.  Horror Hospital also changed the way I looked at British horror films, before this my point of reference for British horror was the Amicus and Hammer films that played on late night TV.  Therefore my impression of homegrown horror was that it was all rather restrained and old fashioned, the type of horror films that your parents approved of you watching.  By the early 1990s I had turned my back on such films and was looking for more extreme and violent movies, evidenced by the fact that I was picking up Vipco videos.  So Horror Hospital blew me away with it with the revelation that British horror could get this gory and outrageous, as one of the quotes on the Vipco release puts it the film anticipates the day of the video nasty.  While being an example of a British film that could stand shoulder to shoulder with the type of material that Vipco usually released, Horror Hospital was also very funny in a way I didn't think a film so deeply into throwing blood and severed heads around could be.  

vipco: the 1990s years

Obviously this was my first port of call when it came to Antony Balch, as I suspect is the case with the majority of people, it has been his most visible movie over the years. I saw his Burroughs shorts next, having sent off for a compilation of those to a video company based in Blackpool, of all places, who sent the tape before they even cashed the cheque, which was very trusting of them.  I remember that when I opened the Jiffy bag they sent the tape in, a millipede type creature scurried out of it, a very Burroughs touch there.  Free millipede with every William Burroughs video.  It was Secrets of Sex that was the difficult to see Balch movie during that period.  Prior to its DVD release in 2005 that was a tough movie to track down, and something I had to make do with reading and hearing about before getting the chance to see it for myself.

 

Fortunately this was not the case with Horror Hospital.  In fact, me and Horror Hospital hit it off so well, that whenever a new film review book would hit the bookshelves back then, I would always make a point of looking up what they had to say about Horror Hospital.  If they were into the movie it was a good sign that me and this book were on the same wavelength.  On the other hand, if they panned the movie it was damning evidence that this book was written by someone with no soul.  The second part of this test is whether they could spell the director’s name right.  If they dropped an extra ‘H’ into Antony it was usually a sign that this was going to be an error ridden, poorly researched book.  So, now you know the secret to dodging the bullet on badly researched books, written by people with no soul…The Balch test.  You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge it by what it says about Horror Hospital. 

 

A couple of years ago I remember reading an online review of Horror Hospital, that I wished I’d done screenshots of at the time, in which the reviewer had seen that Robin Askwith was in the film, seen red and assumed that Horror Hospital was made by similar people to the Confessions films.  Therefore went off on this whole tirade about how the people who made this film must have been blokey morons who thought that was okay to ogle women and sexually harass them on trains, and that they must have also thought that gay bashing was funny as well.  At which point I thought “you really haven't done your research into the people who made this film, have you?”  I'm sure Balch was happy to leave the skirt chasing to the likes of Greg Smith and Norman Cohen.  As for gay bashing, well Balch was gay and did film himself masturbating for his short film ‘Towers Open Fire’ … so yes, I guess he was into gay bashing, just not in the sense that this dipstick meant.  People’s lack of perception amuses me sometimes.  I mean, I was 15 when I first saw this film and knew nothing about Antony Balch, back then… but even so there was a certain shot in the scene where Askwith meets Dennis Price, which tipped me off to the fact that the director of this film wasn't going home to a wife and two kids at night. 

I have a theory that the early parts of Horror Hospital are intended as a bit of a dig at Mick Jagger… I shall explain.  Horror Hospital wasn't meant to be Balch’s second movie.  After Secrets of Sex his plan was to do a film adaptation of Burroughs’ book The Naked Lunch.  There had been some movement on that in May 1971, when Mick Jagger expressed an interest in playing the lead role.  This resulted in Jagger meeting Balch and Burroughs at Dalmeny Court in Duke Street, where Balch and Burroughs both lived at the time.  Jagger wanted a big name director for the film, and took an instant dislike to Balch.  Apparently Jagger showed up wearing of a tight pair of trousers that left little to the imagination, and Balch being Balch passed comment on this, which Jagger took offense to, and felt Balch was coming onto him sexually.  So, could it be that Balch was still working through his vendetta with Jagger when he made Horror Hospital? In the cast is Robin Askwith, who prior to becoming a star in his own right, tended to be noted for his resemblance to Brian Jones, playing a character called Jason Jones, who is depicted as the real talent in a rock and roll band.  One Jones is being eased out of in favor of a flamboyant cross-dressing front man who may be a piss-take of Mick Jagger.  That’s my ‘Horror Hospital is a secret Brian Jones biopic’ theory.

 

Alan Watson in all his glory

Jason Jones’ cross dressing nemesis, who he insults as a “lemon meringue pie on heat” is played by the film's co-writer Alan Watson and by all accounts, a lemon meringue pie on heat was a role he was born to play.  Alan was a friend of Balch, but he definitely was not a friend of William Burroughs… even though he and Burroughs lived together for a few years… it's complicated.  From what I understand of that situation Burroughs had been in a relationship with a young Englishman called Ian Sommerville. Due to problems with Ian getting a US visa they had drifted apart, but when Burroughs began living in London he asked Ian to move in with him at Dalmeny Court.  The problem was that Ian had begun a relationship with Alan Watson, and so in order to still have Ian in his life, Burroughs agreed to let both Ian and Alan live with him at Dalmeny Court, in what you could describe as a triangle relationship.  Burroughs from what I understand wasn't fond of keeping company with camp effeminate men, and Alan was, in the words of Burroughs “a 100% swishy queen”.  So Alan probably drove Burroughs up the wall by playing Maria Callas records all the time, as well as with his nasally, room clearing, laugh… which is captured on film at the start of Horror Hospital.  Incredibly Alan had a day job working for the police, he was a cook at Scotland Yard, where the police would encourage him to dance on the top of tables in the canteen room.  This was another black mark against Alan in William Burroughs’ book, since Burroughs hated the police and regarded any gay man who worked for them as consorting with the enemy.  Alan did however come up with the idea of the car that decapitates people in Horror Hospital and was meant to be an extremely good cook, so he did have his uses.  Another priceless Alan Watson story is that a hotel was being built near Dalmeny Court, which brought a lot of workmen to the area.  Dalmeny Court was a respectable address where the majority of the residents choose not to draw attention to themselves and their sexuality.  Alan Watson however could not be suppressed, and was soon blowing kisses to these workmen and wolf whistling at them, to which they would laugh and occasionally jeer at him.  Being the center of attention and getting the backs up of straight men seems to be how Alan Watson got his kicks.  Which is what I suspect is really going on in that early scene between him and Askwith in Horror Hospital.  It has to be said, it is unusual in a film from the early 1970s to see a fight scene between an effeminate gay man and a straight man, in which it is the straight man who ends up worse off.  Jason Jones being the one who gets a bloody nose, which immediately leads to the cocaine joke in the film “have you been snorting coke again, Jason?” delivered by Antony Balch himself in a small cameo.  Another reason why Horror Hospital has the edge over your average 1970s British horror film.  While other horror filmmakers were trying to get down with the kids by referencing LSD and smoking grass at jazz festivals, the infinitely cooler Antony Balch and Horror Hospital was doing cocaine humour.  Although I guess having William Burroughs as a pal gave you a heads up when it came to popular narcotics.  Balch’s own idea of a good time, in that respect, was to juggle oranges, then take a few codeine pills, then set fire to money.  That was his so-called ‘The Impossible, the Immoral, and the Illegal’ routine that he’d perform for friends.  The Impossible part being the juggling, the immoral being the codeine taking, and the illegal being the burning of pound notes.  I wouldn’t have thought it was actually illegal to burn your own money, unless there was some law against defacing the Queen’s image, but irregardless ‘The Impossible, the Immoral, and the Illegal’ does sound like one hell of a party piece. 

The role of Jason Jones was written with Robin Askwith in mind, producer Richard Gordon having previously worked with him on a film called Tower of Evil, and Balch and Watson having seen him in Cool It Carol.  So it is a role that plays to Askwith’s strengths.  Out of all his pre-Confessions roles, Jason Jones is the one that points the most to where his career was heading.  Saying that, Askwith is a bit more rock and roll in Horror Hospital, he gets to swear here, smoke a joint, and has those Mungo Jerry sideburns… they gave him a bit of a squeaky clean, boy next door make over for Confession of a Window Cleaner.  I suppose you could say that Horror Hospital is a closest we ever got to a horror themed Confessions movie.  The Confessions book series did eventually get around to the genre with ‘Confessions from a Haunted House’ but the film series had expired by the time that book came out in 1980. 

 

If you wanted to pinpoint the moment when the flower power idealism of the 1960s died, the club scene in Horror Hospital is a good enough place to put the pin.  Rock bands are fighting over money, people are selling out and getting into punch ups… as the song playing in that scene puts it “something ain't right… something is wrong”.  While the role was written with Askwith in mind and Jason Jones comes across as a likable hippy refugee from the music biz, Horror Hospital does have a playfully sadistic tendency of dropping him into uncomfortable situations for a straight man.  First off he is beaten up by a transvestite, then when he fancies a holiday to try and get his head together, he is thrown to lecherous gay travel agent Pollock (Dennis Price) who after checking out his junk and giving him a wink, sends him in the direction of Dr. Storm's health farm.  Leading to more traditional horror movie indignities for Jason.  I used to correspond via email with someone in America who was deeply into movies like this and seemed to believe that everyone in Britain still spoke like Robin Askwith circa 1973.  I'd get emails like “cor blimey, Gav, have you ever seen that movie ‘Secrets of Sex’ there's some smashing birds in that” and “do you know what happened to Vanessa Shaw?, what a piece of crumpet she was”.  I could never bring myself to tell him that no one here has spoken like that for over 30 years. 

 

In the early 2000s I did actually see Askwith ‘live’ in a play called Dead Funny, which is about a bunch of British comedy anoraks who gather together to celebrate the life of Benny Hill, but during the course of the evening their private lives begin to fall apart.  The main female character discovers her husband is having an affair and Askwith’s character comes out as gay to the others.  It has to be said that for all of the snide comments you find online about Askwith being a crappy actor from all those ‘atrocious 1970s sex comedies’, that guy was on stage for around 90 minutes, never fluffed a line, never missed a cue, never mistimed a joke, and I do find myself in awe of anyone who can memorize and recite what must have been pages and pages of dialogue.  I remember that when we rang up to book tickets, the theatre had to issue a warning that the play contained a scene of full frontal male nudity.  At which point I thought “Christ, is Askwith still running around with his trousers off all these years later”.   Surprisingly, though the nudity in the play didn’t come from Askwith it was performed by his co-star Stephen Pinder, perhaps best remembered as Max Farnham in the soap opera ‘Brookside’, who took all his clothes off right at the start of the play, albeit with his back turned to the audience.  At which point an old lady in the row behind me loudly complained “I can't see anything”. 

 

Another peculiar incident connected to that play was that Askwith was falsely reported to have died during its run.  While I don't think this ever made it onto the ‘proper’ news outlets, a couple of RIP notices popped up online before it was discovered to be fake news.  I guess someone thought to ring up the theatre and ask if he was still going on that night or whether he was zipped up in a body bag backstage.  Quickly though people soon realized that Robin Askwith wasn't dead he was just appearing on stage in Oldham.  I'm sure there's a joke there… which would be highly offensive to the residents of Oldham. 

 

Decades before being falsely declared dead in Oldham, Askwith alias Jason Jones was on route to Dr. Storm’s health farm and managing to chat up the heroine of the movie Judy (Vanessa Shaw) during the train journey there.  From Horror Hospital we learn that the way to break the ice with a young lady on a train back then was to reassure her you have no plans to rape her.  At which point Judy instantly warms to Jason and is immediately sharing the most embarrassing aspects of her life.  Such as being born illegitimate, having an Aunt who used to run a  brothel, and that said Aunt has hooked up with a Mad Doctor… the kind of thing you tell people on trains who you’ve only known for a matter of minutes.  According to his autobiography, Askwith ended up jumping Vanessa Shaw’s bones during the making of this film, so I guess he was doing something right.  Her real name was Phoebe Shaw but producer Richard Gordon felt Phoebe was an old-fashioned name which wasn't befitting a young actress, and talked her into changing it to Vanessa for the film.  In fairness I can only think of three actresses of note since who have been called Phoebe... Phoebe Cates, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the woman from the Toxic Avengers sequels… so maybe Richard Gordon was onto something there. 

Horror Hospital does tap to the hippie era of belief that you should never trust anyone over thirty.  Valuable advice here, considering you have Pollock, a sexual predator and money grabber.  Carter, the guy at the train station played by Kenneth Benda, who is once again giving off Boris Karloff vibes, and Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock) who is in cahoots with Storm.  All of the older characters in this film are united in their contempt for young people.  The baddest of the bad being, but of course, Dr. Storm himself -played by Michael Gough- whose health farm is a front for lobotomy experiments that turn itinerant hippies into his mindless zombiefied slaves.  Balch and Alan Watson thought up the title Horror Hospital before they had wrote the script, which does show at times.  Technically the film should be called Horror Health Farm but Balch and Watson managed to cover their tracks by including a line where Askwith says something like “this place is more like a hospital than a health farm”. 

 

Hospital or health farm though, it is a place that Dr. Storm rules with an iron fist… assisted by Aunt Harris, his dwarf assistant Frederick (Skip Martin), the zombiefied hippies and leather clad bikers.  I suppose to understand Horror Hospital you have to understand Balch’s influences and childhood hero worship of Bela Lugosi.  Given the time period of Balch’s early youth, which would have been played out in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Balch’s first port of call for Lugosi movies looks to have been the poverty row efforts Bela made in the 1940s in order to buy morphine and get high.  Films like Scared to Death, Return of the Ape Man and The Devil Bat, which usually feature Lugosi as a mad doctor, usually partner him with a dwarf assistant, and are so weird you suspect that Bela wasn't the only one using drugs.  Fill your head with movies like that as a child and you too can grow to make films like Horror Hospital and Secrets of Sex.  Balch did continue his Lugosi obsession into adulthood and owned his own 16mm prints of The Devil Bat and White Zombie.  Which, when not juggling oranges, taking drugs and setting fire to money, he’d bring out at parties, and I imagine were quite a novelty.  Given that these films would have been long out of theatrical distribution by that point and this being the pre video days.  There is an often told story that Balch invited Michael Gough to Dalmeny Court and screened The Devil Bat for him, in order to help Gough understand the type of performance that Balch wanted from him in the Dr Storm role.   A story that does unfairly make Michael Gough sound like a mere Bela Lugosi tribute act.  While Lugosi does cast a large, bat shaped shadow over Horror Hospital, and Balch was undoubtedly playing out his fantasy of directing Lugosi through Michael Gough, Dr. Storm is still a role that Gough makes his own.  If anything Storm feels like an amalgamation of Gough’s career in horror movies, you get the ranting control freak from Horrors of the Black Museum, the mad doctor with a spinster assistant and a pervy eye for young ladies in Konga and parts of all the other ‘Mr. Nasty’ roles he played in horror movies.  I know that in later years the Batman movies were a money earner for him, but to me Dr. Storm is the definitive Michael Gough performance.  Balch really got a master class in old school villainy from Gough, which is something needed for him to spar on screen against such a big personality actor like Robin Askwith and lots of scene stealing secondary roles from Skip Martin, Kenneth Benda and Dennis Price.  I've never heard anyone say a bad word about the making of Horror Hospital, everything seems to have gone smoothly, there were no personality clashes and everyone seems to have had a great time making it.  I think Richard Gordon was on record as saying that this was the most fun he ever had on a movie and to his credit Robin Askwith has always been very complimentary about Horror Hospital and Antony Balch, even though he and Kurt Christian are thrown around like ragdolls by those bikers.  That scene where Robin gets beaten up by the bike boys does go on for a bit, and dare I suggest that somebody behind the camera was enjoying the ‘rough stuff’ a little too much to yell ‘cut’.

 

I do wish this had been Dennis Price’s last movie, by this stage in his career he'd been reduced to appearing in The Adventurer and guest star spots in horror movies and often gives the impression of phoning it in.  However, even though he clearly was not a well man here, you can tell like he had more enthusiasm for Horror Hospital than many of his usual late period roles.  I love his line “mirror, mirror on the wall don't say a word I know it all” and his grand exit from the movie… with that jaunty, yet regal music playing as he does his final walk before getting his head cut off by the car… what a final bow for an actor that would have been.  Price did though hang on for a few more movies, there is a question mark over what was Dennis' last film but it looks like it might have been ‘Son of Dracula’ from 1974.  Which isn't a good movie but may have been fun to be in, especially if you had a love affair with the old demon alcohol going on.  You have Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, John Bonham, Freddie Jones and Dennis Price in that film… between them they must have drunk London dry.  So hopefully Dennis Price got to have one last massive booze up making Son of Dracula, shame there isn’t a decent movie to show for it. 

 

Son of Dracula shares another cast member with Horror Hospital in the form of Skip Martin, who was very well liked on the set of Horror Hospital and seems to have charmed everybody involved in the film.  Something which may factor into his character Frederick going from what initially appears to be your standard evil dwarf sidekick to a far more substantial role.  When you first see Frederick in the film, rolling his eyes and poking at the severed heads, you don't immediately think that this is the character who will turn out to have a sympathetic back story or redemptive story arc.  Even though Horror Hospital is very tongue in cheek, that “I was almost a hero, wasn’t I” line does always manage to pull at the heart strings.  While my love for Horror Hospital goes deep, I will concede that Balch does tend to overindulge Skip Martin a bit.  Did we really need a whole scene of him preparing that RoboCop like baby food for Askwith and Kurt Christian to eat… and yes that scene of him drugging the bike boys is funny, but it does go on forever.  Then there’s the catchphrases “shish kebab”, “don’t forget to brush your teeth”.  I am torn because while the Frederick scenes do tend to drag the film to a slow pace at times, they can't have been that many decent roles for dwarf actors at the time, and when it comes to screen time in Horror Hospital, Skip Martin certainly didn't get ahem… short-changed.  I wonder if Frederick could also have been a bit of a mouthpiece or even alter ego for Balch himself.  They do appear to have this shared love of unusual, head turning sayings.  One story about Balch is that he and William Burroughs were dining out at an exclusive London restaurant, and Balch ordered a fish meal, then upon being served it loudly shrieked “the trouble with fish is that they are so fisheeee”.  Which sounds like a very Frederick thing to say and did apparently embarrass William Burroughs, who socially at least, came across as a very reserved guy. 

 

What I find remarkable about Antony Balch is that in a short amount of time, and a short amount of films, he went from the Burroughs shorts which had a tiny audience and very little commercial appeal, to feature films that entertained people who went to fleapit cinemas in the UK and grindhouses and drive-ins in the States.  All without compromising on his own eccentricity, or holding back on his sexual tastes.  Horror Hospital played for years at the US drive-ins.  It was distributed by Hallmark -who also put out Last House on the Left and Mark of the Devil- and brought Horror Hospital back a number of times.  Computer Killers and Love Camp 13 were some of its drive-in titles.  Hallmark also had a habit of creating campaigns that inappropriately drew comparisons between Horror Hospital and very straight laced movies.  There was a Hallmark campaign for it that tried to ride on the coat tails of ‘Coma’ a sombre conspiracy theory thriller starring Michael Douglas.  By far the oddest repackaging of Horror Hospital was under the title ‘Eastworld’ making it out to be connected to Westworld, and anyone going to see a re-titled Horror Hospital expecting the sequel to a film starring Yul Brenner as a robot gunslinger must surely have thought they'd come to the wrong party here.

 

While Horror Hospital is very much a child of the 1970s, it was still showing up at the drive-ins way into the 1980s.  It was one of the co-features to Dr. Butcher MD for a while.  The last play date I can find for it at the drive-ins was in 1984 when it was playing as a co-feature to The House on the Edge of the Park.  This, despite the fact that Horror Hospital had already entered into US TV syndication by that point, albeit I imagine in a heavily cut version.  It played on Elvira’s show, Movie Macabre, as early as 1982. 

 

The people who tend to be the most hostile towards Horror Hospital are the William Burroughs crowd, who have issues reconciling the fact that anyone close to Burroughs was also enthusiastically involved with exploitation movies.  They have a tendency to look down on Horror Hospital and Secrets of Sex, as strictly commercial ventures that Balch merely made in order to gain the experience needed to adapt the Naked Lunch to the screen.  They also dismiss his involvement in distributing soft core porn as something Balch did to raise the money needed to shoot film of Burroughs walking around the streets of Paris and shooting up in hotel rooms… essentially reducing Balch to the level of a toadie or a hanger-on.  Which I feel does a tremendous disservice to Balch’s friendship with William Burroughs, as well as Balch as a talent in his own right.  Still, who needs the approval of a few dead eyed intellectuals when Horror Hospital played for years to the blood, boobs and hot dog brigade at the drive-ins.  It’s a film that has rarely been out of circulation since it was made and now thanks to DVD, Blu-ray and streaming has stormed its way into the 21st century. 

 

There is a French language book about Balch called ‘Guerilla Conditions’ which regrettably has never been translated into English, and its rumored that one of the Flipside people is currently working on a book about Balch.  In which case ‘take my money’, I'd be first in line if that ever materializes.  In the meantime, hopefully I've convinced people to raise a glass to Antony Balch, maybe stick an old Bela Lugosi movie on in his memory… juggling, drug taking and burning money are however optional.  Balch’s premature death and the fact that he left behind too few films, is one of the great tragedies of British exploitation cinema in particular, and British cinema in general. 

Antony Balch (1937-1980)

 

Secrets of Sex (1970)

There is nothing quite like Secrets of Sex in the British sex film genre, and there is nothing quite like Horror Hospital in the British horror genre. Despite both being commercially successful, the two feature films by Antony Balch are a pair of cinematic oddballs that walk against the crowd, never really fitting in with what was going on at the time, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Secrets of Sex is the only British sex film to be narrated by a Mummy.

Then again, these films were made by someone who it is fair to say was a true one-off character. Antony Balch was a unique individual in many ways. He was a friend and collaborator of William Burroughs, he began as an experimental filmmaker before transitioning to commercial film, he was a distributor as well as a filmmaker, he was a gay man with a talent for marketing sexploitation films to straight men, often allot more successfully than the heterosexual competition. He was also way ahead of his time, seeing value in, and releasing films by Russ Meyer, Jess Franco and Ted V. Mikels, years before cults sprang up around them.

Balch was the only child of Delta Emily Balch, who had been in revues by theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran. Although Balch claimed that upon giving birth to him, Delta lost her singing voice and never sung publically again, instead becoming a film and TV extra as well as a stand in for Dame Edith Evans. I get the impression that Balch was from a privileged background, he was what you’d call a toff, but in terms of the film industry Balch was someone who’d worked his way up from the bottom. Balch directed TV commercials, subtitled foreign films for an arthouse distributor called Mondial films and put together trailers...all the menial jobs.

Balch is far from the only fascinating character from the world of sexploitation distribution, but in the cold light of day you have to admit that fellow travelers like Bachoo Sen, EJ Fancey and David Hamilton Grant were merely hucksters who zoned in on the movie industry as a means to make money. I think what calls out to film buffs about the Antony Balch story, is the sense that Balch was one of us, a passionate movie lover who got to live out the fantasy of being able to bring movies he admired to the public’s attention, both as a distributor and as the programmer of two London cinemas. In the distributor realm, Balch was the first person to release Tod Browning’s Freaks, which had been banned in the UK for decades. Balch also revived the silent movie Haxan, which he released as ‘Witchcraft Through The Ages’, giving it a hip, 1960s makeover by having Burroughs narrate the movie and Jean-Luc Ponty provide a soundtrack. Endearing Balch to critics of the day, and earmarking him as someone with greater integrity than your typical Soho smut peddler. Balch had an office in Golden Square, so was just a hop, skip and a jump from the very heart of Soho.

Somehow in the middle of this Balch managed to find time to direct Secrets of Sex, which came about due to Balch’s friendship with Richard Gordon, who had produced many classic horror and sci-fi movies like Fiend Without A Face and Devil Doll. Balch was a huge Bela Lugosi nut who had dragged his long suffering mother to various fleapit cinemas to see Lugosi movies during the 1940s and 50s.  Even getting to meet Lugosi backstage in Brighton during Lugosi’s ill-fated 1951 tour of Dracula, which Richard Gordon had a hand in organizing. So I guess you could say that Bela Lugosi is what brought Balch and Gordon together. I do think Balch was very fortunate to have Richard Gordon onboard as a producer.  Gordon seems to have ‘got’ Balch right away, and allowed him free rein to make this movie, confident that Balch’s marketing brain could make Secrets of Sex a big success, even though this is far from a conventional movie...understatement of the century.

Would anyone else have backed a film like this? I have my doubts...because of its anthology structure and horror elements, Secrets of Sex tends to get compared to the films that Amicus were making at the time.  However that is to overlook the fact that Amicus were somewhat of the goody two shoes of British horror, never went near ‘sexy’ stuff and weren’t too fond of graphic violence. There was Tigon, who were a more exploitation oriented company, but they tended to take films away from directors if things got too out there, or too gay, and draft in hack filmmakers to shoot more conventional footage. As I believe was the case with Zeta One and The Haunted House of Horror.

Thanks to Richard Gordon putting up half of the budget, and Balch digging into his own pockets for the rest, Balch though got to make Secrets of Sex...the film that educated the dirty mac brigade to the fact that women aren’t just sexual objects. They can also be sadistic murderers, thieves, spies, mad scientists, and want to trap men’s souls in plants. Valuable advice for budding misogynists dished out by a philosophical mummy, who recounts several tales from ‘the battle of the sexes’. A theme Balch appears to have been quite hung up on, and also bleeds on over into the films he distributed. In Balch released movies like Supervixens and Mama’s Dirty Girls, sexual relations between men and women usually spiral over into violence and death. As a distributor Balch was also drawn to movies that portrayed women in a particularly wicked and immoral light. Such is the case with Balch pick-ups like Daughter of Horror, Freaks, Blacksnake, and of course Don’t Deliver Us From Evil. I rarely throw around the term genius, but Balch really was that when it came to marketing exploitation movies, and the hyperbole he employed to sell movies has rightly become the stuff of legend... “the French Film Banned in France”, “the Film that Shocked America”, “Amazing Shockophonic Action”, “Alain Delon as the most evil man in France!”, “Brainbucket Death Sports”, “Tougher than the Dirty Dozen, rougher than Dirty Harry”. The tag line he dreamt up for Secrets of Sex was “unisex explodes in the film they tried to stop”, which to the sexually repressed must have made unisex sound like a new sexual fetish they needed to know about. Although I wonder if that unisex explodes tag-line wasn’t also a coded message that there is also allot of naked guys in this movie, and that Secrets of Sex had elements that would appeal to the type of gentlemen that Balch was fond of encountering in London’s bath houses and public toilets. By all accounts, Balch was no stranger to cottaging.

Secrets of Sex begins with the origin story of its mummy narrator, and how a thousand years ago an Arabian Judge (Richard Schuman, a sex film distributor with acting aspirations) discovered a locked trunk in his wife’s bedroom, and convinced that his wife’s lover is hiding in the trunk, has it buried. It’s a prologue that shares similarities to a short story called La Grande Breteche, written in 1831 by Honore de Balzac. If you want to see a more faithful adaptation of that story it was the basis for an episode of Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries (1973) with Peter Cushing in the role of the wronged husband. Don’t go expecting to see the lover become a mummy in that though. Saying that, Secrets of Sex itself doesn’t ever properly explain how a man buried alive in a trunk emerges from it as a fully bandaged mummy...but Mr. Balch wanted a mummy in his film, and realism was never one of his big concerns.

Our mummy narrator is voiced by Valentine Dyall, an actor who came to prominence on radio in the 1940s, playing a character called ‘The Man in Black’. So I can imagine was probably another childhood icon of Antony Balch. Due to that distinct, velvet voice that Dyall had, he was frequently employed by the horror film industry. He narrated a couple of trailers for Hammer, was the voice of the ‘werewolf break’ in The Beast Must Die, dubbed Mike Raven’s voice in Lust for a Vampire, but also had a career in comedy, acting as a straight man to The Goons and Spike Milligan.  I guess you could say Dyall had a face for radio, and a voice for horror films.

 

The first proper story in Secrets of Sex combines something Balch was very fond of…shirtless men in chains… and something Balch was not very fond of...which was being photographed. Balch had a superstition about having his picture taken, as a result there are only a handful of photographs of him in existence, and in one of those he is obscuring his face. A phobia that manifests itself in Secrets of Sex in the story of a young male model (Antony Rowlands), posing in a mock up of a medieval torture chamber for a lesbian photographer (Dorothy Grumbar), who shall we say seems a little too into her work. His nervousness significantly increases when she orders her assistant Norma, to “go get me the Spanish horse”. Her cover story being that she has been commissioned to photograph him on a Spanish horse for an advert- although I do struggle to imagine what product would require an advertising campaign centered around someone being tortured on a Spanish horse. Much as I’m sure we’d all love to believe that the Spanish horse was a fictional invention of this film, this was a genuine torture device dating from the 1600s that was still in use during the American civil war, in which the victim is suspended by chains, is forced to straddle a sawhorse like device equipped with a blade, and has weights attached to their feet, in order for them to be pulled down onto the blade. This Secrets of Sex segment is reminiscent of a James Bond film where the villain comes up with an elaborate, sadistic way to kill Bond off, but rather than stick around and observe their handiwork, makes their excuses and leave, thus allowing Bond the opportunity to make a miraculous escape. Only this being Secrets of Sex, rather than a James Bond movie, the male model isn’t so fortunate, and finds he really does have to suffer for his art.

In the second story, we meet Mary-Claire (Yvonne Quenet) a female scientist who has hooked up with an older guy, Sacha Seremona (Kenneth Benda) but quietly despises him because of his wealth and power. Upon discovering she carries a defective genre, and that any child she has will likely be born deformed, she decides to bear Sacha a child, knowing it will be born a monster.  Throughout this segment you do feel a torn allegiance between Mary-Claire and Sasha Seremona.  Despite her terrible actions, Mary-Claire is not entirely unsympathetic, she has a sick mother and even though she is an intelligent woman and a scientist is being held back because of her gender.  As Sasha bluntly puts it he doesn't really regard women as anything more than a means for men to continue their bloodline. At the same time Sasha isn't someone you feel universal hostility to either, he's already lost a son and gives the impression that he does admire Mary-Claire’s spirit and intelligence. Had this story been done by Amicus I'm sure Sasha would have been portrayed as a stone cold ruthless monster who you'd be chomping at the bit to see get his comeuppance.  Whereas here you only hear about the worst side of his character- like turning poor families out on the street- anecdotally, and the film doesn't quite make the case for Sasha getting what he deserves.  Secrets of Sex and Horror Hospital do however put forward a better case that Kenneth Benda should have become a horror film star. As much as Michael Gough in Horror Hospital seems to have been Balch’s substitute for Bela Lugosi, Kenneth Benda comes across as his Boris Karloff proxy.  Benda does have an older Karloff type quality to him, however with the exception of a brief role in Scream and Scream Again, the Balch movies were his only foray into horror, with Benda spending the rest of his career playing Judges and Lords.  In the credits of Secrets of Sex there are five listed screenwriters, Balch and Elliot Stein, who were real people and three others who have no further credits and were likely pseudonyms.  Who they were is one of the secrets of Secrets of Sex.  Brion Gysin, another Burroughs associate and a renaissance man in his own right, once claimed to have written parts of it.  Another name linked to writing Secrets of Sex is Ian Cullen, an actor and writer.  This used to appear on Ian’s CV on the name ‘Multiplication’ which was a working title for Secrets of Sex.  Cullen who passed away in 2019 was the husband of Yvonne Quenet who plays Mary-Claire, so I suspect may have written this particular segment.  Since it is an acting vehicle for his wife Yvonne, who by Secrets of Sex standards is a pretty good actress and holds her own against a veteran like Kenneth Benda. I have to admit I don't recall seeing her in anything else but she was still acting up until about 2014 and has had a longer career than any of the other young actresses in this film. 

 

Secrets of Sex reminds you it’s a sex film with its third segment in which a female burglar played by Cathy Howard breaks into the house of a guy (Mike Britton) disrupting him from reading Jean Genet’s Miracle of the Rose, a book about a man's homosexual experiences in a French penal colony… so your typical light bedtime reading there.  After catching her robbing his house, she persuade him that there's a better way to pass the time than calling the fuzz, and the allure of a bad girl in leather proves too great for him. I'd say that this is the most authentically erotic scene in the movie, although even here Balch can’t quite leave his sense of humour at the door.  Scoring their lovemaking to a radio broadcast about a flower show with double-entre references to ‘plucking the fruit’ and a ‘decorative bush’.  This sequence also contains lots of in-joke film industry references.  At one point the radio broadcast mentions an Antonia Gordon-Gordon, which is a reference to this film’s producer Richard Gordon.  As well as a young film producer called Peter Walking, which is a reference to Pete Walker.  According to the radio broadcast ‘Walking’ has become engaged to a post-op transsexual, a joke that the very heterosexual Pete Walker hopefully saw the funny side to.  Of all the Secrets of Sex cast members Cathy Howard is the biggest enigma.  Most female cast members like Maria Frost, Sue Bond and Nicola Austin came from a nude modeling background, but I'm not sure if that is the case with Cathy Howard.  If she did do work for the skin mags back then, no evidence of this has ever resurfaced.  Cathy was in a handful of movies, all made during a relatively brief amount of time and the quality of her acting in them varies dramatically.  She's really bad in Pete Walker’s School for Sex, yet Balch coaxes out of her what is by far her best acting performance.  Cathy's co-star Mike Britton is another one who did few films, although he was also a model in print ads during this period, including one for Smirnoff.  In the film Mike is playing a married man who is tempted by another woman and he is acting from experience there.  In real life Mike was married, but had a bit on the side in the form of an actress and model called Maxine Casson, who appeared in a couple of films of this nature.  Mike liked to refer to Maxine as his ‘side-chick’.  The last anyone has heard from Mike, and this was decades ago, he was working as a manager of a sports centre, where the also had another ‘side-chick’ situation going on.  During his time in sex films, Mike also had a day job as a crew member on Top of the Pops, where he’d work crowd control and occasionally fill in for band members during camera run throughs.  Unfortunately Mike and a couple of the other crew members ended up getting fired from the show, on account of appearing in films like this.  What happened is that a new floor manager arrived at Top of the Pops, straight out of university and he was, by all account a total snob who took an instant dislike to Mike and a few of the other crew members, on account of them being from working class backgrounds.  Presumably this floor manager also had a thing about porn, and had either seen Mike and the others in a film or maybe a magazine with stills from a film.  He then used that as leverage to get them fired for bringing Top of the Pops into disrepute.  Ironically this would have been the same time as the Top of the Pops people may have been turning a blind eye to, or even concealing, the activities of the dreaded Jimmy Savile.  In Secrets of Sex though you can see Mike engaging in the kind of things that got you fired from Top of the Pops back then.  Although in real life it seems that toffee nosed floor managers were the ones that you needed to look out for, rather than female burglars. 

 

The next Secrets of Sex story is the only one adapted from an outside source, the Lindy Leigh cartoon strip which ran in ‘Mayfair’ magazine towards the end of the 1960s, and was the work of a Dutchman, Alfred Mazure, who signed his work Maz.  Lindy Leigh is a none too bright spy with a habit of losing her clothes during the course of her patriotic duty. I managed to track down the Lindy Leigh story that Balch adapted, ‘The Moranian treaty’ published by Mayfair in January 1969, and it's surprisingly a very straight adaptation of that cartoon strip…as well as a rare occurrence when ‘very straight’ and ‘Antony Balch’ can be included in the same sentence.  In fact the original strip could pass as a storyboard for the film with most of the dialogue and the images being directly taken from the source cartoon. I have to admit I found this surprising because I’d always thought that the dialogue in this scene where Lindy Leigh infiltrates the Moranian embassy and overhears snippets of conversations about nuclear power and boy scouts sounded very Burroughs influenced, but… no all of that is from Mazure.  The Balch film does contain something that you don’t get in the original comic strip though, music by the Mancunian himself… yes Cliff Twemlow has some music on the Secrets of Sex soundtrack.  Right at the start of the Lindy Leigh segment, you get to hear the opening fanfare of ‘This is my City’ from the album ‘Big City Story’.  One of many of Cliff’s compositions for the DeWolfe company, created by him humming the tune into a tape recorder, sending it off to his musical partner Peter Taylor, who then transcribed that into music.  As tends to be the case with DeWolfe tracks ‘This is my City’ bounced around various TV shows and films for over a decade.  It was also used in episode of the Benny Hill show, and a criminally bad comedy called ‘No Secrets’ starring Oliver Read and Peter Cushing.

 
Balch’s major contribution to the Lindy Leigh segment is the inclusion of the silent slapstick comedy parody ‘Bedroom Beauties of 1929’.  A film within a film sequence in which Nicola Austin gets caught up in a fracas between two gay men, is then harassed by a man who turns out to be a lesbian in male drag, then is further harassed by the lesbian lover of the lesbian male drag… before being escorted off the premises by the manager.  It is simultaneously the film's silliest yet also subversive segment.  Amidst all of these slapstick comedy hi-jinks is the fact that the only harmonious relationships in the entire film are same sex ones with Nicola’s hetero character being seen as this troubling, disruptive force that temporary results in all these gays falling out and fighting amongst each other.  I do think the sequence is a little unfair on Nicola’s character though, I mean the initial guy is cheating on his boyfriend with her, then each of the lesbians assault her for no particular reason… and yet she is still depicted as the scarlet woman and the villain of the piece.  Then again do we really expect a woman to be given a fair hearing in the kangaroo court of Secrets of Sex?  The sequence ends with the caption ‘back to normal for the bedroom beauties’ a ballsy move considering that homosexuality was only made legal in 1967, and few would have considered same sex relationships normal in 1970. 

 

There was a trend in the early days of the British sex film to cast nude models rather than professional actresses, as was the case with Nicola Austin and Maria Frost here.  I guess the thinking there was that if you are mainly casting for nudity then there was a risk that while a professional actress may give a better performance, she might then get cold feet about doing nudity.  Whereas a nude model is hardly likely to have issues with nudity and you should be able to pass them off as an actress as long as you didn’t give them too much dialogue. Maria Frost who played Lindy Leigh though was apparently mortified when she read the script for this film and discovered that she had been given a substantial role.  Reportedly she even complained to Balch that she was a model and could not act, but I think that because the segment is based on a comic strip, and requires her to do little more than pose in a series of filmed cartoon panels means that Maria was able to bluff her way through the role.  Fortunately for Maria, during the rest of her movie career she was never again asked to do anything demeaning or degrading as acting, they just wanted her to take her clothes off.

 Lindy Leigh in cartoon and film form

From sexy spies we then meet the Strange Young Man (Elliott Stein) who rings up for a call girl, only for it all to go wrong when he whips out his lizard, and fails to convince her that it would be a groovy thing for them to make love while his pet lizard watches them.  The best way I can come up with to describe Elliott Stein in Secrets of Sex is Austin Powers had that role been played by Woody Allen rather than Mike Myers.  The strange young man is a neurotic mess who is trying to pass himself off as a hippest guy in Carnaby Street by dropping into the conversation lingo like… groovy, swinging, the permissive society…baby.  It is a segment that once again appears to be gay men looking in on, and having a laugh at the expense of heterosexuality.  Dialogue here sends up popular straight kinks like wife swapping and contact magazines by having the Strange Young Man trying to sell the call girl on the idea of ‘lizard swapping’ being the new wife swapping,  and claiming he’s seen in swinger advert for a young couple seeking a good natured pangolin.  At times it does feel like Balch was put on this earth to make heterosexuality seem unnatural, he can't seem to bring himself to shoot straight sex without throwing some odd or ridiculous detail in there.  Whether it's people having sex in front of pangolins, or in Horror Hospital where Robin Askwith is trying to seduce the girl in the shower while wearing the helmet of a suit of amour.  Elliott Stein does throw himself into the role with some gusto even though you suspect he was here out of friendship to Balch, rather than any serious acting ambition… he was mainly a journalist and film critic.  Stein also plays the Mummy in the film, and I think it's a true sign of friendship if you are prepared to get wrapped up in bandages for your friend’s movie… and of course get dressed up as a school boy in a flashback sequence to the strange youth of the Strange Young Man.  As tends to be the case with people within Balch’s inner circle, Stein was a massive horror fan and as a film critic was one of the early champions of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ which he wrote about in the Village Voice.  In his later years he became a well-respected critic, film historian and programmer in his native New York.  Stein makes a brief, uncredited and memorable for all the wrong reasons appearance in a documentary called Cinemania (2002) about the lives of a bunch of obsessed filmgoers in the New York city area and the rep housing they flock to.  The back-story to his appearance in that documentary, is that Stein had gone out for a big meal, decided to follow that by going to see a movie at a rep cinema and made himself more comfortable by loosening his pants and belt.  However all they show in the documentary is the lights coming up at the end of the movie screening, at which point you see Elliot zipping up his pants and fastening his belt.  Something Stein was pissed off about.  Understandably so, because the impression you get is that he'd been jerking off to the movie.  So if that documentary has given you the wrong impression, be reassured that Elliott Stein wasn't one for beating his meat at places like the Museum of Modern Art.

Elliot Stein, not masturbating, in Cinemania (2002) 

 As well as Elliot Stein and Sue Bond, the Strange Young Man segment also features a last minute appearance by Delta Balch as ‘old lady with lizard’ because what loving son doesn't put his mother in one of his soft porn movies?  It’s also worth mentioning that the Strange Young Man's pet, referred to as a pangolin, isn't really a pangolin… this film lied to you.  Actual pangolins are closer in appearances to anteaters rather than lizards, not that I imagine anyone has ever walked out of Secrets of Sex complaining “that's not a real pangolin, this film is dead to me”.

 

For the last Secrets of Sex story we have a dotty old lady (Laurelle Streeter) telling her new valet Jeremy (Bob Raymond) about her youth as a jet setter in Monte Carlo and lets slip how she imprisoned the souls of her former lovers in the plants that she attends to in a greenhouse.  In order to prove her claims she magically summons up a naked couple who start balling in the straw.  Balch was especially keen on his sex scene and claimed “she has this extraordinary smile like a toothpaste commercial and the boy who lies on top of her has a wonderful arse”.  This segment seems to have been pretty much written on the fly by Balch, and perhaps because of that is where allot of the esoteric beliefs that he was into, come into play, particularly William Burroughs and the church of Scientology.  Among Secrets of Sex’s many claims to uniqueness is that it's the only British sex film that requires you to do research into Scientology, trust me that doesn't happen with Confessions of a Window Cleaner.  Based on my layman's understanding the claims made by the old lady in this segment about the soul leaving the body upon death, travelling around in space for a while before choosing to be reborn in the womb all come from Scientology.  I guess getting your soul trapped in a plant and being kept in greenhouse conditions for eternity is a big hang-up of scientologists, and must be what keeps Tom Cruise awake at night. 

 

When Jeremy turns on her and calls a ‘filthy alien garbage heap’ that is the influence of Burroughs, who I believe at the time, was espousing the belief that women were all agents working for insects from another galaxy.  According to Burroughs’ private correspondence, Balch had been ‘processed’ by the Scientologists in February 1968.  Burroughs himself had been around Scientology from around 1959 but began to publicly denounce it around 1970.  So I wonder if team Balch and Burroughs were already beginning to turn against Scientology when Secrets of Sex was made in 1969.  Given that the character who espouses Scientology beliefs in the film ends up being strangled to death and denounced as a filthy alien garbage heap.

 

Secrets of Sex may well be the best reviewed British sex film of all time, if not the only British sex film to garner decent critical praise.  Its publicity material including glowing quotes from the Financial Times to Screw magazine, Secrets of Sex really was the toast of everyone from the highfalutin to the sleazemongers.  The British Censor was less keen on it and cut around 9 minutes from the film.  In the words of Balch himself “Secrets of Sex was completely fucked up by John Trevelyan and the BBFC”.  Cuts included ‘shots of two naked men and one naked woman together’ a shot of ‘naked boy rolling over in the hay’, ‘female strippers being pelted with tomatoes’, the entire removal of the end of the Spanish horse segment, cuts to the Cathy Howard/Mike Britain scene, and cuts to the couple in the straw.  They really didn't leave Balch an awful lot left to exploit and Balch felt that people didn't tend to enjoy the film as much after the BBFC had had their way with it.  I imagine it would have been a frustrating experience given that so much was missing.  Paradoxically the cuts seem to have made this a far more nasty film than it really was.  Since the end of the Spanish horse scene was missing, people were imagining that the uncut version of film showed the model being cut in half, and conjured up far more graphic images in their minds and they were being prevented from seeing by the censor.  Given the censorship problems this film has had over the years and the very different versions that have been around, we are very fortunate that the version which was committed to video tape by Iver Film Services in 1981 and the 2005 DVD release by Synapse films was the full version.  So chances are that if you're watching Secrets of Sex today you are seeing what Balch intended, which certainly wasn't the case when this film first came out in the UK. 

 

Secrets of Sex had a rather turbulent voyage to America; it was seized and impounded by US customs for a while, then couldn't get a rating from the MPAA.  The commonly held belief is that the film was originally released in the States as ‘Bizarre’ but I found a newspaper clipping that suggests it was playing on the Pussycat Theatre chain under the ‘Secrets of Sex’ title in August 1970.  So it looks like it was road tested as Secrets of Sex in the States before reverting to Bizarre.  It was distributed stateside by a fledging New Line Cinema, who at the time were mostly catering to the counterculture/college campus audience and putting out movies which reflected that.  At the time, New Line were a couple of years away from enjoying their first big success with early John Waters films, and many years at away from becoming synonymous with the Nightmare On Elm Street and Lord of the Rings movies.  The film was then re-edited around 1972 when Richard Gordon became one of the directors of Fanfare Films, and created a new version of the film called ‘Tales of the Bizarre’ which removed the sexual content from the film and finally received an R rating.  Tales of the Bizarre was designed to play on the bottom half of horror double bills, and played the Drive-Ins under Fanfare releases like Werewolves on Wheels and Horror on Snape Island.

 

Curiously footage from the film also found itself in an American hardcore film, ‘Naked Came the Stranger’ a Radley Metzger porno- chic movie from 1975.  In the opening scene of the Metzger film, Secrets of Sex is shown playing on TV.  Metzger uses footage from the Spanish horse segment and later on in the scene, audio from the Lady in the Greenhouse segment.  So it seems Secrets of Sex met with the Metzger seal of approval, since I'm sure Metzger wouldn’t allow just any old sexploitation film to be referenced in one of his movies.  Metzger did of course work with Richard Gordon a few years later on an adaptation of ‘The Cat and the Canary’ so I guess those two knew each other and this factors into why footage from Secrets of Sex ended up in Naked Came the Stranger.

SOS as seen in Naked Came the Stranger

The final re-edit of the film was done by Balch himself, who created a short version of the film in 1977 which was designed to play as a support feature to the skin flicks he was distributing.  Presumably that version emphasized the sexual content of the film, although it is meant to omit the Lindy Leigh segment, which probably seemed a little dated and a bit of swinging 1960s artifact by 1977. I'd be curious how Tales of the Bizarre and the short version play out, at the same time we should probably thank our lucky stars that this film's home viewing history is a lot less complicated that it's theatrical one, and it's only been the uncut version that has been in circulation since the VHS era onwards.

 

Balch’s own take on Secrets of Sex was that it was a very uneven film, he particularly liked the Spanish horse, strange young man and lady in the greenhouse segments, felt the monster baby segment was a ‘bore’ but thought the shot of it at the end was ‘brilliant’ which I think is a fairly honest assessment of the film.  Secrets of Sex does come across very much like a first feature film by young director who was eager to get all his worldview, influences and personal mojo up on the screen.  There is, I suspect, a whole hidden layer of obscure references and in-jokes in the film that only Balch himself would be able to declassify and decipher for the rest of us.  There may even be references within references in the film, take the first sight you see in the film, three naked people with a superimposed quote from Paradise Lost.  Your automatic assumption is that this is a tip of the hat to John Milton and Paradise Lost.  However not even that is straightforward, because this is the exact same Paradise Lost quote that Mary Shelley uses at the start of Frankenstein.  So is Balch actually referencing John Milton or Mary Shelly there?, and if this is a hidden reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein could this also be a jokey admission that Secrets of Sex is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of a film, stitched together from Balch’s obsessions and brought to life with a few bolts of lightning. 

 

Not everything hangs together, as you might expect from a first time feature film director Balch was still making rookie mistakes, but all the segments, even the ones that don't entirely work, still linger in the imagination, due to the often striking imagery and originality that's behind them.  I can't help but think that if Balch had lived to an old age and made many, many more films we might not attach too much significance to Secrets of Sex.  People who were around Balch were of the opinion that he’d have gone on to become a Ken Russell type bombastic, eccentric force of nature who wasn't tied to any particularly genre.  I suppose you could draw parallels between Balch and Michael Reeves, even though Reeves had an entirely different personality and was a far more serious filmmaker. If you look at Reeves’ first film The She Beast, it is totally all over the place and even one of its own actors once described that film to me as a ‘malformation’.  However the sad fact that both Reeves and Balch died young, means that we have to cling on to these early malformations of theirs, which leave you with a sense that we've been denied seeing the full extent of their talent. 

 

Of Balch’s two feature films, Secrets of Sex is the more difficult and divisive, yet while this film does have a dark side- it is a very pessimistic movie when it comes to depicting relations between men and women- I think that Balch’s sense of humor, energy and inventiveness overshadows that and wins you over.  Ultimately Balch’s greatest achievement here was to pull off the trick of making an unusual and offbeat film that could still stand on its own two feet commercially, a talent that dare I say is eluding people working in the film industry today.  Much as I admire aspects of ‘Under the Skin’ and ‘Last Night In Soho’, Under the Skin lost something like 7 million dollars and Last Night in Soho lost in the region of 20 million dollars at the box office.  I saw some dipstick on the internet the other day say that the British film industry should be making more films like Under the Skin and Last Night In Soho… well I'm not sure there is going to be a British film industry for much longer if they keep on making movies like Under the Skin and Last Night in Soho.  I'm sure Balch would have loved Under the Skin, a woman depicted as an alien species, sex used to lure straight men to their deaths, full frontal male nudity.. that would have fit right into Secrets of Sex, and if Balch was still around and in charge of marketing Last Night In Soho it probably would not be 20 million down.  He'd have probably gone with “See London's vice laid bare… Matt Smith as the most evil man in Soho…wokery explodes in the film they tried to stop”.  Where are you now Antony Balch when the British film industry needs you the most?

 

Ironically it is Secrets of Sex's dark side and the battle of the sexes theme that still makes it a timely, relevant film… and how many 50 year old British sex films can you say that about.  Decades on from the release of this strange little film, gentleman and ladies still seem incapable of living together in harmony and equality.  Look at the #metoo movement, look at what's happening in Iran right now, look at the misandry commonly found in mainstream films and TV show, and on the flip side of that look at the online incels, who refer to women as a whole lot worse than filthy alien garbage heaps, and probably do prefer the company of pangolins to women.  If Balch was around today he'd probably have enough material to feed a dozen battle of the sexes themed movies.  As the Mummy says “and so it goes on and on and on and on”.