Chainsaw Terror (1984, Shaun Hutson)

You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre, you can stay in Kilburn.

Growing up in the 1980s I was always aware of Shaun Hutson- even though I largely shunned horror fiction back then- he was a big personality, gave hilarious interviews and looked like he should be fronting a heavy metal band, completely breaking with people's mental image of an English author being this Dennis Wheatley type elderly gent hunched over a typewriter, wearing a dinner jacket and his war medals.

I remember the covers for Slugs, Victims, Assassin, and so have these childhood memories of Hutson's work, without having experienced it until recently. The opportunity to break the habit of a lifetime came, very cheaply, my way recently. My local Tesco has this small section where people donate old books, it isn't staffed, but you're meant to drop some spare change into a charity donation bucket. A copy of his early book 'The Skull' appeared there, and so I picked that up only to realize I didn't have any change on me. Fortunately there wasn't anyone around, so I just simulated dropping money into the charity bucket. The next time I was there though I did purposely being along some spare change with me and dropped 24p in there, in very small change to make it look like I'm a better and more charitable person than I actually am.

This copy of The Skull has its fair to say, had a very hard life. It's in the kind of condition that would give book collecting aficionados nightmares. Every time I open it up part of the cover flakes off, the pages have this warped thickness suggesting it has been exposed to water, parts of it even have these muddy smears so possibly it may have been buried in the ground at some point, mirroring the plot of the book itself.

Despite practically needing to open its pages with a tire iron, The Skull was worth every one of the twenty four pence that I eventually paid for it. Looking around for what people had to say about The Skull online, I kept coming across references to this other early book of his called Chainsaw Terror. That sounded like music to my ears, especially when I learned it tackled two of my favourite subjects...Soho and women being violently killed with power tools.

The back-story to Chainsaw Terror is that it began life with Hutson's publisher pitching the idea that he should do a novelisation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only for that to fall by the wayside because the rights owners of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre wanted too much money. I gather there is a still a problem with novelising TCM since neither the original film, nor any of the numbered sequels have ever got tie-in novelisations. It wasn't until the 2003 remake that the TCM franchise got its first book adaptation. I doubt this was an oversight on behalf of the film companies that have owned TCM over the years, Cannon Films and New Line seemed keen to monetize their ownership of the property, so I have the feeling that someone connected with the original movie either wanted too much or just wasn't willing to play ball. There was a similar situation with the Death Wish sequels, where the author of the original novel Brian Garfield hated the movie adaptation and the direction the sequels went in, and was able to nix plans to novelise the movie sequels. To this day there hasn't been a novelisation of the original TCM, in spite of the current trend for novelising movies that never got a novelisation back in their day. Blood on Satan's Claw recently got a novelisation, as did Night of the Demon and Cruel Jaws, even Shaun Hutson himself has gotten in on the act by writing novelisations of two Hammer films...X the Unknown and Twins of Evil. For a project that began life as a TCM novelisation, there aren’t many traces of that remaining in Chainsaw Terror. Only one scene, where a man is clubbed with a hammer, spasms on the floor, then is dragged away to be cut up with a chainsaw, gives an insight into what a Shaun Hutson version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would look like. Instead Hutson, never one to be accused of good taste, appears to have been inspired by the true story of Dennis Nilsen, the gay serial killer who murdered several men and kept their bodies around for sex and company. In order to make this subject matter more palatable for an 1980s readership, the serial killer in Chainsaw Terror, Edward Briggs, is however straight, 'cause that makes him killing people with a chainsaw and making out with a several head that little bit more socially acceptable.

Hutson's version of a chainsaw massacre begins in 1978 when Ralph Briggs, a hardworking carpenter who shares his Kilburn home with his wife and two children, returns home to find his wife intends to leave him for another man. Ralph doesn't take this well, and responds by beating her up, murdering her with broken glass then using the murder weapon to slit his own throat. Setting out his stall early on, Hutson spares no detail when it comes to gushing gore or undignified details 'as blackness finally swept over him, his sphincter muscle failed'. Fast forward a few years to 1983 and surviving Briggs siblings Edward and Maureen are still living at their parents' house and are disturbingly re-creating the parent roles. Especially Edward, who is very much his father's son, having inherited his father's carpentry business and developed a jealous streak when it comes to Maureen. Despite regularly getting hit on by nympho housewives in his career as an odd job man 'he felt uncomfortable in the company of women' and bores holes in their walls, symbolizing his sexual frustration. Edward only has eyes for Maureen, and likes to jerk off while watching her through a peephole or molesting her in her sleep. History threatens to repeat itself when Maureen announces her intension to leave him for another man, and Edward decides that rather than allowing her to leave in peace, he'd rather she stayed in pieces.

When not making out with her severed head and calling her a whore, Edward rationales that he too should be allowed to go out and make new friends. So starts making pilgrimages to Soho, where he picks up prostitutes, then takes them home to meet his sister, and a variety of power tools.

As a kid I tended to look towards film and video as where the wild and outrageous innovations where being made, and regarded books as a far more respectable and staid medium. Well, the likes of Chopper, Bamboo Guerrillas, Eat Them Alive and now Chainsaw Terror sure have kicked that kind of thinking out of me. Respectable and staid are never words that will be synonymous with Chainsaw Terror. Eat them Alive is said to be a favourite of Hutson's, which makes perfect sense. Whereas with Eat them Alive though, it may have been that Pierce Nace's lack of experience in the horror genre may have led her to think that all horror books and movies were just wall to wall bloodshed and sadism, and therefore Eat Them Alive was a work of accidental extremism, there is nothing accidental about that extremism of Chainsaw Terror. This wasn't a book that was intended to go quietly into the night, this was 1984, the height of the video nasty panic, and Chainsaw Terror was blatantly designed to wind-up the tabloids, get confiscated by parents and teachers, to cause outrage and get arrested. The extent that it did get in trouble is where myth and reality have gotten a little blurred. For years the story that was trotted out about Chainsaw Terror was that it completely banned, and eventually re-released in a heavily cut version that removed all of the gore. In recent times a clearer picture of what happened has began to emerged. It appears that Chainsaw Terror fell foul of a leading book distributor, Bookwise, who refused to carry it, purely because it had the world Chainsaw in the title. This being around the time that the availability of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on videotape was causing a stink, and a few years away from Fred Olen Ray's Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers having to forgo the 'C' word for its UK video release. The Bookwise ban effectively killed Hutson's plans for two further Chainsaw related books called Chainsaw Slaughter and Chainsaw Bloodbath, and lead to his publisher re-releasing it under the less controversial title 'Come the Night'. Another urban myth that has sprung up over this book is that the Come The Night edition is heavily cut, which has made Chainsaw Terror the preferred, and more expensive edition to seek out. In a twist in the tale, avid book collectors who have copies of both Chainsaw Terror and Come the Night have since compared the two and found that apart from the title, there are no differences between them, everything that is in Chainsaw Terror is in Come the Night. Rather than devalue Chainsaw Terror, copies of which are known to fetch around £300, this has actually increased the prices of the two editions of Come the Night. Both the 1985 reprint, and a 1999 edition which was part of a 'three books for the price of one' release that triple-billed it with two other Hutson books that had originally been published pseudonymously.

I'm guessing that Hutson used a pseudonym 'Nick Blake' on Chainsaw Terror because it started life as a commission. Still, while I can understand him writing war and sci-fi novels under fake names, on account of those genres not being what his name is synonymous with, Chainsaw Terror has Shaun Hutson written all over it, and entirely fits in with the nature of the books he used his real name on. If anything Chainsaw Terror is exactly how I'd imagined his books would be like over the years, far more so than The Skull which has always been attributed to him.

Persistent rumours have it that this book was pre-censored by the publisher and around 20 to 25 pages were removed prior to it being  released in 1984. There appears to be evidence of this in the scene where Edward Briggs is about to drive a power drill through the eye of a Soho prostitute, only for the writing to skip over the gore and cut to her dead. Which is uncharacteristic for Chainsaw Terror, this isn't a book to look away from the unpleasant side of life. There has also been speculation that the scene where Edward comes close to killing the two kids, only for their mother to come home and thwart his plans by tripping over the wire of his drill, may have originally been a bit longer and possibly Edward got a second wind. This I am on the fence about, that whole scene is set up for you to expect the worst, only to surprise you by pulling back, as if Hutson was saying "yeah you really thought I was gonna kill those kids, but I'm not that much of a sick bastard". Maybe I'm crediting Hutson with too much of a conscience there though, for all I know there's 20 extra pages floating around of Edward working those two brats over with a blowtorch and a power drill. The official line is that Hutson's original manuscript is now lost and unless that resurfaces the published edition is now the de facto uncut version. Hutson's book was also published in France as "La Tronconneuse De L'Horreur/The Chainsaw of Horror", but they merely got the same edition that we did in the UK.

There is a tendency to speak of Shaun Hutson in the same breath as Guy N. Smith, even though Hutson has been known to take the piss out of poor Guy over the years. Hutson is rumoured to be the source of the famous joke about Guy N. Smith… that Guy N. Smith was such a good farmer because he spread his own books on his land. Which seems to have amused Smith to the extent that he even included that joke in his own autobiography 'Pipe Dreams'. I'm not sure he author of Chainsaw Terror earned the right to look down on the author of Bamboo Guerrillas, it often feels as if Hutson and Smith were in continuous competition with each other back then over who could write the most scenes featuring inappropriate erections. I haven't done a boner count on Chainsaw Terror Vs Bamboo Guerrillas, but both must rate high on the peter meter. Hutson and Smith were also both big on writing heroes that bore more than a passing resemblance to their creators. Smith had his pipe smoking, aquiline featured, hunting enthusiasts, and in Chainsaw Terror, Hutson's man, Dave Todd is this leather jacket wearing, darts playing, sweary journalist, very much created in Hutson's own image.

Where Smith and Hutson do have a parting of the ways, is that with Smith I get the impression that once he became known as a horror novelist he self-consciously cut himself off from horror literature and cinema for fear of being accused of plagiarizing other people's work. In the 1990s, Smith wrote a guide to writing horror fiction, imaginatively titled 'Writing Horror Fiction', in which he goes into the history of pulp horror and comes across as well versed on people like H.P Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, yet gets terribly vague when it came to his own generation of horror writers. Hutson, on the other hand, seemed happy to be influenced by the culture that surrounded him. Reading Chainsaw Terror you can sense you are in the company of someone who has seen Taxi Driver, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and possibly rented out Pieces, little suspecting that it's director would soon after be taking a chainsaw to Hutson's novel Slugs. There is this Taxi Driver like subplot to Chainsaw Terror about Dave Todd trying to rescue a prostitute called Vicki Powell from her evil pimp, Maltese Danny. I also get the feeling that Hutson may have rented Blow Out, since his hero faces a similar moral dilemma of having to jeopardize the life of the whore that he loves, and have her wired for sound to order to trap the killer. Another film that Chainsaw Terror reminds me of, although it has to be a coincidence as they both came out the same year, is Fear City. Which similarly juggles a serial killer plot with that of a tough guy trying to extract a prostitute from the vice world. I guess Shaun Hutson and Abel Ferrara were singing from the same song sheet in 1984.

Chainsaw Terror is Shaun Hutson trying to do for Soho what the likes of Taxi Driver and Fear City did for the deuce. It's this neon lit, soul sucking, sexual netherworld that Hutson is determined to drag you through. Allot of what he writes, does surprisingly hold up to historical scrutiny. During one of Edward's visits to London's red light district he encounters a porn film called Sex School, which sounds as if it's informed by the John Lindsay blue movies in which adult actresses portrayed schoolgirls in the jailbait fixated plots of Lindsay titles like Jolly Hockey Sticks, Schoolgirl Joyride and Girl Guides' Misfortune, which would still have been floating around Soho in the early 1980s.
At one point Vicki Powell recalls being beaten up by Maltese Danny for turning down two rich Arabs, who wanted her to blow one of them, while the other one held a gun to her genitals. This is in keeping with the real life reputation Arabs had in the London vice world back then for paying well but playing rough. In her autobiography Cosey Fanni Tutti recalls Harrison Marks playing the part of reluctant pimp by mentioning that if she wanted to earn a grand there were some rich Arabs in town, but then laid it on strong that they were into the sexually severe...lots of anal... ultimately leading her to the decision that the fucking she'd get wasn't worth the fucking she'd get.

The knee jerk reaction to the Arab anecdote, and making the pimp Maltese, is to wonder if Hutson is being a bit racist here, but once again historical accuracy appears to be on his side. According to an authoritative 1960 book on London vice called The Shame of a City, the majority of the Soho pimps back then were from places like Malta and Trinidad. This isn't reflected in movies from that time like Beat Girl and Passport to Shame, where pimpish characters tended to be played by white actors like Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom. Even in a more recent film like Last Night in Soho, you have an evil white pimp played by Matt Smith. The irony is that both then and now, black or darker skinned actors are losing out on roles that they are historically entitled to play. Back then because of a casting preference for white actors, and now because of a tendency to avoid casting black actors in negative roles.

Something else that Hutson hits the nail on the head about is the foul stench of severed body parts, trust one who knows. At the risk of going off topic, all good sense suggests I need to explain just how I know what severed limbs smell like. A few months ago, myself and a friend were walking around a country park near where I live, and we were hit by this vile, utterly repugnant smell which we dismissed at the time as stagnant water or fly tipping. A day later, the whole area was cordoned off and crime scene investigation vans were everywhere...and it turned out that they had discovered a severed arm, then later when they sent frogmen into the lake, half of a human head. Then another country park was closed down, after limbs were found there, then a further country park got closed down because they found the torso. Two men have been charged with the killing, rumour is that they worked in the meat trade and that is how they managed to dismember the body and the sight of them hauling bags of meat around didn't automatically arouse suspicion. Had those two not been arrested and charged, I might have had second thoughts about commenting on this book. Chainsaw Terror isn't the sort of book you want to admit to reading when severed limbs start showing up in your neck of the woods.

For all the inherent Britishness of Chainsaw Terror, I suspect the only small window of opportunity for a movie version to have been made would have been in Category III era Hong Kong, its cheerful bad taste would have snuggly fit in with The Untold Story and The Ebola Syndrome. When we handed Hong Kong back to China, we also threw away the chance to see Anthony Wong as Edward Briggs. The nearest visualization we're likely to see of Chainsaw Terror is the mock trailer for Garth Marenghi's Bitch Killer. Which comes from the Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace spin-off series 'Man to Man with Dean Learner', in an episode about an ill fated actor whose career was destroyed by appearing in a movie version of a Garth Marenghi book about a chainsaw maniac. "the dirtiest, nastiest, sexiest film you'll see all year". I would wager that the person who came up with that trailer is also a person who has exposed themselves to Chainsaw Terror at some point. The Bitch Killer trailer even imitates the white on red lettering used in the trailer for Pete Walker's Frightmare. So, if you're not just paying homage to Pete Walker films, but the look of a trailer to a Pete Walker film, you are clearly someone with advanced, master level knowledge of British sleaze, and are probably the person who has paid £300 for a copy of Chainsaw Terror.

Although there isn't the safety net of 'this could never happen in real life' that you have with Slugs or The Skull, I think Chainsaw Terror still captures the 'fun' side of 1980s gore that you get with The Evil Dead, Re-Animator and The Deadly Spawn. Yes, they are gross and revolting but it's a thrill ride that isn't going to leave you mentally scared or weighing heavily on your conscience. At the same time, Chainsaw Terror does anticipate the morbid, depressing direction that the gore film was heading in with the likes of Nekromantik, Aftermath, Deadbeat at Dawn, A Gun for Jennifer, where it felt like these films were made by angry, nihilistic people and gore stopped being fun for a while. Despite walking a tightrope between the two, for my money Chainsaw Terror always manages to stay on the entertaining side of gratuitous violence.

No names from me, but I had a bad experience with a recent self-published extreme horror novel, that by rights should have been the heir apparent to Chainsaw Terror. So, why did I get on with Chainsaw Terror and not this newer book about a chainsaw maniac? I suppose it was because the newer book gave the strong vibe that its author really needed to get laid, rather than spending all day writing about naked female bodies being mashed up, and incriminated himself as a suspect incel in his book. Whereas Chainsaw Terror for all its excess and Hutson's insensitive rock n’ roll swagger, still has the faint ticking of a moral compass. Bad people get what's coming to them, there is a redemptive story arc for Vicki Powell, and an everyman hero you can get behind in Dave Todd. Danny the pimp is simplistically depicted as a one dimensional scumbag and there is no attempt to humanize him or get into his head that you'd find with books by Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines. Chainsaw Terror does spend allot of time with Edward Briggs, but even there you never sense that Hutson regards Edward as anything other than a freak and a weirdo. There's a line in the sand drawn between author and chainsaw maniac here that you probably wouldn't get with a writer of the incel persuasion.

Chainsaw Terror leaves the impression that once the cheque for writing it cleared, Hutson was down the pub or going to a Liverpool FC match, rather than buying a new chainsaw and slaughtering innocents. It should be mentioned that the copy I read of Chainsaw Terror is a library copy, which was evidently taken out of a local library for just about every week of 1986 and into 1987. A reminder of just how mainstream and popular, horror sleaze was with the British public, back in the wonderful, morally bankrupt decade that was the 1980s. Apart from with the one library user who felt compelled to write in pen, and in block capitals 'TRASH' on one of the closing pages of the book. Though I suspect that Hutson is of that rare breed of author who would take that kind of incensed defacing as a complement.

Joe 9

 An Irishman, a Welshman and a Mancunian continue their journey through Filmirage

Can I Come Too (1979)

 

I'm of the generation that just about remembers the tail end of the fleapit cinema era...the broken down seats, the thick cigarette smoke penetrated only by the light from the projection booth, the usherettes selling ice cream and Kia-Ora in the intervals, the Pearl & Dean adverts. If you want to know what a down on its knees local cinema looked like in the late 1970s, Ray Selfe's 'Can I Come Too' takes you around every nook and every cranny of a fleapit cinema.

In his later years, Selfe was critical of the David Hamilton Grant films he was involved with, due to their avoidance of the three-act structure. Yet, Can I Come Too, the short sex film Selfe made outside of Grant's orbit, is very much cut from the same cloth. It's a shambolic, ensemble piece that barely goes anywhere in terms of narrative, and owes its existence to the fact that a distributor urgently needed a support feature. New Realm put out Can I Come Too as the co-feature to their Jackie Collins adaptation The World is Full of Married Men. A few years later, in the early days of videotape, it formed half of a VHS double bill with James C. Katz's striptease documentary The Rise and Fall of Ivor Dickie (1978).

As with David Hamilton Grant movies like Under the Bed and The Office Party, Can I Come Too is closer in spirit to a sitcom episode than a feature film, but with the kind of nudity and sexual humour that you couldn't get on TV back then. The creation of Can I Come Too appears to have mirrored what little plot there is here, sex film producer Manny Glowpick reaches out to his contacts in the low end of the film industry in order to stage a lavish film premiere at the less than lavish Savoy cinema in Brixton. Selfe likewise looks to have put together his film with similar haste, calling on friends and family members to pose as actors, hiring a few aging entertainers to do their thing and a few dolly birds willing to bare all. The involvement of the latter possibility being a motivation in ensnaring the former. For a near plot less 38 minute film, Can I Come Too sure has allot of characters to contend with. The out of their depth staff making a hash of arranging the premiere includes manager Mr. Royal (Charlie Chester), cleaning lady Laverne (Rita Webb), ticket lady Vera (Sue Longhurst), and a pair of usherettes (Lindy Benson, Maria Harper) who dream of starring in movies like 'King Kong meets Emmanuelle'. Meanwhile projectionist Terry (Graham White) fears that the arrival of a new projectionist called Charlie will cramp his style as the cinema's resident stud. Only for Charlie (Julia Rushford) to turn out to be female, who despite being a womens libber isn't averse to getting her boobs out in the projection booth either. Elsewhere porn star Gloria Overtones (Susan Silvie), the special guest of honour, is more concerned with leaving a good impression on her posh future mother in law, Lady Wickhampton (played by Selfe's wife Jean), who initially mistakes Gloria for a black woman after catching Gloria wearing a mud-pack and hearing she is from Brixton.

Such is the obscurity of Can I Come Too these days that it is likely to only be tracked down and seen by the most dedicated of those with a jones for 1970s British pop culture. The irony is that the film itself in no way, shape or form shares that love for the time period it was made in. For all of the tits and intended giggles here, there is much despair in Can I Come Too at the state of Britain in 1979. In the eyes of Can I Come Too, cinemas have just become places for old people to sleep in and keep warm, the world outside of the Savoy is the dangerous stomping ground of football hooligans and punk rockers, the sex films that British film industry churns out are an embarrassment and it gets teary eyed for the past, with Rita Webb's character lamenting the passing of an age of proper movie stars like Jean Harlow and Mary Pickford. It's a backwards looking, living only for the past film, never likely expecting that its own era of British sex films, football hooligans, fleapit cinemas and punk rockers would one day exert a similar fascination over future generations. Young bare flesh might be the main selling point, but the characters that Can I Come Too really cares about tend to be the middle aged or senior ones. All of whom have an air of wasted, unfulfilled lives about them. George Skinner (Tony Wright) the owner of the restaurant next door to the cinema is estranged from his daughter and is in the doldrums over his business going down the pan. Laverne, played by Rita Webb, is a tragicomic character who wanted to be a glamorous movie star, but makes do with her pathetic connection to the movies, of being a cleaning lady at a fleapit cinema. Unusually for a British sex comedy the running theme here is finding love in later life. Freddy (Mark Jones) the bumbling film publicity man with an extreme stutter that anticipates Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda by a few years, becomes besotted by ticket lady Vera, played by Jones' Keep It Up Jack co-star Sue Longhurst. Senior sparks begin to fly between Laverne and Manny, while George Skinner is unexpectedly reunited with his ex-wife.

It is the older hands who largely shine here. Admittedly Chic Murray seems to be phoning it in and doesn't have the same vigor he had in The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, but Charlie Chester is value for money and Rita Webb is the person that Selfe clearly regarded as the real star of his movie.
Murray and Webb were by this point veterans of saucy cinema, but Charlie Chester was more of a coup, the comedian's career having largely been played out on the radio. While his appearance here might have raised the eyebrows of his older fans, Chester was no stranger to sleaze. Turning to a writing career in the 1970s, Chester knocked out sex and violence fuelled books for publisher New English Library that were completely at odds with his family friendly image. Symphony and Psychopath (1975) concerns auto-erotic asphyxiation, Soho prostitution and the murder of a pregnant woman, and also sees Chester boning after schoolgirls in print. In comparison being in close proximity to a few bare boobs in Can I Come Too must have seemed a relatively vanilla experience. Under a pseudonym, Chester even wrote a gay themed serial killer novel called Even the Rainbow's Bent (1977) in which a sexually confused man is encouraged to adopt a female persona by his domineering mother, only to end up killing schoolgirls.

a right pair of charlies

The younger cast members of Can I Come Too are less of a standout bunch, consisting of third tier sex comedy people like Lindy Benson, Maria Harper and Vicki Scott, all of whom arrived too late on the scene to make much of an impact on it. One movie and he's done stud, Graham White, looks like he'd have been better suited to playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s creation in The Rocky Horror Show. Given a larger share of the spotlight than usual here is Susan Silvie, who was sort of the poor man's Suzy Mandel, though did later achieve a degree of notoriety by playing a woman who gives birth to a fully grown man in the sci-fi grossfest 'Xtro'. In Can I Come Too, Silvie looks, sounds and dresses so much like Suzy Mandel it is positively uncanny, and she would later add to the illusion by billing herself as Susie Silvie. To add to the confusion, the film Blonde Ambition starring the real Suzy Mandel was released to UK cinemas in 1984 as 'Can I Come Again', making it sound like a sequel to Can I Come Too, starring the Suzy Mandel equivalent of Bruce Le.

Keep your eyes peeled for a 'blink and you'll miss her' appearance by Annette Poussin. Distinguished by her cute, pudding bowl haircut Annette was a regular in blue movies like 'No Morals' and 'Pop Concert'. Her fleeting cameo, and the fact that Selfe himself was no stranger to hardcore pornography, opens up the possibility that a stronger version of Can I Come Too might exist. While a potential 'something blue' aspect to the film is still a question mark, there is plenty of evidence of 'something borrowed' here. The film recycles a joke about a fictional movie called Sore Throat, a pun on Deep Throat, from 1975's Sexplorer, and John Shakespeare's theme tune was a track dusted down from his soundtrack to the 1966 movie 'Death is a Woman'.

Aside from Selfe, whose oeuvre includes the early David Jason vehicle 'White Cargo', a Kenny Ball concert film and 'Mother Goosed', a videotaped adult pantomime, the other auteur of Can I Come Too was Alan Selwyn (1926-2002), it's writer and producer, who also takes a small acting role in the film. A jack of all trades in the British sex film world, Alan Selwyn was very much a man created by Soho. His birth name was Alfred Lopez Salzedo, and his father Solomon who used the professional name of Sidney Brandon had been an entertainer at the Windmill theatre, meaning that Selwyn had been around sex, showbiz and criminality from an early age. He was originally a bit part actor, and shows up in a few early Ken Loach films like Poor Cow and Cathy Come Home. At some point in the sixties Selwyn did prison time, seemingly for defrauding a man in the theatrical world, who Selwyn's sister worked for. The sister, who played no part in the fraud, was so ashamed by her brother's actions that she felt obliged to resign from her job, and as a result rarely spoke to her brother again. Unaware that he had predeceased her, her will made a special proviso that none of her estate should go to her brother Alfred, 'also known as Alan Selwyn'. Which is how his surviving relatives came to know about the Alan Selwyn side of his life and his connection to the movie industry. People's memories of Alan Selwyn tend to be that of a real life Arthur Daley figure, a man from the shady side of the street, who nevertheless wasn't without a moral compass. Suzy Mandel has good memories of Selwyn, and Annette Poussin regarded him as a gentlemanly, father like figure who actually dissuaded her from taking larger, credited roles in sex movies on account of the possible negative consequences it could have on her private life. In the name of honesty and full disclosure though, it should be pointed out that not everyone remembers Alan Selwyn so fondly. He is the subject of a #metoo story in Cosey Fanni Tutti's autobiography, where she claims Selwyn tried to rape her backstage during the making of Secrets of a Superstud. "Once in the dressing room, I fell asleep - and prey to Selwyn's unwanted attentions. He soon got off me when I told him I'd started my period". I will say that story is completely at odds with what other women have told me about Alan Selwyn, but that is what Ms. Fanni Tutti wrote.

There is an end of the line feel about Can I Come Too, remember that last day of school? this is the British sex film equivalent. Everyone here is letting their hair down, not doing much serious work and partying with the people they've got to know well over the last couple of years, in the knowledge that they are never likely to see each other again. Something that is added to by a scene towards the end of the film, where this gathering of British sex film people gets down on the dance floor, with some exceptional dad dancing from Mark Jones that causes Alan Selwyn to crack up. It was the end of an era, but it's not over till the fat lady yells. I do wish that Can I Come Too had been Rita Webb's last film.  The final shot in the film, a freeze frame of Rita throwing her cleaning equipment away and yelling "SOD IT, let them clean the place up themselves" would have been such a Rita Webb way of saying goodbye, and likely reflects Ray Selfe's own attitude to the British sex film biz...sod it, let them clean this mess up themselves.

The real success story of Can I Come Too isn't in fact anyone in front or behind the camera, rather it's the cinema itself. Referred to as The Savoy in the movie, it was in fact the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton. Can I Come Too captures this location at the lowest point in its history, and watching the film you'd be forgiven for thinking that it had long since been bulldozed. Following a 1994 renovation though, the Ritzy has bounced back from its inglorious state in the 1970s and is now considered the jewel in the crown of London's surviving cinemas. It's aged better, and more elegantly than those football hooligans, punk rockers or indeed Can I Come Too itself.

Blood Suckers (1969)

Blood Suckers is one of those films that ITV used to play at some ungodly hour, when they presumably thought that everyone was in bed, and those that weren't presumably thought they'd just hallucinated it. Two other notable movies that ITV gave the same treatment to were "No Secrets" also starring Peter Cushing, and "Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein". All three are bonded in my mind by this otherworldly quality, whereby whatever the time of day that you watch them, it'll always feel like it's 2am in the morning and that you've fallen asleep during the parts that would help these films make sense. Blood Suckers is a famously botched adaptation of Simon Raven's 1960 book 'Doctors Wear Scarlet' that begun filming in 1969, and ran into production problems that led to director Robert Hartford-Davis taking his name off the film when it was finally released in the UK as Incense for the Damned in 1972.

I recently read the source novel for the first time, which is advisable if you want to make sense of the film as there is so much more characterization, psychological depth and general meat on the bone in the book. In comparison the film is like a jigsaw puzzle where many of the pieces are missing, and those that are present don't actually fit together all that well.

Doctors Wear Scarlet concerns Richard Fountain, a promising young Oxford Don who effectively flees to Greece in order to escape the domineering influence of his provost Walter Goodrich, who is grooming Richard as both his successor and as a fiancé to his daughter Penelope. While in Greece, Richard falls under the influence of a sultry temptress called Chriseis, who draws him into her world of vampirism and the occult. Necessitating that Richard's friends, Piers Clarence, Captain Roddy Longbow and Anthony Seymour travel to Greece in order to extract Richard from the Chriseis situation and avoid a scandal. Vampirism aside, it had clear autobiographical elements for the notoriously caddish Simon Raven, whose career in the military and higher education was marred in controversy, and no doubt had his own run ins with the Walter Goodrichs of this world. Pears Clarence is likely based on Raven's younger companion Bungo Partridge. While the anti-Semitic incident that is in the book, but isn’t ported over to the film, likely relates to Raven's publisher Anthony Blond, who was Jewish and is said to have suffered badly on account of it whilst at Eton. Reflecting Raven's personality and tastes, Doctors Wear Scarlet is all about the allure of scandalous men. Richard's motivation for striking up a friendship with Piers is the trouble that will arise. Similarly Richard himself proves to be source of much male adulation, due to the aura of controversy that surrounds him. Marc Honeydew can't get enough of watching Richard's conflicts with Walter from the sidelines, and Richard first comes to Anthony Seymour's notice by beating up an anti-Semitic school bully. An incident that marks Richard out as the man Anthony wants as his study fag. Boys will be boys, and play with toys, so be strong with your beast.

Judging by the book, I'm guessing that production of the film ran into problems once it left Greece and relocated to the UK. The Greek portions of the film follow the book relatively faithfully. It is the first and third acts of the film set in the UK, where so much has clearly gone unfilmed and what they did get in the can was awkwardly pieced together. About the first 100 pages of the book are compressed into the first couple of minutes of the film. It would really need a TV miniseries to do justice to the story of Richard Fountain. Short of giving you his inside leg measurements, the book goes into every aspect of his life, his military service, his adventures in the Congo, his days as a Study Fag, his antagonistic relationship with Walter Goodrich. I think where the film initially drops the ball is how little of Walter Goodrich there is in it. We never see enough of Walter to understand why Richard hates him so. Whereas in the book, Walter is a manipulative, ruthless control freak with a need to dominate every aspect of Richard’s life. The first time the word ‘vampire’ is mentioned in the book, isn’t in relation to Chriseis, it’s in relation to Walter wanting to drain Richard of his individuality and have Walter’s personality flowing in Richard’s veins instead. Richard escapes to Greece, but he only succeeds in jumping from one unhealthy, domineering relationship to another, replacing Master Walter with Mistress Chriseis. Another shortcoming to the film is how little there is of Marc Honeydew, who in the book is this wonderfully waspish old queen who thrives on other people’s conflicts and gossip, particularly that of a sexual nature. ‘Mother Honeydew’ as he nicknames himself, might well be my favorite character in the book, and one you strongly suspect Simon Raven had much fun in writing. Yet, you see so little of Honeydew in the film that the actor who plays him, William Mervyn, might as well as not bothered to show up on set. Which is frustrating because you sense that Peter Cushing had a Walter Goodrich performance in him. While Mervyn had played a very Honeydew type role in a TV series called ‘Mr. Rose’, so it’s a certain he had a Marc Honeydew performance in him, but either Hartford-Davis didn’t get it on film, or it ended up on the cutting room floor. I will say that the film is well cast, and if you see the film first then read the book, you will have Patrick Mower in your head when you read about Richard Fountain, you will have Peter Cushing in your head when you read about Walter Goodrich, right down to cast members like Imogen Hassall and Edward Woodward, even though they don’t match up to how their characters are described in the book.

A radical departure from the book, which the film makes, is to drop the character of Piers Clarence and replace him with Bob Kirby, an African student of Richard’s. A very early example of race swapping in movies. Although I don’t think this is out of step with the Richard Fountain of the book, who gravitates towards Piers because people think that they’re a pair of gays, which causes problems for Walter who is trying to pair Richard off with his daughter. So, I can buy into the idea of Richard befriending a black man, because it turns heads, because it rattles the cage of the establishment. The Congo section of the book, and the language Raven uses there, does inadvertently illustrate amount the racial prejudice around in the circles that Richard would have travelled in. Since there is so little back-story in the film though, I don’t think you really get the sense that Richard’s relationship with Bob is another way of him striking back at Walter, which is I suspect why Hartford-Davis cast a black actor in the role. Considering that this was an era when racially themed films like 'To Sir, with Love' and 'In the Heat of the Night' were big box-office, something an astute character like Hartford-Davis would have been aware of, very little is made of Bob’s skin colour….unless you speak Greek. From what I’m told the Greek language yelling that the old woman does in the scene where Bob gets beaten up by the Greek thugs is extremely racist, and would never have made it onto British TV, had anyone at ITV understood Greek. That scene is also the subject of one of my all time favorite, unintentionally hilarious front of house stills, which depicts one of the Greek guys charging into Bob’s mid-section and Penelope becoming hysterical in the background. Trouble is that, what with Bob’s facial expression and the Greek guy's head being buried in Bob’s crotch….at the risk of sounding like Marc Honeydew….it does rather look like Bob is getting a blow-job. Which is doubly-unfortunate given that….again at the risk of sounding like Marc Honeydew…someone connected to this film is rumored to have died whilst being fellated. No names from me, but I’ll put everyone’s mind at ease by saying it wasn’t Peter Cushing.

A couple of Hartford-Davis’ other casting decisions have an air of favoritism to them. By having Penelope Goodrich along for the Greek trip, rather than keeping her in the UK as per the book, he was able to increase the screen time of Madeleine Hinde, an actress he was into promoting at the time, and the star of his previous film ‘The Smashing Bird I Used to Know’. This does feel like a betrayal of Simon Raven’s book and its boys only attitude of ‘tally ho chaps; we’re off the Greece to rescue dear Dickie from the clutches of a beastly woman’. You can tell from the book that Raven was the product of a predominately male society, where women were largely excluded or regarded as a nuisance, Raven does have a wicked fondness for comparing Penelope Goodrich to a cow, dumbly grazing at social occasions with her heaving bosom and ‘cow eyes’. Hartford-Davis also always loved to use David Lodge in his movies, so comes up with an entirely new character, Col. Stavros, in order to shoehorn Dave Lodge in there. However Lodge is far less memorably utilized here than in Hartford-Davis’ earlier film Corruption. You’ll leave Corruption never being able to forget Lodge’s character in that, I don’t think you can say the same about Col. Stavros.

Although the passing of time has likely robbed the book of its freshness, in its day Doctors Wear Scarlet must have been a game changing work that freed the subject of vampirism from its Gothic trappings and explored its relationship with sex and sadomasochism. In the book, Richard is drawn to vampirism due to his need to be dominated, due to his inability to have regular sex. The film makes those connections to an extent, but the book also draws comparisons between how victims of vampirism can go onto take on the vampire role themselves, in the way that the victims of sexual abuse can often go on to be abusers themselves. This is made clearer in the book, especially as there are scenes of sexual abuse in it, which would be completely unfilmable. Wild, gratuitous and random as the ‘psychedelic orgy’ scene in the film is, that’s vanilla compared to what its standing in for in the book. In which Chriseis encourages parents to sexually abuse their children, in order that she can then drink the blood of fleshly corrupted children.

After reading the book, you have to wonder how anyone thought there was a film in it, Doctors Wear Scarlet is a stubbornly un-cinematic book. Very leisurely placed, very much a raconteur’s book, mainly related in the form of anecdotes, conversations, personal correspondence and even poems. Even the title doesn’t lend itself well to a film, Doctors Wear Scarlet is the kind of enigmatic, cryptic title that a book can get away with, but film titles generally have to be bolder, and more forthcoming about what they are selling. Very much in the way that ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ is a great book title and ‘Blade Runner’ is a great film title, but it wouldn’t work the other way around. I can’t imagine a film called Doctors Wear Scarlet would do much business at the Drive-Ins or the horror section of VHS shops, on the other hand I struggle to imagine Simon Raven using Bloodsuckers as a book title, even Incense for the Damned would likely have sounded too schlocky, and unbecoming to the likes of him.

Maybe Hartford-Davis just fancied a holiday in Greece, and adapted the nearest Greek themed book he had to hand. I’ve often thought that Hartford-Davis had a shooting style that falsely suggests he had a background directing ITC shows. He didn’t, but in his hands Doctors Wear Scarlet does end up looking like an episode of The Saint, The Protectors or if you’ve feeling ungenerous The Adventurer…sunny foreign holiday location work and manly fist fights are the order of the day here. An illusion that’s added to by the casting, which leans towards small screen heroes. Alex Davion was the co-star of Gideon’s Way, William Mervyn was Mr. Rose, Patrick Macnee was John Steed, and Edward Woodward is here taking a break from Callan. Even Patrick Mower was destined to be more of a TV heartthrob than a movie star. In his autobiography, Mower tells of how Imogen Hassall successfully won a £10 bet with several crew members that she could sexually arouse Mower during their love scene. “Method actor though I am, a block of ice I am not. And Richard the prig was becoming Bruce Banner- only it wasn’t the Hulk that was growing larger”. Although the camera operator stiffed Hassall on full payment, remarking “call that a stiffy? I’ve seen more meat in a Potato pie; I’m only paying a fiver”. Mower also recalls being vigorously pursued by a Turkish belly dancer during the making of the film, who ‘gave me one of the best nights of sex in my life’, only for it to emerge that she had mistaken him for Patrick Macnee. “I only make love to the star of the film” she told Mower after whacking him around the head. As much as Bloodsuckers has its fair share of name actors, Hartford-Davis did have a Michael Winner like talent for spotting up and coming talent and putting them in films they’d later come to regret. Maureen Lipman famously hates the Hartford-Davis film she is in, The Smashing Bird I Used to Know. Writing about the same film in his autobiography, Mower recalled him and Dennis Waterman getting shitfaced drunk after seeing The Smashing Bird I Used To Know, on account of it being “such an unmitigated load of old tripe”.

I still have a bit of nostalgia for Blood Suckers, it takes me back to a time when I was discovering then obscure and undocumented movies on late night television. After exposing myself to the source novel, I do now have a greater understanding of what the film was trying to say, but I also have to concede that they did make a pig’s ear of saying it, and it is difficult to forgive the film for its lack of Marc Honeydew.

For a 1960 book, Doctors Wear Scarlet was ahead of its time in many respects, and likely felt more relevant when the film was made in 1969. What with its themes of disillusionment with the older generation, young people dropping out and seeking freedom, only to discover that the counterculture itself had a dark side. Chriseis is a warning that those in Charles Manson’s obit should have taken heed of. Choose your gurus, and study fags, wisely. Not all Greek women are as nice as Nana Mouskouri.