Tales from Pandora’s Box Vol 1-3 (2023)

 

Why watch one British horror anthology film made by a randy old pensioner, when you can watch three British horror anthology films made by a randy old pensioner? Since Tales from Pandora's Box Vol.1, Vol.2 and Vol.3 are currently available to stream on the Fawesome app in the UK. Billed by Fawesome as "A collection of short stories. Where each tale surprises the viewer with unexpected surprises" these are all the work of one Mol Smith of Oxfordshire, although I gather some people call him Maurice, presumably because he speaks of the pompitous of love. While the words British horror anthology automatically makes you think back to the days of Amicus, Mol's onslaught of low-fi production values, a love of filming nekkid people and underwhelming CGI tends to make him come across like a senior, British version of Bill Zebub.

Described on one website as 'a compulsive creator of books, images and movies', Mol, now in his seventies, has been directing erotically inclined short films since the early 2010s. However his efforts appear to have flown under the radar of most until these three Tales from Pandora's Box movies, which are in fact compilations of his short films. The trilogy suffers from similar issues as that David McGillivray 'Worst Fears' horror anthology thing, in that you're watching a series of unconnected shorts that were never intended to be seen bolted together. Therefore there are tonal issues and the problem of the same cast members repeatedly popping up in different roles. Mol having something of a rep company that includes Sean Botha, a beefy, hairy bloke who isn't shy about whipping his wedding tackle out in these shorts. As well as Tessa McGinn, who at a glance could pass for an older Jane Birkin.

Being the first out of the gate, Tales from Pandora's Box Vol.1 represents the best of the bunch, the crème de la Mol, if you will. 'The Artist' sees a nude model become fascinated by the work of her photographer, who uses digital trickery to make it appear that his models have cut off their limbs. He in turn becomes inspired by her, and while taking legs akimbo snaps, imagines that a dragon is emerging from her vagina. Soon after, she is haunted by a ghostly amputee, but the photographer tries to convince her that the spooky sounds she is hearing at night is in fact squirrels, who apparently make a noise identical to a one legged ghost. She is not convinced.

In 'The Magician' a seedy stage magician finds it difficult to keep hold of female assistants, due to the lecherous nature of the blokeish audiences he plays too. A mysterious man with severe COPD issues and a magic lamb offers a possible solution to this problem.

Vol.1 drops the ball a little with 'Which Witch' a silly diversion that adds up to little more than an excuse for Mol to film several young ladies cosplaying as feuding witches, complete with an overkill of CGI effects and comedy captions highlighting the witches' strengths and weaknesses 'Favourite Food: Bull's Urine...Sexual Preferences: Dwarfs'.

Things return to normal, or whatever passes for normal here, with the straight faced weirdness of 'The Quest for the Quantum Vagina' in which two scientists (Tessa McGinn and Sean Botha) pay a high price for inserting a tentacled creature into a woman's vagina. 'Non Compliance' sees a young lady escape from the back of a garbage truck, break into someone's house only to (literally) haywire when she takes a bath. Finally there is 'Haunted' aka 'Away for Christmas' in which a woman preps for a party, but why does she keep imagining that her face is falling off, and why do her knickers set on fire. You'll have to keep tuned till the end to find out.

Vol.2 and Vol.3 are allot more hit and miss affairs, they are also allot less lucid, with traditional storytelling often set aside for brief, baffling mindfuckery. There is a running gag in the glam rock movie Never Too Young to Rock, where various characters keep saying "what was that?" a question you'll find yourselves asking many, many times throughout the Tales from Pandora's Box sequels. Such is the case with Vol.2 opener 'My Beautiful Egypt' in which lightening strikes the crotch of a female mummy, causing her to come back to life and do a striptease out of her bandages. This rubs shoulders with home movie footage of Mol's holiday in Egypt and news footage pilfered from the now outlawed Russia Today channel. If ever there was a Tales from Pandora's Box segment that needed to repeatedly cut away to a Never Too Young To Rock character saying "what was that" it is My Beautiful Egypt. There are fortunately a few standout stories in the sequels which mean that neither of them can entirely be written off. Highlights of Vol.2, include 'Dead Positive' a tale of a mortician's apprentice whose first cadaver turns out to be an ex boyfriend of hers, which with its themes of necrophilia, domestic violence and suicide represents the darker side of the series. Also of note is 'From out of the Storm' in which a woman, alone in her house on a rainy night, is terrorized by a naked Sean Botha, who emerges, Terminator style, from a ball of lightening. Botha returns in 'The Invited' playing a guilt ridden Jack the Ripper who reaches out to a pair of girls who have been using an Ouija board. The girls turn out to be reincarnations of Jack's victims, but can they find it in their hearts to forgive him, even though he hacked out those hearts in their past lives?

Vol.3 has two good, and fortunately quite lengthy, stories. In 'ScareB&B' Sean Botha and Tessa McGinn play a couple who plan to turn their house into a B&B, mainly as a way for him to cope with her impending death. A UFO beams down a naked woman (Elinia Rose, whose IMDB bio makes for 'interesting' reading), who they discover in the woods and decide to take home and give her a bath. She turns out to be an alien in human form who has the ability to transmit the life forces of other aliens into people's bodies, which doesn't bode well for the future of the B&B. Here we are very much in Xtro/Under the Skin territory of sci-fi, sexuality and women's bodies doing gross things. 

Defying the often prudish attitude of 21st century genre filmmaking, ScareB&B has both female and male nudity and goes off in some highly perverse directions. Two of the aliens pose as a father and daughter team, with the father ordering the daughter to dress provocatively and come on sexually to an old man, played by Mol himself, who contributes towards the full frontal nudity.

Mol manages to make even a muscle wasting disease seem sexy in the other notable story in Vol.3. 'The Samaritan's Gift' finds a young gypsy girl (Lucy Pelso), out for a ride on her ebike, and asking a passing motorist (Sean Botha) for help. As she is suffering from a disease that makes walking difficult for her, she wants him to take her home and give her a bath. Older men giving vulnerable, incapacitated, younger women baths being a reoccurring theme in Vol.3. Unexpectedly, given Botha's track record in these shorts, his character turns out to be a highly moral man who doesn't take advantage of this unusual situation, and his kindness wins her heart. All of which spells trouble for this good Samaritan, since her plans for him turn out to be more sinister than merely trying to sell him lots of clothes pegs. The Samaritan's Gift is distinguished by a confidant, sexy turn from Lucy Pelso, with Mol showing good judgment by making her performance so front and centre here, and showing saucy judgment by making her the subject of so many upskirt shots.

While Mol is clearly a DIY filmmaker whose budgets often struggle to accommodate his imagination, there are definitely enough nuggets of erotic eccentricity and horror storytelling here to justify wading through the Tales from Pandora's Box threesome. But wait...there's more!!! As Fawesome is also playing host to Abduction 2: Revenge of the Hive Queen (2018) Mol's micro budgeted sci-fi epic that runs a daunting 102 minutes. Being of sound mind, I barely understood a single one of those 102 minutes, but was entertained and left slack jawed throughout. The Mol oeuvre certainly leaves you with the lingering thought that it must be quite the experience to live next door to the people who make films like this. Hooray for Mollywood!!!

White Squaw 8: Horn of Plenty (1985, E.J. Hunter)

 

The eighth installment in the White Squaw series sees deviant author E.J. Hunter mix fact with fiction. This Rebecca Caldwell adventure being played out amidst the backdrop of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, hence Horn of Plenty. What else did you possibly think that title could be referring to? It is a piece of American history that held a personal connection for Hunter, who dedicates this White Squaw book to the ancestors of his that fought in this battle and 'happened to be on the winning side. Hoka hey!'. This revelation about Hunter's ancestry does tend to put a spin on how you view the White Squaw series, and explains the series' extensive knowledge of Native American culture.

Horn of Plenty finds Oglala chief Iron Calf in ailing health and therefore sending out a brave called Swift Bear to find his estranged daughter Sinaskawin -that's Rebecca Caldwell to you buddy- in order to reunite father and daughter before Iron Calf goes off to meet the Great Spirit. For Rebecca though, it’s business as usual as she and her faithful companion Brett Baylor aka Lone Wolf pursue her Uncle Ezekiel and his boss Roger Styles. Ezekiel (sometimes spelt Ezekial in the other books) isn't half the man he used to be. A bullet from Rebecca having immobilized his arm in a previous White Squaw installment. Uncle Ezekiel is also having to readjust to living as a man without stones, having had his balls cut off by Rebecca in the fifth book 'Buckskin Bombshell'. At the risk of sounding bloodthirsty myself, I fail to understand why Rebecca didn't take off the dick at the same time, thus putting an end to all the raping Ezekiel gets up too. After all Rebecca is acutely aware that being without stones doesn't mean a man can't function sexually. This we know, since she relates to Lone Wolf an eye watering anecdote about a young brave who was thrown from his horse at which point "a sharp pointed branch on a sagebrush ripped off his testicles". Still every cloud it seems has a silver lining, since the boy then found himself being used for sex by all the female members of his tribe, safe in the knowledge that he was incapable of getting them pregnant.

Hunter manages to restrain himself for about ten pages before reminding his readership of what a sick individual he was. An assault on a homestead by Ezekiel's men quickly takes out family patriarch Josh Talmadge and his young son Jimmy. Less fortunate is Josh's wife Dorrie, who is taken in the bedroom, gang raped and has her throat slit. The main focus of abuse though is the virgin daughter of the family, Luanna, who is raped by Petey Willis, one of the youngest of Ezekiel's men. A spectacle that gives Ezekiel his first successful hard on in months. Hunter is creepily keen to emphasize Petey's youth, as if he wished the character were actually younger than he made him. Petey is described as looking 'closer to twelve than the sixteen years he owned to'. Petey's only regret about raping Luanna is that he doesn't have more to offer the young lady 'Petey found himself wishing he had about nine inches instead of the paltry five he possessed'. Hunter being the consistent sicko, has Luanna eventually enjoy the experience ("Please" Luanna moaned, as she burned with the shame at the words she had to say "Please, please") and becoming a happy, sexual receptacle for the men who just wiped out her entire family.

Hunter follows that with another shocking scene -which seems to be catering to the raw poultry brigade- involving Timmy Phillips, a young boy tasked by his mother with overseeing the family's cattle (Timmy's father having been killed by the Sioux). For his troubles Timmy ends up being set upon by brutes in KKK style hoods who steal the animals and for extra kicks- as well as the fact that E.J. Hunter likes to write about things like this- strip Timmy naked and hang him upside down from a tree. Leaving Timmy to fret that he'll probably be beaten by his mother when she finds him like this. His mother having previously whipped him after catching Timmy skinny dipping in the creek with another young boy.

Maybe sensing that his audience needed a respite from the usual revenge plot, Horn of Plenty finds Rebecca distracted by both the plight of her father and the plight of Timmy's mother. A widow raising three small children, Grace Phillips is attempting to keep the family farm afloat despite opposition from a crooked bank manager and the hooded goons who put her son in bondage. This series' attitude towards women is utterly schizophrenic. Hunter appears to genuinely respect and admire tough, strong willed women like Grace Phillips and Rebecca herself, who defy the chauvinistic attitudes of their time. Horn of Plenty being yet another White Squaw book where Rebecca ruffles the feathers of stuffy old farts with her unladylike language and proud admission that she cut her Uncle's balls off. When it comes to younger females though, Hunter reverts to this drooling sex freak who gets a charge out of making them the subject of demeaning dirty talk. What with Luanna referred to as "steady pussy for the boys" who "could suck a pecker pretty good".

Although its the eight book, Horn of Plenty manages a few series' firsts. We get our first significant black character in the form of Marcus Roundtree, who is very much of the Turk Turpin school of black sexual brutality, telling Rebecca "I's gonna break yo'ah head- right after I split yo'ah crotch wits dis donkey-sized tallywhacker o'mine".
Hunter also stumbles onto a new sexual fetish for the series, Maiesiophilia, when Rebecca flashes back to being made love to by her husband, Four Horns, while she was carrying their child. "There is not much time left...you and I cannot lay together in the last months. It is not good for the child" Four Horns tells the sex mad Rebecca. Such tender moments are rare for this series, with this scene carrying extra poignancy, given that we know that both Four Horns and the child will die soon after.

It is always easy to tell when a big sex scene is about to go down in a White Squaw book, as Lone Wolf will find a reason to ride on ahead, leaving Rebecca and her love interest to get down to business, preferably by an outdoor fire. Lone Wolf's Native American abilities seemingly including a sixth sense of when three's company. Rebecca's main beau for this book is Swift Bear, who it turns out has loved Rebecca since she was enslaved by his tribe when he was just thirteen. Swift Bear felt a kinship with Rebecca, relating to her struggles to learn Sioux customs, on account of Swift Bear having been whisked away from his people by Jesuit priests and forced to learn the ways of the white man. It's his distinctly Native American chat up lines that get him into Rebecca's pants though. "You are m-more beautiful than the Ptesanwin. You are a gift from the Great Spirit" smooth talk that he sure didn't pick up from the Jesuits.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is perhaps the weakest aspect to Horn of Plenty. As historic accuracy dictates that fictional characters can't play significant roles in real life events. This means that Rebecca, Roger Styles, Ezekiel et al have to be kept at arm's length from a major set piece in the book. There is little love loss for General George Armstrong Custer within these pages, with Hunter portraying him as a genocidal racist. When Custer is asked if the killing of Native American women bothers him, Custer cold bloodedly replies "nits make lice". As with the inclusion of Oscar Wilde in the 18th White Squaw book, Hunter's motivation for working a real life figure into the White Squaw world appears to be to give Custer a piece of his mind, with Rebecca Caldwell acting as his mouthpiece. The Custer subplot also allows Hunter to work in a reoccurring theme in the series. The white authorities' reluctance to act against white men who commit crimes against Indians. A constant source of frustration to Rebecca.

Hunter respectfully chooses to mostly have the Battle of the Little Bighorn play out off-page, with what little that is depicted being dealt with in a tasteful, non-explicit fashion, an uncharacteristic move for him. Indeed, the inclusion of a real life battle appears to bring out a more introspective, soul searching side to the White Squaw series than we have seen before. Being reunited with her father and his people, gives Rebecca a sense of belonging and pride in the Native American side of her identity. This however is immediately robbed from her by the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Observing the deaths of both whites and Indians, sickens the mixed race Rebecca 'Soldier or Sioux: at their savage worst she saw little to chose between them. Would she ever fit into either world'. In that sense, Horn of Plenty is the reverse of Soldier Blue, this being about a Native American woman lamenting the mass slaughter of whites and the moral stain on her culture that it will leave. Rebecca's fear that the victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn will only increase the whites' fear and hatred of Indians is immediately realized when she and Brett- the heroes of the series- ride into a small town only to be met with threats and racial abuse. One wonders if Hunter, who like many Men's Adventures authors is rumoured to have served in Vietnam, personally related to the experience of expecting a hero's welcome only to be faced with contempt and hostility. Horn of Plenty ends with Rebecca seething at the way the White press martyrs Custer while demonizing the Sioux. Rebecca vows to rehabilitate the image of the Sioux as violent savages, while at the same time renewing her vow to hunt down, castrate and kill the white men who wronged her. What can I say, Miss Rebecca continues to be a woman of fascinating contradictions.

For a series driven by extreme gore and perverted sex, Horn of Plenty then ends up unexpectedly delivering food for thought o'plenty... as well as the inescapable sense that Custer sure had allot to answer for.