Halloween Special: Stripped Bare For The Mummy Monster (1989)

 

For our Halloween special, meself, Clive and Nick discuss ‘Stripped Bare For the Mummy Monster’ the unpublished 1989 horror novel by Lucille Simmons book featuring death by lawnmower, chainsaw dismemberment, lesbian incest and a rampaging Egyptian mummy.  You can also read the book yourself at archive.org

Keep It Up Jack (1974)

They say nothing signifies the end of an era quite like nostalgia for its beginning, something that's certainly true of Keep It Up Jack, a British sex comedy that harkens back to the days of the music hall, while sadly acknowledging its demise. It's hero, Jack James (Mark Jones) being a quick change artist whose dated act is dying a death in front of a bored audience of old women and young kids. "Let the act rest, its dead any road, a long time ago, it's the end of an era, Jack" his gruff, Northern boss tells him. By the 1970s the British music hall had largely bitten the dust, but it's memory clearly lived on in the target audience of Keep It Up Jack. In that sense the film is a part of a cultural mourning for the music hall era that was also reflected in the BBC's The Good Old Days programme, or low budget documentaries about music hall history that were doing the rounds on the lower half of double bills like A Little of What You Fancy (1968) and Top of the Bill (1971) by Arnold Louis Miller. 

Derek Ford, the director of Keep It Up Jack is an unexpected figure to have been bitten by the music hall nostalgia bug. Ford not having come from a theatrical background and being middle class, the music hall being a predominantly working class phenomenon. Therefore I wonder if the idea for the film didn't emanate more from Ford's co-writer Alan Selwyn, who unlike Ford was both working class and had a direct connection to showbiz. Selwyn's father Solomon Salzedo having been a comedy performer at the Windmill Theatre during the 1940s, under the anglicised name of Sidney Brandon. As well as co-writer of Keep It Up Jack, Selwyn also served as a bit part actor in the movie, an associate producer and procurer of female talent. The Ford/Selwyn script offers Jack a lucky break when an Aunt of his dies in a car crash leaving him her expensive home...in reality Ford's own home 'Beeleigh Falls House' in Maldon, Essex. To Jack's horror, he also discovers that his Auntie was a famous madam and that he's inherited a fully functional brothel. For reasons that Ford and Selwyn's script never satisfactorily explains, Jack decides to continue running the brothel and begins cross dressing as his Auntie. Initially his motivation for this seems to be out of sympathy and possible attraction to Virginia (Sue Longhurst), a lesbian prostitute who has shown up at the house expecting employment, and who gives Jack the cold shoulder until he starts masquerading as an older woman with a strap on. All of which makes it seem like Keep It Up Jack is going in the direction of being unorthodox rom-com about a guy trying to woo a lesbian by masquerading as a woman himself. 

However the film doesn't really pan out like that, and if anything Virginia becomes something of the villain of the piece, when ambition causes her to try and make a power grab for the business. One which also sees her employ more prostitutes, each of whom bring their own distinct mojo to Chez Auntie. Caroline (Jenny Westbrook) is the dominatrix of the bunch, Gloria (Linda Regan) is the one with the baby fetish, while Francine, played by Veronica Peters is a woman of Russ Meyer proportions, or as Peters' IMDB page puts it 'trademark: large breasts'. Based on her role in Keep It Up Jack, Peters doesn't seem to have been that bad an actress, but when it came to ebony beauties in British sexploitation, appears to have been sidelined in favour of Minah Bird and Lucienne Camille. The remainder of Peters' acting career consisting of bit parts in Sexplorer, Eskimo Nell and the Harrison Marks short Tailor Maid.

Since romance with Virginia is off the cards, Jack's reasons for passing himself off as his Auntie seem obscure at best. Apart from being a way of getting some laughs out of seeing a man in drag. I wonder if Keep It Up Jack might seem like a more sexually subversive film in the eyes of an American audience, who would be unaware of the long standing mainstream tradition of drag humour in British culture, whereas in America, drag is more synonymous with the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. One culture's idea of a sexually revolutionary act is another culture's source of belly laughs for all the family. I remember an American woman, who used to be on Twitter/X, writing a review of Tiffany Jones (1973) and praising a scene- where a male character is forced to drag up only to then get hit on by confused straight men- as being wonderfully progressive for its time and evidence that it's director Pete Walker was an early trans ally. A theory that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, if you've ever read an interview Walker, you'll know he is a very conservative minded person. Jack James himself is also a man on a morals kick, and once the brothel gets swinging again becomes all uptight and disgusted by the Essex bacchanal he himself has created. Jack then sees it as his mission to rescue Fleur (Maggi Burton), a young naive prostitute, from those who would seek to exploit her. Essentially Fleur becomes the Iris to Jack's Travis Bickle, but instead of shaving his head into a mohawk and shooting up Beeleigh Falls with bullets, Jack instead infiltrates his own brothel by posing as a host of foreign stereotypes including an Arab and a Japanese man. An idea that I suspect might have come from Alan Selwyn, since there's a similar phoney Arab scene in Selwyn's movie Secrets of a Superstud, with Selwyn himself donning the boot polish on that occasion.

This is my first time viewing of the hardcore version of Keep It Up Jack, and while the hardcore is very brief compared to what Ford got up to in Diversions, it is jarring to see scenes of people having real sex in such close proximity to scenes involving well known, respectable comedy actors like Frank Thornton, Queenie Watts and Paul Whitsun-Jones. The latter making his final film appearance here before his premature death in early 1974, meaning that Ford would have shot Keep It Up Jack at some point in 1973. Until the hardcore version was rediscovered, the general consensus about the additional footage, quoted on the IMDb and Wikipedia was that "the film also exists in a version with hardcore inserts, but there is no suggestion that any of the credited cast participated in it." This hasn't turned out to be entirely true. While none of the name cast partisapate in real sex here, they are not entirely excluded from material that is unique to the stronger version. A scene where Jenny Westbrook and Veronica Peters' characters seduce Fleur into a lesbian threesome is much more explicit in this version, culminating in all three women masturbating themselves with champagne bottles. It's not hardcore per se, but its only a few shades away from it. There's also a startling scene, only included in the stronger version, involving Linda Regan's character decorating Jack's hard-on with whipped cream and a cherry on top, before chowing down. A scene achieved with an obvious prosthetic penis, presumably due to Regan and Mark Jones' unwillingness to do hardcore. Again, at risk of sounding like a Derek Ford apologist, I suspect this was another script idea from Alan Selwyn, since there is a near identical scene of food fellatio in Secrets of a Superstud. One wonders what Regan, who went on to have a career in mainstream British comedy like Hi-De-Hi, and has more recently reinvented herself as a crime novelist, must make of this unearthed footage. As she recently appeared to be a little flustered by her appearance in Carry on England being mentioned on Twitter/X, it'll take a braver man than me to bring up the subject of Keep It Up Jack with her.

The actual hardcore footage involves no name specialty actresses being put through their paces by the game-for-anything actor Tony Kenyon, whose mustache twirling antics once again recalls his stag movie forefathers. These scenes illustrate Ford's strong inclinations towards S&M, with bondage and sadism taking president over regular sex. Ford had attempted to get a film version of 'The Story of O' off the ground in the late sixties, and these sequences give an idea of what we'd have been in for, had fortune favoured Ford over Just Jaeckin. As well as offering flashes of the serious, erotic filmmaker that Ford could have been, had he not been so shackled to the comedic demands of British sexploitation.

Funnily enough, I can never think of Keep It Up Jack without also thinking of the actor David Warbeck, even though Warbeck isn't actually in the film. This being due to two, of many, stories I've heard about the Wild, Wild World of David Warbeck over the years. During the 1990s, when Warbeck was doing horror movie conventions, he would frequently shock fans by claiming that he was breaking his curfew by attending these shows and that he'd recently been put under house arrest for running a brothel. This, I'm assured was actually a wind up on Warbeck's behalf and an example of his mischievous sense of humour. Another genuine, Warbeck story though, dates from his time in Italy making westerns and thrillers there, where he would always cause the crews to crack up by turning up on the first day of shooting in full drag... breaking with his macho screen image. So, I can't help thinking he would have been more suited to playing a cross dressing, brothel owner in Keep It Up Jack than a horny jewel thief in The Sex Thief, Warbeck's only actual foray into British sexploitation. Not that there's anything wrong with Mark Jones here, Jones was a very versatile actor who brought a bit of class to British sex comedies and Don't Open Till Christmas, another fine mess that Derek Ford got him into, and apparently a huge source of embarrassment for the actor. Jones goes beyond the call of duty in Keep It Up Jack, shaving his chest, concealing his dick between his legs and donning a female wig on top of his regular male wig. Jones seems to have had a Sean Connery attitude to toupee wearing in movies, willing to slap one on if the role required it, but equally happy to play roles without a wig and made no secret of being bald in real life. Incidentally if you want to put a face to our master of ceremonies, Derek Ford himself shows up right at the end of the movie playing, of all things, a vicar. In fairness, Father Derek of the Maldon Essex Parish, is slightly more credible as a man of the cloth than Mark Jones is as a Japanese chappie.

 

Blood-Sex (1985, Charles Necrorian)

 

When people tell you that you can't judge a book by it's cover, they sure weren't thinking of this book. Blood-Sex was the 5th in the 'Gore' series of books published in France by the Fleuve Noir imprint from 1985 to 1989. Distinguished by some of the most revoltingly eye catching covers you're ever likely to see, the series began with a severely abridged version of John Russo's Night of the Living Dead novelisation. Subsequent entries in the series included Herschell Gordon Lewis' novelisations of Color Me Blood Red, Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs, as well as French editions of books by Shaun Hutson, Guy N. Smith and John Halkin. Flying the flag for France were authors like Christian Vila and Charles Necrorian, whose contributions to the series don't ever appear to have been published outside of France. Presumably because places like the UK and American had enough of their own trashy horror paperbacks to contend with. None of these books have to my knowledge ever been officially translated into English, but I've been fortunate enough to read a few of them recently, with the help of a website that converts foreign language PDFs into English. 

'Nightmare on Staten Island' (1986) is a likeable, unpretentious slice of 1980s pulp horror about an ex-cop trying to alert the authorities to the existence of cannibalistic fishmen on the shores of Staten Island. 'Wild Camping' (1989) sees Hells Angels rise from their graves, 15 years after being massacred by vigilante locals. 'Blood-Sex' though really gives the likes of Hutson and Guy N. Smith a run for their money when it comes to extreme content, and manages to pull off the monumental achievement of actually living up to its title. Delivering two twisted stories for the price of one, Blood-Sex combines elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Russ Meyer's Up, whilst anticipating American Psycho by a number of years. The first storyline concerns the aptly named Stephen Murderren, a spoilt, sociopathic, trust fund heir who is putting the finishing touches to a horror novel called Blood-Sex. In order to get the creative juices flowing, Stephen has to also get the blood of others flowing as well. Teaming up with his lover/sister Vanessa ('only she could understand him, help him in his long quest. Other women were nothing but smelly genitals') the duo sadistically kill everyone from a black streetwalker to a nervous rich kid who wants to swing with Vanessa and Stephen...and pays dearly for it. The second storyline, is in fact the story that Stephen is attempting to write, and finds two redneck brothers abducting women and chopping up their menfolk with meat cleavers. Sam is the smarter, mustachioed of the two. Willie is the Leatherface of the duo, with an unfortunate penchant for letting his dick hang out of his pants. As a child, Willie was accidentally shot in the head with a pellet gun, causing him constant headaches, which his mother attempted to relieve by jerking him off on a regular basis...it didn't help much. The influence of Russ Meyer appears in the form of the square jawed sheriff, who when not trying to solve the murders that the brothers are committing, has a hard-on for the big titted waitress who works in the local redneck bar. The waitress tips the Sheriff off about the two brothers "The eldest has a hick mustache, hick clothes, a hick dick... The other one, the nutcase, he makes me uncomfortable sometimes. When he's here, he's always playing with his dick and I don't know a single girl who would go and polish it for him, even for money, assuming he had any". Only for the Sheriff to then effectively tell her that such behavior is all her own fault, since her body excites men too much.

Blood-Sex, and in fact the entire 'Gore' series, illustrates the influence that US grindhouse cinema had on France, leading to the likes of Meyer and H.G. Lewis being recognized as auteurs there. As well as French cinema catching the splatter movie bug in the form of Devil Story, Mad Mutilator and Revenge of the Living Dead Girls. What's surprising about the 'Gore' books that I've read so far is that they sidestep the chance to put a French perspective on the horror/exploitation genre and instead have an American obsession going on. Blood-Sex's characters are an outlandish collection of amplified American stereotypes...the Stetson wearing sheriff, the horny hitchhikers, the beer guzzling truckers, the Chicano hating old timer, the do-gooding female journalist who ends up renouncing her liberal ways. Everyone lives on a diet of hamburgers, but given the nature of the book, usually ends up vomiting them up at the sight of mangled corpses. The jury is still out on whether all the Americana in these books is a case of the French paying homage to their influences, or the French not wanting to take a shit on their own doorstep. I can't help but recall Bill Landis, who became quite anti-French towards the end of his life...seemingly due to the fact that a couple of Joel M. Reed movies had been released on DVD there...and his accusation that France was 'a nation obsessed with anything making America look ridiculous from Jerry Lewis to Blood Feast'.

Author Charles Necrorian, real name Rene-Charles Rey, also devised the gore scenes for the Jess Franco film 'Faceless'. Judging by what he was getting up to in print, his contributions to the Franco film were a model of restraint. In one revolting scene, one of the captured girls goes along with the two brothers' insistence that she help them make a handbag for their mother as a birthday present, until she realizes that they require her to provide the raw materials to make the handbag. In the other storyline, Stephen opens a man's chest up, plays about with the entrails, before thoughtfully tossing the man's liver at Vanessa, which practically causes her to have an orgasm.

Overall I'd say that the 'story within a story' is the more entertaining of the two parallel storylines, and in a wise move is the one that rightfully dominates the book. The antics of the dimwitted brothers providing some much needed comic relief, given the morbid and nihilistic tone of the Murderren storyline. Needless to say, strong stomachs are required for Blood-Sex. It's a worthy French entry into the bad taste Olympics, that leaves other extreme horror novels looking like nothing but 'smelly genitals' in comparison.

Dracutwig (1969, Bernhardt J. Hurwood)

 

The quest to read Dracutwig has been something of a personal cause of mine for the last few years. The allure of an eccentric sounding, swinging sixties relic -in which Dracula's daughter embarks on a Twiggy like modeling career- calling out to me from the groovy past. At the same time I was never under the illusion that Dracutwig would be a good book in the traditional sense...which is just as well.

Dracutwig began life as a screenplay, allegedly penned by the writer of several Broadway musicals, but when plans for the movie fell by the wayside, the script was retooled and Dracutwig rose from the grave in book form. The book version is credited to Mallory T. Knight, a pen name for Bernhardt J. Hurwood, whose bibliography includes horror fiction, sexy paperbacks and nonfiction occult titles, possibly explaining the uneven qualities of Dracutwig. Hurwood would also go on to the write novelisations of 'Kingdom of the Spiders' and the Linda Blair TV movie 'Born Innocent'.

Dracutwig is initially set in 1950 where Count Dracula has aligned himself with the communist party, who provide him with a regular supply of political undesirables to drink blood from. In return Dracula leaves the local Transylvanian peasants alone, who make their money by shipping their virgin daughters off to the big city to work as prostitutes. Everything is hunky dory until local nympho Charmaine Skakowski, whose 'monumental breasts bounced with every step she took' forces herself on Count Dracula 'instead of blood, Dracula now thought only of the exquisite sensations raging through his long dead body'. After Charmaine becomes pregnant, the disgruntled villagers force their way into Castle Dracula, assaulting Dracula's club footed majordomo Klaus, whose entire purpose in the book seems to be to get kicked in the ass or in the balls. Dracula is forced into a shotgun marriage and the result of his and Charmaine's union is a daughter... Dracutwig, or 'Draculine' as she is actually called in the book. Upon her 18th birthday, young Draculine is dispatched to London to get the best education that money can buy, with all the culture clash, fish out of water comedy you'd expect. Draculine gatecrashes a funeral, and having been raised among the undead, causes an outcry when she tries to help the corpse out of the coffin. While at a fashion show being held at a trendy nightclub called 'The Well Dressed Nude', Draculine accidentally ends up on the catwalk, causing fashion model Petruska to vengefully tear off Draculine's clothes. This results in onlookers getting horny and embarking on a mass orgy. 'For poor Draculine, who pressed herself in agony against the platform where it all had begun, the spectacle seemed like a wild battle scene, but where semen was spewing instead of blood. But she knew one thing for sure as she deliberately kicked a would-be rapist in the groin: Transylvania never offered anything like it!'.

Draculine also becomes an instant fashion sensation due to her pale skin and undead appearance. At which point the book could almost lay claim to have anticipated Goth culture with the masses copying Draculine's look, a fashion trend dubbed 'new morbidity' within these pages. The fact that Dracutwig is essentially a romantic comedy doesn't prevent Draculine from occasionally wandering away from the in-crowd to murder a more diverse section of Londoners. Her victims including a randy priest, an old drunk she meets in Soho, a cross dresser and a stoned hippy. Drinking the contaminated blood of the latter causes Draculine to have an LSD trip in Trafalgar Square 'nothing seemed more natural than for Lord Nelson's statue to slowly turn around on it's sparkling pedestal, unbutton it's fly and begin to urinate in a fantastical iridescent rainbow'. The initial Transylvanian section of the book invites comparisons with The Fearless Vampire Killers, but once we hop over to London, the 'not quite as hip as it thinks it is' sensibility and level of humour is more in the territory of the David Niven 'Vampira', or Son of Dracula (the Harry Nilsson one). Draculine falls for a dandy photographer called Harry Brockton, who is a severe hemophiliac. His confession "I'm a hemo" causes a confused Draculine to question his sexuality "you mean you're like your agent, no that can't be".

As Dracutwig was written by a lifelong New Yorker, the book's version of Swinging London is the type that probably never really existed outside of German Krimi movies. The geography of Dracutwig entirely consisting of well known tourist spots... Belgravia, Trafalgar Square, Soho, and where the sound of Big Ben is never too far away. The book is also fond of absurdly double-barreled English names, we get Sarah Fardley-Butticks, Lady Dorcas-Brockton and Ms. Ponsonby-Smithe's School for Young Ladies.

If you're expecting a wacky, campy romp, then your expectations are only going to be partly met here. Dracutwig gets surprisingly sour and cynical at the halfway point, as Draculine's beau Harry Brockton, cheats on her, exploits her for fame and money and has a disturbingly over affectionate relationship with his mother, the aforementioned Lady Dorcas-Brockton. The book then gets hit with the silly stick again, as Dorcas-Brockton keeps dressing up as a Nun in order to kill Draculine, only to then tonally switch back for an incredibly downbeat ending. Even more so, given that...without trying to give too much away.. it's the kind of ending that makes you think that they'll be some kind of last minute, get out cause that will lead to a happy conclusion, only for the book to instead double down on the darkness.

I suspect that average person will find this book to be an unfinishable, insult to the intelligence. However if, like me, you're a sucker for any ol' Swinging London nonsense, then a date with Miss Dracutwig is difficult to turn down...even if she is difficult to get a hold of these days. As far as I'm aware the book was only ever available in America and Germany, where it was published in 1971 as Dracula's Tochter/Dracula's Daughter. Such was my desperation to read the book that I downloaded a German language ebook of it from a dodgy website, had that converted to a PDF using another dodgy website, then used a further dodgy website to translate the German PDF into English. Meaning that the version I read was an English translation of a German translation of a book that was originally in English. The German edition also includes a dissertation on vampires the gives the main text a run for it's money when it comes to strangeness, and concludes with what inadvertently doubles as a fitting epitaph for Dracutwig 'a completely senseless undertaking, but they didn't know any better'.

Exposé brought to book

In it's day, Exposé (1976) was a movie sold on the basis of being a star vehicle for 1970s sex symbol Fiona Richmond, but it's lasting notoriety rests on being banned in Britain as a Video Nasty in the mid 1980s.

Unusually this novelisation of Exposé appeared in 1978, two years after the release of the movie. Breaking the mould for movie novelisations, which tended to be released concurrent to the movies they were promoting, serving as a pre-VHS way of keeping taking a movie home with you. I can only think that the novelisations of subsequent Fiona Richmond vehicles Hardcore and Let's Get Laid sold enough copies to warrant going back to her first star vehicle and also novelising Exposé.

Rather than merely transcribe the movie, the book chooses to expand on it, adding back-story and presenting a version of Exposé that is free of the budgetary and censorship constraints that the movie was shackled by. The reason why the book isn't just your standard hack-job novelisation is that it was written by the film's own writer/director James Kenelm Clarke, under the pen name Philip Massinger. The novelisations of Hardcore and Let's Get Laid were also credited to Philip Massinger. However those two books were in fact written by a scriptwriter, whose career was mainly played out on British television, using the Massinger name. When he declined to novelise Exposé, Kenelm Clarke himself stepped in to adapt his own work, and inherited the Philip Massinger name. In later life Kenelm Clarke was critical of his own Exposé screenplay, feeling it needed a few months more worth work, and presumably the novelisation was his way of having a second stab at it. His additions to the plot are a mixed bag of positives and negatives, some add extra dimensions to the story, others are questionable choices. As Exposé is at its core a murder mystery in which various unfortunate characters are stabbed to death at the isolated country home of novelist Paul Martin, was it really wise to include an early scene in the book in which Martin's new secretary Linda Hindstatt packs a knife into her suitcase while en route to Martin's country home. Saying that, I suppose you could counter argue that since the book came out two years after the movie, Kenelm Clarke would have been writing it in the knowledge that the majority of his readership would have seen the movie by this point and therefore there wasn't as much point in concealing the killer's identity. As the book's target audience would have been Fiona Richmond's fanbase -she is on the cover and was still very much the selling point- it is no surprise that the book is geared towards the sexploitation market and seizes the opportunity to be more pornographic than the movie was able to be. However what is surprising is that the additional sexed up content here doesn't really relate to Richmond's character Suzanne -Paul's girlfriend referred to at one point as 'darkly lovely, brainless Suzanne' - and is instead allocated to Paul Martin and his secretary Linda, played by Linda Hayden in the movie. In the first major diversion from the movie, we learn that a few years prior to becoming Paul's secretary, young Linda had visited her aunt and uncle in Saint-Tropez to learn the French language. Only to receive a lesson in the language of love, when she is seduced by an older Frenchman. Curiously one of the most well remembered sexual kinks from the film, Paul wearing plastic gloves during sex, isn't in the book. The Exposé novelisation forgoing plastic gloves in favour of muff shaving, with a graphic description of Linda shaving her genitals prior to her date with the French smoothie, Jacques de Chaumont. The film version of Exposé was partly financed by Paul Raymond, renowned publisher of erotica, owner of the Raymond Revuebar and Richmond's wealthy enabler. Raymond's shadowy influence stretches to the novelisation, which adheres to a very Paul Raymond view of the world, with Linda favouring her older, sophisticated French lover, a Marquis no less, over her inexperienced, uncultured boyfriend Colin. As with Raymond's top shelf publications of the time, the Exposé novelisation prides itself on its open minded, sexual libertine stance. Offering a relaxed attitude towards male bisexuality -Linda's sexual limits are tested when she finds Jacques in bed with his male lover Roger Erskine- and enlightened acknowledgement of female sexual frustration, masturbation and orgasm. In fact the book is practically falling over itself to 'acknowledge' those last three topics 'that night, like no other, Roger and Jacques made Linda come several times, each in a different manner'. The novelisation is also very fond of fellatio, and in another show of sexual frankness has no qualms about depicting male homosexually ('Roger's cock had gently slid itself into the mouth of de Chaumont and the Marquis was sucking on it with lazy passion') with all the same enthusiasm as heterosexuality ('and so it came to pass that the first blow job that Linda ever gave was to the Marquis de Chaumont, and as his sperm spurted into her mouth, she loved every minute of it').
Characters in the book also share Paul Raymond's love of wealth, status symbols and the finer things in life. Paul Martin's Rolls Royce agitating two lower class yobbos who sneeringly refer to Linda as a 'Toffee Nosed Git' and 'Hoity Toity', leading to the witty observation 'if they had been in a Cortina Estate, no one would have afforded them a second glance'. Poor Karl Howman, who in the film suffered the indignity of playing a character called 'small youth', here suffers the further indignity of having his character continuously described as having a pumpkin like head. Talk about giving a man a complex! So rather than being called Small Youth in the book he is instead referred to as ‘Pumpkin-head’.  A name that now conjures up images of the Pumpkinhead creature from the horror movie series, rather than the bloke from Brush Strokes.

Just when you think the book is starting to align with the plot of the movie, we then go off on another tangent, as the Roger Erskine story resumes with him trying to make a career for himself as a writer in the cut throat world of Hollywood. Struggling to make ends meet and living in a seedy Sunset Boulevard motel, Roger finds himself having to throw some sex in the direction of Miss Cavendish, a rich, older, married TV executive with the power to make or break the young writer's career. At which point the novelisation resembles a hybrid of Paul Morrissey's Heat and a book by Jackie Collins, right down to some Collins-esque name dropping 'she reminded him of a more wanton Angie Dickinson'. Anyone familiar with the movie version of Exposé will be royally baffled at this point as to why the book is diverting so strongly from it, in order to focus on a seemingly minor and insignificant character as Roger Erskine. Just when it appears the book has lost its way, Kenelm Clarke pulls a blinder and steers it strongly back on course by dropping the bombshell that Roger Erskine is in fact Paul Martin. Erskine having adopted the Paul Martin name when the deal with Cavendish went south and desperation lead him to steal another writer's work. It is tempting to speculate whether the experience of directing a gay actor, Udo Kier, in the role of Paul Martin for the movie, motivated Kenelm Clarke to make the character bi-sexual in the book. Whereas in the film, Paul's heterosexuality is never called into question, in the book even the straight sex that Paul gets up to has homoerotic connotations. After being fellated by Suzanne, Paul notes 'the strange sensation as, now, when kissing her mouth, he tasted the unmistakable memory of his own sex'. Whilst having to put out to Miss Cavendish, Paul consoles himself with the observation that she possesses 'firm, almost boyish buttocks'.

The problem with the extended back stories of Paul and Linda is that, perplexingly, Kenelm Clarke makes little of the incident that pits one of these characters against the other: the suicide of Linda's husband Simon Hindstatt, due to Roger/Paul stealing Simon's novel and passing it off as his own. We learn much about Linda's life in New York, becoming accustomed to the big apple, finding work as a secretary, mixing with the New York elite, none of which is terribly interesting. However, the more significant part of Linda's story....her marriage to Simon, his alcoholism, his work being stolen and his suicide ...is all over in about five sentences. By glossing over the death of her husband, Kenelm Clarke misses the chance to really explore Linda's descent into depression and insanity that would have explained her transformation from easy going English rose to revenge fuelled, cold blooded murderess. Paul's back-story in Hollywood and his relationship with Miss Cavendish feels equally superfluous, other than as an early example of the themes of sex and power that is more strongly conveyed in the novelisation than the film. Cavendish uses her position in the TV world to demand sex from Paul, when he tries to dominate her during sex, she turns on him, dashing his chances of a Hollywood career. After he becomes rich and famous, Paul begins to cruelly treat women as he was once treated by Miss Cavendish, using them for sex then wanting little else to do with them. An attitude that comes back to haunt him in the form of Linda, who he views a potential conquest that he'll eventually become bored with. When she refuses his advances, an ego hurt Paul becomes the weak one, sinking into alcoholism and paranoia. Linda's seduction of his girlfriend Suzanne, which comes across as rather random and gratuitous in the film, takes on greater significance when you're privy to the knowledge that she is essentially doing unto him what he once did unto her. Just as he once posed a homosexual threat to her relationship with Jacques, she now poses a homosexual threat to his relationship to Suzanne. Paul attempts to reassert his power and masculinity by dragging Suzanne away "he would complete this rape with bestial urgency''. Only for Linda to match his actions by later getting rough with the much abused Suzanne, taking on Paul's role by violating her with a strap on...Linda really did think to pack everything. In the ultimate reversal of the power dynamic, Paul dictates his lousy paperback to Linda, only for her to refuse to transcribe his words and humiliates him by instead typing out her own, superior text. Having emasculated him as a man, by stealing his girlfriend away from him, Linda then further emasculates him as an author, by stealing his book away from him.

There is a meta aspect to the Exposé novelisation in that it is a pornographically minded book about an author attempting to write a pornographically minded book, only for the blue prose to refuse to flow. Where I think Kenelm Clarke tries to have his cake and eat it is by parodying bad sex in literature within a book that itself aims to titillate. In that respect, the Exposé novelisation runs the risk of being an example of what it sets out to make fun of. Truth be told there is an extremely blurry line between the cringe worthy nonsense that Paul dictates to Linda ('Then Angus' tongue started it's slow exploration, comma, darting there, comma, playing Anna like a virtuoso with a Stradivarius') and the book's own genuine attempts at arousing material ('She climbed up into a sitting position and sat, gently on his face. He was aware of her scented loins, descending on to his mouth and nose, of how good they smelt, her vagina, her anus').

The film version of Exposé has always been something of a square peg in the round hole of British sexploitation, walking against the crowd by being a straight thriller that wasn't afraid to mix sex with violence in an era when smutty comedy was the norm. If anything the novelisation is even more of a greater abnormality, the additional graphic sex, scenes of male homosexually and decadent globetrotting making it seem more like an adaptation of a nonexistent Radley Metzger film than anything from British sexploitation cinema. For sure the novel is a different beast from the movie, but while this might have caused confusion at the time from people expecting a straightforward, no frills novelisation, in the long term Kenelm Clarke going the extra mile works in its benefit. In book form Exposé now contains everything that people seeking out novelisations tend to look for these days, additional characterization; backstory and answers to questions that the film doesn't provide...just don't go expecting to find out why Paul wears plastic gloves during sex. If you've any interest in the movie, the novelisation is well worth seeking out, since if you've only seen Exposé in movie form, then you've only really seen half of the story Kenelm Clarke wanted to tell, the other half is in this book. Chances are though that the only way you'll be able to experience the book these days is as a PDF which can be found in the shady corners of the internet...if you know, you know... physical copies have been known to fetch the kind of prices that only those with a Paul Raymond sized bank balance could justify paying. The now prohibitively expensive price of the book likely due to the fact that it belongs to that rare breed of novels based on films that ended up on the 'final 39' Video Nasty list. An exclusive club that includes Herschell Gordon Lewis' novelisation of Blood Feast, recent novelisations of Night of the Demon and Mardi Gras Massacre by Brad Carter, and Love Camp 7, which was novelised in 1970 by Harry Burns as Sex Camp 7. Presumably the original title of that movie being too subtle for the sex paperback market.

Speaking of re-titlings, one of the main giveaways that Kenelm Clarke was the author of this book is the constant references to the main location as 'The House on Straw Hill'. Which if you didn't know, was Kenelm Clarke's original and preferred title for the movie, Exposé being a title that was forced on it by a distributor. All these years later, history has favoured Kenelm Clarke. What with The House on Straw Hill becoming the more common and popular title for the film, with few ever referring to it as Exposé anymore. Given that the novelisation breaks with the claustrophobic, singular setting of the movie and whisks characters off to Saint Tropez, New York and Hollywood, it could perhaps be dubbed...Beyond the Valley of The House on Straw Hill.

The Bornless Keeper (1974, Gordon Williams)

 

In-between writing The Siege of Trencher's Farm -the source novel for Straw Dogs- and teaming up with footballer Terry Venables to write the Hazell series of private detective novels, author Gordon Williams made a one-shot stab at folk horror with 1974's The Bornless Keeper.

Peacock Island, owned by the rich, reclusive Bennett Family, is the subject of a curse that has kept the residents of the nearby village of Mundham at bay for decades. "Tread ye on this sacred dell, The Bornless Keeper ye shall see, pointing the road to hell". When Lady Bennett, the last of her line, dies of natural causes, and her corpse is cannibalized by rats, the authorities discover that the Bornless Keeper, a part man, part bird creature protecting the island from intruders, might be more than just an urban myth. Looking for a scoop, a crass TV crew trespasses onto the island, intent on making a documentary about the Bornless Keeper, only to be picked off one by one by the feathered fiend, who has a penchant for slashing throats and plucking out eyeballs.

If you think the horror novels of John Halkin had an axe to grind with the TV industry, then Gordon Williams wants you to hold his beer. Williams' TV crew are a cutthroat, backstabbing bunch. Cameraman Puggy Elder, might be the closest thing to a decent member of the team, but even he is willing to potentially lose his wife and children over his silly infatuation with Victoria Dryden-Chambers, an emotionally frigid career woman with a cruel streak. Victoria has been recently made executive producer of the TV company, and is very much flying the flag for women's lib, bringing her into conflict with underling producer Julian Maltravers, an acid tongued, chauvinistic dandy who thinks her job should have been his. Williams' characters are unlikable, but never uninteresting; conflicts between Victoria and Julian drive the narrative, while their bitchy, verbal punching matches animate it. Puggy might be a 'love-sick, middle aged dope' when it comes to Victoria, but she has her eyes wickedly set on Julian, if only because seducing him would give her power over him. 'You'll weaken Julian, oh yes you will' she tells herself whilst admiring her own nude body in a mirror 'then we'll see who does the mocking'. When Victoria successfully stirs the long dormant heterosexuality in the camp Julian, it leads to the hilarious line "it was a long time since he had thought about breasts".

Nearly all the major characters in the book have their guards up, emotionally speaking, provoking hostility in others, who resent what they can't understand. Victor Daniels, a detective inspector who has moved to Mundham from London, is viewed with suspicion by locals and even co-workers who speculate amongst themselves that his decampment was the result of police corruption, cowardliness or loss of nerve. While Maltravers' aversion to women, and apparent homosexually, turns out to have been the result of a childhood sexual assault by a predatory woman. Leading Julian to confront Victoria with "what do women's libbers say about the possibility of rape by a woman? By a much older woman on a frightened boy?". Sexual trauma is something of a reoccurring theme here, Victoria's lack of interest in men, and unwillingness to jump into bed with them is born out of being sexually abused by her uncle. Daniels' investigation also leads him to an uncouth old lag called Sidney Marley who narrowly survived an attack by the Bornless Keeper in the 1950s, and is now rumoured to be in an incestuous relationship with his own daughter 'Daniels found himself making a mental note of the man's interest in children'. While reading this part of the book, I couldn't help think of Arthur Mullard playing this role in a film version of The Bornless Keeper, but can't decide if this was down to Mullard matching Williams' description of the character, or whether disturbing, posthumous rumours about Mullard were the reason for that imaginary piece of casting. When it comes to this book, you don't have to be sexually messed up to be a character in it...but it helps. Somehow also figuring within it's pages is an Irish dwarf, whose schizophrenia sometimes causes him to believe he is own, dead, puritanical mother...a subject matter handled with all the sensitivity you'd expect from the 1970s.

The Bornless Keeper is the type of book that gives off a Wicker Man type vibe upon approaching it, although after reading it, and knowing all it's secrets, you'd be more inclined to cite 'Tower of Evil' as a more accurate British horror film comparison. Like Tower of Evil, The Bornless Keeper could lay the slightest of claim for providing the blueprint for the slasher genre to come.
The spectre of The Siege of Trencher's Farm, and Straw Dogs, also looms over The Bornless Keeper. There's conflict arising from the new world intruding on the old one. Daniels is very much the David Sumner of the book, an outsider, disliked and distrusted by the locals who call his masculinity into question. Daniels attempts to bury himself away in a 'peaceful' setting, only to find himself having to confront the violent side of his nature that he thought he'd left behind in the big city. The Bornless Keeper, when he is eventually revealed, is akin to the Henry Niles character in The Siege of Trencher's Farm/Straw Dogs.... a confused, pitiful figure, without the capacity to understand his own violent actions. There seems to have been little love loss between Williams and Straw Dogs' director Sam Peckinpah. The latter referred to The Siege of Trencher's Farm as a 'rotten book' and Williams publically denounced Peckinpah's film of his novel, particularly the rape scene, which isn't in the original book. Surprisingly then that Williams provides an almost identical rape scene in The Bornless Keeper which begins with "oh no, please don't, please, oh no" and ends with "don't stop, don't stop". If anything the rape in The Bornless Keeper is even more troubling than the one in Straw Dogs. What with the victim initially play acting consent out of self-preservation 'telling herself over and over again she was doing this to save her life, she began to coil her legs round his hard body' only to then begin to get authentically turned on by it, and ending with her feeling physically, and possibly even emotionally, attracted to her rapist. There's also the implication that the rape helps the victim overcome the trauma of an earlier sexual assault, according to this book, two rapes do make a right.

Perhaps because of this graphic scene, or perhaps because it invites comparisons with the Peckinpah adaptation of his earlier work, Williams used the pen name 'P.B. Yuill' for the The Bornless Keeper. The author biography in the hardback edition merely stating 'P.B. Yuill is a pseudonym. The author doesn't want his real identity disclosed'. A few years later, Williams would resurrect the Yuill name, using it as a joint pseudonym for himself and Terry Venables, when they were co-writing the Hazell novels. Much as I like the idea of Terry Venables co-writing a folk horror novel, all evidence however points to The Bornless Keeper being entirely written by Williams.

For an author whose work- the Siege of Trencher's Farm excepted- was mainly played out in an urban environment, Williams has a real talent, and seemingly affection, for a location that has truly been taken back by nature. Peacock Island is a dark fairy tale land of brambles, thorns, spider’s webs, decaying cottages and harsh woodlands. There is possibly an overkill when it comes to descriptions of the great, but sinister outdoors in the book, you feel like you should be getting green fingers from turning the pages over, but it's a wonderfully atmospheric read, of that there can be no doubt. Inadvertently adding to the experience is the fact that my copy, an ex-library one last hired out in February 1979, has this old, damp smell to it, with a slight aroma of sea air, as if it's been locked in an attic like a mad relative for the last forty years. Which feels exactly how a book such as this should smell, whenever I open it, that smell hits me, immersing me in all things folk horror and what I like to call 'odour de Bornless Keeper'.

 

An Iowa Inferno (1975)

Now on YouTube, we discuss 'An Iowa Inferno: An Erotic Story of Forbidden Lust' (1975) a charming book about incest, bikers, sex with Cthulhu and a woman's unhealthy obsession with Richard Nixon. Clive and Nick talk about the book, I mostly cry with laughter.