Back to the Eighties: LIPSTICK AND BLOOD (1986)

In a room whose walls are gradually being taken up by pornographic pin-ups, a sickly looking, pigeon- chested man rises from his bed to contemplate his image in the mirror, a mirror with `whores hate their clients' scrawled onto it in red lipstick. Mediocre rock music on the soundtrack combines with the pinned up photos of Debee Ashby and Debbie Linden to clue you into the fact that you're watching a film from the Eighties. Computer generated credits –again a very 1980s touch- are juxtaposed with flash forward highlights of the film you are about to see. Names in the credits… `Kaleb King'….. `Robert Bauer'… all sound suspiciously like Lindsay Shonteff or various Shonteff family members hiding out under pseudonyms in order to make the film look like it had a larger crew than it probably did, a familiar trait of Shonteff's.

Lipstick and Blood marked a new, if rather brief, period in Shonteff's career that saw him shooting films on videotape. A medium generally frowned upon by industry veterans and mainly being the preserve of fledgling filmmakers and 1980s entrepreneurs. Maybe the appearance of these upstarts, and the likes of GBH, Suffer Little Children and Death Shock appearing in video rental shops convinced Shonteff that the British exploitation genre might get a second life as shot on video productions, but the `video nasties' furore, the advent of enforced video classification and prohibitively expensive costs of getting a video certificate meant that shot on video horror and exploitation would never really flourish here in the UK in the way that it would do in the States. Apparently dissatisfied with the look of video, Shonteff returned to shooting on film soon after, belatedly returning to video, albeit digital video for his final two films `Ice Cold in Phoenix' and `Angels, Devils and Men'.

Lipstick and Blood concerns the intertwining fates of Jennie (Jane Linter) a part time stripper who has only taken that job as a way of paying for her upcoming marriage, and Jay Preston (Joseph Peters) the porn obsessed man seen in the credits. A sweaty, delusional mess of a character, when Jay isn't murdering prostitutes or ranting at a blow-up doll ("you smell like plastic, rotten whore") Jay is being mesmerized by Jennie's turns at the local stripclub, building up a fantasy relationship between the two of them in his head. Attempts to make this relationship a reality unsurprisingly meet with zero success, "are you going to talk to her, or just sit here and play with yourself" he hisses at himself in his car, following a botched job of introducing himself to her. Constantly trailing Jennie inevitably leads Jay to discover her double life as a stripper/bride to be. The revelation that she has a boyfriend truly sending Jay over the edge, causing Jay to abduct her at gunpoint, repeatedly rape her and take her along with him on a killing spree.

The further you stroll through the Shonteff back catalogue the more two different types of films emerge, there are silly, sight gang ridden ones like Number One Gun and Licensed to Love and Kill, goodtime films designed to leave you with a goofy smile on your face and which don't take themselves or anything else in this world too seriously. Then there are the other Shonteff films, ones that are as dark as the other ones are light. The Fast Kill……..Night After Night, After Night……..Permissive, films full of blackhearted characters driven by dog eat dog agendas and destined for unhappy endings.

Shonteff films born out of his mind-set tend to exhibit a moths to the flame type fascination for misogynistic characters, consider Gilbert Wynne's roadie in Permissive, the chauvinistic and proud of it film producer of The Yes Girls, virtually every male character in Night After Night, After Night, and Kono, the evil pimp supervillian of Big Zapper. Lipstick and Blood represents the culmination of Shonteff's fixation for woman haters, elevating this reoccurring stock character of his from supporting creep to lead role. Echoes of Shonteff's earlier monsters are very evident in Jay Preston, like the judge and the weaselly clerk of Night After Night, After Night Jay is a man drawn to pornography for all the worse reasons, with the pornographic pin-ups he surrounds himself with fuelling his self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy and hostility. Shonteff also gives Jay, Kono's characteristic of wildly diverting away from a calm conversation into intense, fuming rants, shouted through gritted teeth, in a way that is alternately unnerving and amusing.

Unfortunately the first half of Lipstick and Blood is almost a total disaster, with casting and credibility issues being reoccurring problems with it. Jay's first victim for instance looks nothing like the jaded, aged prostitute she is meant to be, instead coming across as a clean cut, middle aged lady on her way home from a jolly Ann Summers party. Its also hard to ignore the absence of believably in scenes such as the one where Jay pulls a magnum on two men at the strip club, actions that mysteriously go unnoticed by any of the other punters or Jennie herself who is performing onstage and blatantly within view of all this madness. Worse still Shonteff's eye for location work, so strong in the 1970s, is notably absent here. The glimpses we get of Jennie's parent's home paint a picture of a cosy, middle class family whose offspring is unlikely to have to slum it as a stripper in order to get by. The strip club itself also appears to be located, slap bang in the middle of the same affluent neighbourhood, which in reality would surely never allow such a dubious venue (whose owners have a side-line in gun running!) to exist on their doorstep. Tellingly we only get to see the strip club from its back entrance, but even these fleeting appearances strike up the wrong note, looking more like the exterior of a swimming baths or library. There is none of the authentic sleaziness of say "Don't Open Till Christmas" on display here.

Just when you're about to give Lipstick and Blood up as a cinematic loser though the film finds a purpose to itself as Jay's motivation shifts from being perverse to being materialistic and a grotesque emulation of the yuppie aspirations of the time. He drools over a flash, gold coloured Lincoln Continental with an equal amount of desire that he'd previously lavished on Jennie, goes on to befriend and murder the car's American tourist owners in order to steal the vehicle, robs a petrol station, killing the owner in the process, then uses the cash from the robbery to hold up in a series of classy motels. By this stage Jay has acquired everything young men were meant to aim for at the time, the money, the big car, the glamorous trophy girlfriend/wife, but this upturn in his lifestyle fails to bring Jay any real pleasure or contentment. Scenes of him and Jennie hold up in the motel rooms could be mistaken for peeks into a rapidly deteriorating marriage, he idly flicks between TV channels, she stars into space, he unleashes a barrage of verbal abuse and control freak nit-picking, complaining she is terrible at sex and smells. "What’s the matter with you, we're driving a nice car, we've got money, why don't you cheer up" he whines at her. The irony is that for all his extreme actions Jay is in no better place than he was at the start of the film with his squalid flat and blow-up doll. He has merely traded in one sort of claustrophobic environment and non-responsive partner for another.

The entire kidnapping angle expires in a way that manages to be both surprising and utterly undramatic, leaving the final act of Lipstick and Blood to morph into a rape/revenge film. One that finds Jay continuing to pop up in Jennie's life and murder her loved ones, resulting in Jennie turning female vigilante in order to average their deaths and finally rid herself of the trouble making pervert. As far as rape/revenge films go Lipstick and Blood is an example of the genre that is outrageous in some respects and very restrained in others. Shonteff spares you no crude detail when it comes to Jay, from him sniffing a pair of Jennie's knickers during a murderous assault on a suburban couples home, to him blaming Jennie for his constipation trouble ("marvellous, I can't even shit, stomachs a mess… it’s your fault"). On the other hand Shonteff keeps the rapes off-screen and the violence is limited to bloody-but unexceptional- shootings and switchblade stabbings. Making you speculate if the backlash against violent films in 1980s Britain had caused Shonteff to lose his nerve and deliver a less savage film than he intended, or whether lead actress Jane Linter had had reservations over the film's content and Lipstick and Blood was toned down to accommodate her requirements. The film itself would edge you towards believing the latter as its especially well behaved around her character, giving the film a problem it shares with the British horror stinker `I Don't Want to be Born' and the more recent Lindsay Lohan vehicle `I Know Who Killed Me', of convincing the audience that its main female character has a successful career as a stripper even though she never takes her clothes off onstage. By far the strangest scene in this respect involves Jay forcing Jennie to take a shower while he watches, yet despite Jay already established as being a stone cold pervert he insists on her showering with all her clothes on! Close-ups of Linter's fully clothed chest during this scene feel like a desperate ploy to claw back some titillation aspect to the scene.

To add to the film's multitude of problems not only did Jane Linter appear to have had a non-nudity cause in her contract but a non-acting clause in it too, and this one movie wonder pretty much sleepwalks her way through the entire running time. Now admittedly there are points in Lipstick and Blood where her emotional detachment is cleverly utilised into being one of the film's strengths, especially during Jay's realisation that the woman he has built up in his head as sexy and vibrant is in fact a dull, non-entity in real life. Such moments however can't disguise the fact that Linter is the film's weak link, her bored facial expressions are a void where the film's heart and soul should be, and her pleas of `please let me go' and `please don't touch me' are unintentionally funny due to the lack of conviction they are delivered with.

Oddly –considering Jennie is meant to be the heroine of the piece- Shonteff continually puts space between the audience and this character by failing to depict scenes that would give the audience a chance to relate to or sympathise with her. Not only does Shonteff gloss over the rapes and there effect on her, but jumps from Jennie about to discover her parents have been murdered by Jay to nine months later when she has sufficiently recovered from the shock and the grieving process. Baffling, alienating, decisions that indicate Shonteff either lost interest in the character or lost confidence in his actress to deliver the emotional punches that these scenes required of her.

What could have been a spirited two hander then, ends up one long stare into Jay's rotten soul, and an unsympathetic attempt to work out what makes this character tick. As with all his other misogynistic characters, there is no evidence that Shonteff likes or is in awe of Jay, on the contrary there isn't a scene in the film that isn't deliberately calculated to turn the audience against this character. Its as if Shonteff wanted to pin down, study and rage against everything he felt was wrong with men and the inherently ruthless nature of the era though this one character, allowing Jay to damn himself and everything the character represented by giving him an entire film to behave in the cruellest, vilest manner possible.

Lipstick and Blood can certainly lay claim to uniqueness, after all there are very few British made examples of the rape/revenge film, in spite of the genre arguably having UK roots thanks to Sam Peckinpah and Straw Dogs. The satirical jibes at yuppie culture and the serial killer turned yuppie concept are also atypical touches, given that the 1980s British horror film was a largely apolitical beast, with only Saxon Logan's Sleepwalker (1984) and the borderline horrors of Britannia Hospital (1982) and Ray Davies' Return to Waterloo (1984) holding up a mirror to those turbulent times. Its a pity then that Lipstick and Blood's flaws conspire to bring it down, chalking it up as yet another 1980s Lindsay Shonteff film that has smart ideas and inspired moments but ultimately fails to fulfil its true potential.

Bedabbled magazine

Just a quick shout out for Bedabbled #3 which I received in the post the other day and contains some fine pieces on the last two Hammer Dracula films, Mike Raven, Incense for the Damned (plus interview with Francoise Pascal about said film). According to their blog this issue has already sold out its print run, however I’ve had an email from Martin telling me that “there are still copies on the Strange Vice and Hemlock Books sites” should anyone fancy picking up any of the few remaining copies. Incidentally I’ve been asked to pen material for the 4th issue, which has given me the excuse to revisit films that are very dear to me, and write up a few that I don’t think I’ve ever properly nailed before. Issue 4# looks to be due around summer 2013.
http://bedabbled.blogspot.co.uk/

Psychomania video cover

I’ve seen Psychomania a dozen times over the years but couldn’t resist picking up this video release whilst in the states recently just for the inspired cover alone, depicting what appears to be a zombified Charles Manson on a bike!! Psychomania seems to have had numerous video releases in the states during the 80s and 90s, in contrast in the UK where as far as I’m aware it never had a post-cert video release, I guess it (and Crucible of Terror) were so common on late night British TV during that period that no one thought it was worth putting out on tape.

Collinson Twins Birthday Card

Tesco Birthday Card featuring the Collinson Twins

Review: Moralpisser (Harrison Marks, 197?)

As regular readers of this blog will know George Harrison Marks is a filmmaker frequently championed around these parts. Aside from perhaps Derek Ford, no one quite personalised the British sex film as much as Marks. With his early 8mm glamour films and big screen outings like ‘The 9 Ages of Nakedness’ Marks reshaped the genre into his own little universe. Resulting in films whose plots were a showcase for Marks’ vivid imagination, starred the women he knew and loved, featured his mates (Stuart Samuels, Tony Roberts, Howard Nelson) in bit parts, and consolidated Marks’ damaged ego as a failed 1950s variety performer by not only making him famous, but allowing him to get his face and personality in front of the camera. The enthralling aspect to Marks is that the full extent of his career has clearly yet to be documented, what with forgotten or anonymously made 8mm films constantly resurfacing, fuelling further interest in the man, his times and his work, as well as rewarding the inquisitive.

A particularly exciting discovery of late is Marks’ hardcore short ‘Moralpisser’. Likely to have been made in the mid-seventies, it is from a time when Marks was still investing a degree of creativity into his hardcore sex films, and just before he began to find making them a chore, resulting in the films themselves deteriorating into generic, 9 to 5 pornography. A bit of detective work suggests that Moralpisser was a hardcore take on a storyline Marks had also used for a softcore short of his called ‘Medium Rare’. While I have yet to see Medium Rare- which starred a bewigged Monique Deveraux- a plot synopsis of that film matches up with the one in Moralpisser, with both films concerning phony mediums whose powers aren’t as inauthentic as they think. The premise of Moralpisser, which is worthy of a connecting sequence in an Amicus horror anthology, sees five strangers meeting up for a séance at the flat of a renowned medium. Four of this bunch (3 gals and 1 guy) are played by little known 1970s porn performers, the odd one out is a bearded older man who seems strangely familiar…… yes, its Marks himself, unable to keep his face off camera, in spite of the fact that he was meant to be directing the film anonymously.

 

Moralpisser captures Marks at possibly the most dilapidated he ever appeared on film. His unshaven appearance, hung-over demeanour and long greasy hair is both testament to his lifestyle having caught up with him by the 1970s and all of the good times he must have had to end up looking that way. Marks is strictly in this film for comic relief, throwing in a few effeminate glances and shrugs at his female co-stars, which recalls all the mincing about he did in The Window Dresser years beforehand. The actor playing the medium, who is attired in a kaftan worthy of Demis Roussos, is recognizable from umpteen soft and hardcore Marks shorts from this period (fellow porn actor Short Jack Gold recalls this man’s first name being ‘Paul’). The séance quickly gets underway and involves the motely group holding hands, swaying about and orgasmically moaning in an attempt to contact the spirit world. All however is not as it seems given that the medium has a couple of tricks up his sleeve, quite literally as the ‘hands’ of his the others are holding onto are actually false hands. While the others are caught up in the séance, the medium uses his real hands (which are hidden under the table) to operate a reel to reel tape recorder that plays soothing music designed to place the others into a trance. With everyone well and truly under the medium’s spell his guests are all instructed into another room, all except poor old Marks who is left on his lonesome at the table, and continues to sway about and mumble nonsense to the spirit world. Once the others are in the next room the amorous nature of the medium’s dastardly plan becomes apparent, with everyone ordered to disrobe which soon leads on to the medium presiding over a sex orgy. All very clever and conniving, even if you can’t help feeling that there must have been an easier way for a moderately handsome, big dicked fellow like him to get laid in the 1970s other than to pose as a medium and employ a set of fake hands and hypnotising music. Still, on the basis of what we see onscreen it was evidently worth all the effort, and the medium gets to have his wicked way with each of the three women, all of whom seem to dig him sexually. Enthusiastic performances, a variety of sexual positions and a more than average amount of money shots in this one present a convincing case for the cast having had a whale of a time making the film.

 

Marks’ previous shorts from the 1970s like A Night at the Bistro Bordello and Dolly Mixture, had been shot at a studio in Faulkner’s Alley and benefited from the set designs of Tony Roberts, who had transformed Marks’ studio into a French Bistro for the former and a mad scientist’s laboratory for the latter. Sadly this was a luxury unavailable to Marks by the time of Moralpisser (reportedly the landlord at the Faulkner’s Alley studio kicked Marks out when he discovered what was being filmed there), which was instead made at the place Marks called home, a ground floor flat at 'The Hall', an apartment block on Grove End Road in St. John’s Wood, a place Marks had been living at since the mid-1960s. To watch Marks’ films from the 1960s and 1970s is to become extremely familiar with this place, it pops up constantly as a filming location in his work during that period. Shooting at his own gaff offering the obvious benefit of privacy to Marks, which would have been essential given the legal question mark that existed over shooting blue movies during this period. Marks’ very own bed is the setting for the sex orgy centrepiece of Moralpisser. Tony Roberts’ sets and creative input might be noticeable by their absence in Moralpisser, but Marks’ own abode is every bit as visually striking as any film set, with each room seemingly boasting its own colour scheme. Bright reds worthy of double decker buses and telephone boxes appear as the dominant colour of choice for Marks’ living room, which has red walls, red chairs, a red table, pretty much red everything. It’s the kind of place that you suspect you’d never be able to forget if you’d ever been there, in fact I’d wager a bet that even today Moralpisser cast members would still be able to recall the day they ventured into Marks’ ‘red room’. Conveniently for Marks it lends itself well to doubling as the lair of a fake medium here, making you wonder if Marks hadn’t made this comparison himself and dreamt up the narrative for this film on that basis.

 

Just to get slightly get away from Moralpisser for the moment, and go all Sherlock Holmes on everyone, also present in Marks’ living room and visible in Moralpisser are several yellowed documents that Marks had put on display on his walls, preserved inside of picture frames with distinct, gold coloured edges. My memory bank of minute details remembered from 1970s porn tells me that the same framed documents appeared as background in a hardcore lesbian shoot that ran in the continental porn magazine ‘Pleasure’. A shoot that is notable for featuring a pre-fame Mary Millington participating in mixed combo action with an afroed black woman and masturbating with a banana (see here). The presence of the framed documents and the further giveaway of bright red walls in the Pleasure magazine shoot meaning that Marks must have taken these photographs of Mary at his Grove End Road pad at some point in time. The fact that the photos capture Mary prior to her nose job and the work done on her teeth, indicates they were taken before her meeting David Sullivan in 1975, and points to them being from very early on in her career. Whilst it is now known that Mary did work for Marks before Come Play With Me, by starring in his softcore short ‘Sex is My Business’, the Pleasure magazine photo-shoot is the first evidence to emerge of Marks employing her in a hardcore capacity in her early days too. Somehow though I doubt the current residents of 'The Hall' in Grove End Road - a building which still stands- will be in any hurry to erect a blue plaque commemorating the fact that Marks made blue films there, or that Mary Millington once pleasured herself with a banana on the premises.

Marks’ ‘red room’ in Moralpisser

Everything about Moralpisser from Marks’ played for laughs cameo to the good time sex scenes have a light-hearted tone to them, leading you to assume that the film will end on a similar note. So it comes as a surprise when Marks royally pulls the rug from under us by taking things in the completely opposite direction. Finally exhausted from all the sex they’ve been having the medium and his guests return back to the séance expecting to find Marks there on his own. Instead they are confronted by the sight of themselves still sitting around the table. The medium and his guests scream wildly at this sight, as the versions of themselves sat around the table turn around and glower at them menacingly. The final shot in the film sees them vanishing into thin air. It’s a puzzler of an ending; have the medium and his guests been dead all along? or have their bodies become possessed by evil spirits during the séance?, or did the séance cause them to lose their souls which drifted away for an orgy and failed to realise they’d become separated from their bodies till the shock ending? Whichever way you interpret this, it is a chilling conclusion and one that takes you totally off guard. Like the onscreen characters, the audience really got more than they bargained for in their pursuit of sexual cheap thrills with Moralpisser, but you can’t help admire the mischievous nature in Marks for pulling a head wrecker of a twist like that on his audience who probably didn’t expect it to be the hairs on the back of their necks that were left standing by the film. So that’s Moralpisser then, a film with laughs, another memorable Marks cameo, raunchy sex, a horror movie worthy ending and clues to a hitherto unknown Marks/Mary Millington connection. What more could you ask for from 1970s pornography?, to quote the board held up by Marks at the end of his 1964 glamour film The Four Poster “what do you want blood?”
 

Stanley Long RIP 1933-2012

Veteran British sex filmmaker Stanley Long died earlier this week aged 78. I can’t make any claim to have known him, save for several email exchanges a few years ago in which he voiced dissatisfaction over the current DVD releases of his films The Wife Swappers and Groupie Girl, and tried to persuade me to buy the then forthcoming DVD boxset of his ‘Adventures of a…’ series instead… not that I needed much persuading there. I did though have a hand in reuniting him with a copy of his 1975 rarity ‘It Could Happen to You’ and his early 8mm glamour film ‘Beauty and the Beast’, and I may have once pissed him off by writing up a certain fact concerning his unmade 1979 horror film ‘Plasmid’.

The British sex film genre could boast to having many distinct characters (Derek Ford, Antony Balch, Harrison Marks) each with their own unique way of looking at the world, but Long had a brilliant, finger on the pulse intuition over what the British public wanted to see. To the degree that his career not only spans the entire history of the genre but also acts as a microcosm of its various trends and changing attitudes. Long was there right from the start, shooting 8mm glamour films in the late 1950s and his subsequent feature film career encompasses the carefree nudist film boom of the early 60s to the cautionary ‘tut, tut and leer’ approach of his mega hit The Wife Swappers at the decade’s end, before the more relaxed attitude of the early 70s allowed Long the chance to make more overtly comic sex films like Sex and the Other Woman, culminating in his massively popular ‘Adventures’ films, beginning with Adventures of a Taxi Driver in 1975, followed by Adventures of a Private Eye in 1977, and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate in 1978. Success after success within the genre proved that Long was far more in touch with the tastes of the average man on the street than any so-called film ‘experts’ or critics. To this day cinema snobs still recoil in disgust over the fact that Long’s Adventures of a Taxi Driver out grossed Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver during its original run, but clearly as far as 1975 was concerned the average British cinemagoer was more interested in seeing Barry Evans lose his trousers then they were in seeing Robert De Niro losing his marbles.

While many British sex films fell into obscurity during the 1980s and 1990s the Adventures films -along with the Confessions series- continued to be kept in circulation via video releases and late night TV airings- ensuring these films played a vital part in forming the public’s mental image of what 1970s British sex comedies were all about. Outside of sex films Long also acted as cinematographer on The Blood Beast Terror (1967)- shooting its ridiculous moth woman monster, and became a footnote to the careers of Roman Polanski and Michael Reeves by acting as cameraman on Repulsion (1965) and The Sorcerers (1967), going way beyond the call of duty for the latter by agreeing to being strapped to the top of a police car in order to film the climactic car chase.

Personally my own introduction to Long’s films –and the two that made the biggest impression on me- were The Wife Swappers (1969) and Eskimo Nell (1974), surely the genre’s most unintentionally and intentionally funniest moments. How can anyone ever forget The Wife Swappers?, after all there isn’t a single scene in that film that isn’t memorable for some reason or another, whether it is the sight of Leonard and his wife who has fallen victim to a post-dubbing job, the hopeless actor being passed off as an ‘eminent London psychiatrist’ who is only convincing as a psychiatrist in the sense that it is hard to believe he was a proper actor, or such hysterical dialogue as “you’ve taken the act of love and dirtied it”.

 

With Eskimo Nell, Long got to have his cake and eat it by producing a satire on the very film industry he himself lorded over, sending up everyone from crooked film distributors to the Whitehouse/Longford/Festival of Light mob. Catching up with that film in the 1990s, further piqued my curiosity over the film world that Eskimo Nell lampooned and encouraged me to delve deeper into Britain’s saucy past.



 



I suspect Long rarity, if ever, saw any decent critical notices for his films while he was making them “a ninth rate skin flick with the ugliest, spottiest, dirtiest assembly of misshapen non-actors since Tod Browning’s Freaks” was Films and Filming’s take on Groupie Girl, “listless documentary about prostitution through the ages, with lots of hammy recreations from different periods. All the women have exceptionally large breasts” moaned Time Out on the subject of 1973’s On the Game. So it was rather gratifying to see a recent flurry of critical interest in Long’s films, with his ‘London in the Raw’ and ‘Primitive London’ both being screened at the BFI Southbank and released on DVD and Blu-Ray, inspiring highbrow reappraisals in the likes of The Guardian. After years of deriding the genre Long worked in ‘the intelligentsia’ had finally come grovelling. Long himself began making regular appearances at film screenings and conventions, as well as popping up on such disparate television programmes as Balderdash and Piffle, British Film Forever and the antiques show Trust Me I’m a Dealer. Even forgotten obscurities like West End Jungle (1961) managed to get dusted off, released on DVD, screened on BBC4 and inspire a Marc Almond music video (2010’s ‘Varity’). Sad as Long’s passing is, and that such a vital link to our cinematic past is now gone, there is the reassuring knowledge that he lived long enough to see his films being appreciated again, and got to tell all (or at least as much as libel laws would allow) in his 2008 biography ‘X Rated - Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker’.

Check out the book and the DVD releases. The former is full of great stories about his life and times, and the films themselves are rich in memorable moments. I know sights like the badly made up Marilyn Monroe lookalike in West End Jungle, a bunch of actors pretending to be beatniks eating what is meant to be cat food but was actually tins of tuna in London in the Raw, Jane Cardew’s breasts in Sex and the Other Woman, and the maniacal Punch and Judy man in Screamtime, will forever be burnt into my grey matter. Stanley Long was responsible for all of that, and I’m very grateful for it.

 

Long strapped to the top of a car during the making of The Sorcerers

8mm sex film adverts

A selection of 8mm sex film ads from the 60s and 70s


“whatever your tastes, fuck films are fun. And although there’s still room for improvement, it’s a most enjoyable way to spend an hour”- Antony Balch, 1972.