Book Review: Wheels of Light: Designs for British Light Shows 1970-1990 by Kevin Foakes (Four Corners, 2022)

Ever since I first began to develop an interest in psychedelic rock as a teenager, the elusive presence of those bubbling, multi-layered liquid light shows which we’re led to believe routinely accompanied performances and ‘happenings’ during the 1960s has always fascinated me. Although I’ve only been lucky enough to witness proper, analogue light shows on a few (distant and poorly remembered) occasions, I feel that they represent an underappreciated and under-utilised DIY art form which has never really been given its due over the over the years.

As such, I was immediately on-board when I learned that Kevin Foakes (aka DJ Food) had a new book coming out via the estimable Four Corners Irregulars imprint, cataloguing his researches into the history of light shows in the UK.

The first thing to note here is that, by Foakes’ own admission, visual evidence of the development of light shows during the ‘60s is sketchy in the extreme. Over the course of a few pages, we learn that the ‘bubbling coloured oil’ type lighting effects primarily associated with the psychedelic era were first brought to these shores in 1964, when avant garde practitioners Mark Boyle and Joan Hills (aka The Boyle Family) utilised them in a series of stand-alone environmental art pieces in central London.

At some point thereafter, Boyle and Hills hooked up with the legendary UFO Club, presenting their, dangerous and occasionally explosive, lighting techniques as but one element of the full spectrum sensory overload envisioned by UFO founders Joe Boyd and John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, no doubt inspiring the eager young practitioners who in turn went on to create way-out lighting experiences for the likes of Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and Dantalian’s Chariot.

It was from this hallowed scene that the first business centred around hiring/selling liquid light show equipment - Krishna Lights, based at 13 Goodge St - emerged, but, with this important pre-history established, ‘Wheels of Light’ swiftly leaves the psychedelic splendour of the ‘60s far behind, focusing instead on the leaner years of the 1970s, when a more established commercial niche for light show projection equipment began to emerge, its focus necessarily becoming more diffuse, both geographically and aesthetically.

By the early ‘70s, specialist retailers like Optikinetics, Pluto and Orion were operating not out of the trendy West End, but from shop fronts and industrial units in such far-flung locales as Luton, Colchester and Penge. Though there was some crossover of personnel from the UFO/Floyd days, these enterprises were staffed not by acid-guzzling hippie agitators, but by nerdy blokes with backgrounds in electronics or engineering, who saw an opportunity to make a living from lenses, bulbs and moulded plastic gizmos.

And, naturally enough, as the excesses of psychedelic rock fell out of fashion, and as the scene’s surviving practitioners moved on to bigger venues and more professional/purpose-built stage shows, these firms needed to widen their remit, appealing to a broader and potentially more mainstream range of potential customers.

But, who in the hell might they be, exactly?! This is the unanswered question which lies behind much of the more curious material in ‘Patterns of Light’, as the book becomes less a celebration of the psychedelic counter-culture, and more of an exploration of a previously neglected form of suburban folk-art, very much in line with Four Corners’ earlier, excellent, volumes on CB Radio Cards and UFO drawings.

By the point at which most of the material in this book was created, projected light shows had largely abandoned the messy and dangerous business of bubbling inks and oils, and - at least in their commercial capacity - were instead largely centred around the use of customised (or custom built) slide projectors. These could be loaded up with either 3” ‘effects cassettes’, used to generate abstract, kaleidoscopic / op-art patterns such as the one seem on the book’s cover, or larger 6” ‘picture wheels’, which allowed a rolling, circular display of themed artwork to be projected in magnified form - and it is on the latter that most of Foakes’ book naturally concentrates.

Probably the most famous examples of these ‘picture wheels’ are the ones created by ‘space artist’ David A. Hardy for Hawkwind’s ‘Space Ritual’ tour in 1972, and subsequently reproduced as part of the artwork for the resulting live album and sold under license by Optikinetics.

 

‘Space Ritual’ wheel by David A. Hardy

So far, so psychedelic, and indeed, this kind of traditionally ‘way out’ imagery remained a proponent component of the lighting companies’ product over the years. At the same time though, many of the picture wheels reproduced herein date from 1977, ‘78 or ’79, by which point surely no remotely fashionable rock band or night club would countenance the idea of using a projected light show at all, let alone subject their audiences to the unhinged mixture of kid’s bedroom wallpaper designs, seaside postcard sleaze and new age kitsch being proffered at the time by Pluto or Orion.

I mean, can you even imagine what kind of terminally naff event would make use of Orion’s ‘punk rock’ picture wheel (featuring Beano-esque figures of mohawked thugs stomping around vibrating amplifiers), never mind their ‘wild west’, ‘smurf’ and ‘torture’ lines?

‘Daffy Disco’ wheel by Steve Maher (Orion Lighting, 1974)

Some semblance of an answer can be found in a passage of the text in which Pluto founder Micky Thompson notes that, by the dawn of the 1980s, the customers of his rivals at Optikinetics were largely proprietors of mobile discos, whilst his own company catered instead to what he calls, “the domestic Saturday night party projector”.

Regarding the former, I certainly went to a school disco or two in my time, and I don’t specifically recall any pirates or cowboys being projected across the assembly hall walls, but yes - mobile discos. That makes sense.

As to the “domestic Saturday night” crowd meanwhile…. well, the mind fairly boggles. At this point, it’s probably worth noting that another thing which stands out about the artwork reproduced in ‘Wheels of Light’ is just how damn smutty (in a distinctly British, 1970s kind of way) much of it is. Drawings of ladies with their boobs out are a frequent presence, as are photo-collages assembled from porno mags, spread across a range of picture wheels which includes such provocative titles as ‘glamour’, ‘stripper’, ‘flesh’, ‘naughty girls’, and the ever-popular ‘roman orgy’.

Clearly these risqué picture wheels must have sold well, as each of the companies featured in the book seems to have offered their own variations on the theme. How many man-caves, private dungeons and swingers’ parties hid behind the pebble-dashed façade of ‘70s suburbia, with lights dimmed and projectors cranked up to create just the right atmosphere for an evening’s indulgences…? Mercifully perhaps, we will probably never know.

As with the aforementioned Four Corners’ books however, the kitsch/cringe factor and analogue-era nostalgia inherent in such material is only a small part of ‘Wheels of Light’s overall appeal. As aesthetically questionable as some of the picture wheels proffered by Optikinetics, Pluto and Orion may have been, many of the other wheels gathered by Foakes are genuinely remarkable, highlighting a wealth of awesome, hyper-detailed and (dare I say it) even somewhat mind-blowing artwork from artists such as Maggie Gould, Roy Wilkinson and Connie Jude (whose 1978 ‘gay’ picture wheel is a particularly fascinating inclusion), as well as impressive later work from Jennie Caldwell (who graduated from designing picture wheels to masterminding Hawkwind’s light show for a period in the 1990s). 

Comprising an exemplary cross-section of the era’s more imaginative popular/pulp illustration, the work of these artists (and numerous others who remain uncredited) is eminently worthy of preservation between hard covers, and it is fair to assume that the opportunity to produce these wheels gave jobbing commercial illustrators a chance to ‘go wild’ in a way which would never have been allowed in more straight-down-the-line magazine/book gigs.

Meanwhile, reproductions of the more more abstract, mandala-like patterns created by the smaller ‘effects cassettes’ are also fascinating and hugely appealing (to me, at least), as is the wealth of technical detail concerning equipment and projection techniques covered in Foakes’ text. In fact, as much as I may have poked fun at the “domestic Saturday night” crowd earlier, I’d dare any reader to get through ‘Wheels of Light’ without at some point feeling an irresistible urge to start tracking down some of this old gear and giving it a whirl.

I mean, who knows? Chances are there’s a music venue down the road from you somewhere with a white sheet, an open mind and a few spare plug sockets. Optikenetics are - miraculously - still in business. So long as we’re all still burning through electricity like irresponsible goons, we might as well channel some of it into light shows, and that pixelated video shit just don’t cut it. So long as we all remember to leave the ‘roman orgy’ wheel at home, a bright future surely awaits.

‘Wheels of Light’ can be purchased direct from Four Corners.  

‘Liquid Lady Wheel’, Light Fantastic Limited (1976)

Stuff to look at: Imiri Sakabashira.

It’s been an age since I’ve done any posts focussed on art or design here, but given that I’ve not really had any time to write about movies during the past few weeks (believe it or not), here for your viewing pleasure are scans of a set of postcards which until recently were pinned up in my kitchen. (I’ve temporarily taken them down to facilitate some much-needed lockdown re-painting.)

These are the work of underground cartoonist and manga creator Imiri Sakabashira, a somewhat mysterious figure (to us English speakers at least) whose work first saw publication in 1989. About the only other biographical info I can find is that he was born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1964. His gekiga manga The Box Man was published in translation by Drawn & Quarterly in 2010.

I bought these postcards from the Taco Ché underground culture/zine shop in Nakano, Tokyo a couple of years ago, and, as can be plainly observed, their combination of naturalistic urban street scenes, pseudo-Lovecraftian kaiju / yokai monstrosities and retro/pop art iconography is guaranteed to blow your (or at least, my) mind, anytime.

More of Sakabashira’s art can be seen via this 2009 post from the much missed Tokyo Scum Brigade blog, which also informs us that the artist is “..a prominent ero-guro artist from the avante-garde manga magazine Garo” [sic] and “..a big name in the underground manga scene”.

I also nabbed the following doozy of a jpg from a Pinterest page.

In conclusion: rock on Imiri. This stuff is amazing.

Exploito All’Italiana: Five Dolls For An August Moon (Mario Bava, 1970)

Quite possibly the least celebrated of Mario Bava’s many contributions to the horror / giallo field, ‘5 Bambole per la Luna d'Agosto’, realised in Italy in March 1970, is unlikely to find a place on many Bava fans’ top ten lists… or even many Edwige Fenech fans’ top ten lists, for that matter. If you’re a dedicated viewers of European genre movies, perhaps it won’t even make your top ten William Berger films. Hell, even top ten films for which Piero Umiliani did the music might be pushing it. But, nonetheless, I still retain a huge soft spot for this underachieving body count picture. Taken purely as a compressed dose of pure 1969/70 Italian Riviera decadence in fact, I actually find it pretty unbeatable. (1)

It is well-known by this point that Bava directed this film under protest, after the producers refused him the extra time he had requested to rework Mario di Nardo’s script into something he considered workable. And, watching with almost fifty years hindsight, I think we can probably share Mario’s pain, for it is di Nardo’s shoddy and derivative plotting – and the production’s dogged determination to stick to it – that is ultimately responsible for ‘Five Dolls..’ failure to attain the same level of quality as the classics Bava usually seemed capable of banging out like clockwork whenever he was allowed near the horror or giallo genres.

Vague and incoherent (though not in a particularly fun way), this Agatha Christie-derived island-bound whodunit scenario revolves – thrillingly - around the formula for a new kind of industrial resin. This is held solely within the bonce of Berger’s grumpily moralistic Herr Dr Scientist (who is immediately differentiated from the conniving playboys around him through his decision to wear an uncomfortable-looking woolly jumper to his sunny island retreat).

Needless to say, the aforementioned conniving playboys and their equally conniving wives are all on the case to obtain said formula, and soon million dollar cheques are being idly tossed around as inconvenient corpses concurrently start to pile up, the latter generating a sense of mild annoyance in the surviving characters roughly equivalent to which might be expected if they discovered that, say, the meat for their dinner had gone bad or something.

Such is the overwhelming disinterest generated by this scenario that, when the characters start indulging in sordid extra-marital liaisons and accompanying back-stabbing, the sense of transgression is somewhat muted by the fact that we can’t quite remember who most of them were supposed to married to in the first place.

Unfortunately, my own (non-conniving) wife tends to be a stickler for all this bloody “plot” rubbish, so, after the film’s spectacularly nonsensical attempt at a twist ending rolled around, we were obliged to spend a good ten minutes vainly trying to establish what was going on – including replays of certain key scenes – before she’d let it be. In the end she reckoned she’d solved the mystery to her satisfaction, but I remain happily and uncaringly mystified.

Never fear though, because, more so than ever in Italian genre cinema, IT DOES NOT MATTER what is actually going on here. Effectively leaving the script for dead at the side of the road, Bava instead wisely concentrates his efforts upon distracting us from its all-too-evident shortcomings, doing his utmost to make each shot more striking, more gloriously opulent and packed with more weird, incidental detail, than the last. And when Mario Bava sets his utmost in that direction, you know you’re in for a good time, regardless of overbearing producers, lazy-ass writers or budgetary constraints.

As is often the case with Bava, the environment in with ‘5 Dolls..’ takes place is almost entirely illusory, with the beautifully executed matte shot that creates the impression of a ultra-kitsch space age beach house perched precariously upon an overhanging cliff-top forming a kind of late ‘60s take on the twilit gothic vista the director created for Whip and the Body – a film that is also recalled by the assorted trysts amongst the rock pools that pad out the concluding act of ‘5 Dolls..’, suggesting perhaps the early stirrings of a self-reflexive tendency in Bava’s work that would reach full bloom in ‘Baron Blood’ a few years later.

Within this fictitious beach house meanwhile, the fantasia constructed by the hard-working set builders in Rome’s Dear Studios is really a sight to behold, mixing wide, circular rooms with asymmetrical vertical lines provided by weird-looking door frames and staircases. Strewn with extravagant soft furnishings, unlikely glassware and garish abstract art adorning the walls, this joint is one of the best ‘space age bachelor pad’ fantasies that Italian genre cinema has to offer (chronic lack of bachelors notwithstanding), even as its unfeasible curves and angles are gradually transformed into a human scale ‘Mouse Trap’ game for the surviving, increasingly paranoid characters, to bounce around in.

(This metaphor that perhaps enters my mind as a result of one of the movie’s more memorable and overtly surreal sequences, wherein the shock of a character’s murder is closely followed by the spectacle of a load of entirely inexplicable silver balls cascading down a spiral staircase.)

Despite working here with what was presumably a fraction of the budget assigned to his earlier ‘Danger! Diabolik’ (1968), Bava nonetheless still manages to bring a sliver of that film’s incomparable aesthetic cool to proceedings, creating a vibrant, endlessly enticing moving postcard from a supremely artificial utopia of myopic self-indulgence; a realm of gleaming chrome, gaudily patterned upholstery, hallucinatory interior décor decisions, crashing waves, hazy J&B-induced stupor and artfully deflected sunlight so spectacularly sensual that not even a series of brutal slayings can harsh yr buzz. (Hey, the characters initially don’t seem to mind them too much, so why should we care?)

Meanwhile, Piero Umiliani’s score – perhaps one of the first to wed harpiscord-heavy orchestration to a driving rock rhythm section in a manner that would soon become de-rigour in the giallo boom of the early ‘70s – ensures that ‘5 Dolls..’ is a splendid film to listen to as well as to look at, whilst the mighty, fuzz-rock blowout – ‘Ti Risveglierai Accanto a Me’ performed by Italian psyche/prog stalwarts Il Balletto di Bronzo – that plays over the movie’s closing credits is an absolute banger, it’s in-the-red roar only enhanced by the dusty distortion of the film’s scrubbed up mono soundtrack reels.

Though the murder sequences in ‘5 Dolls..’ are somewhat on the mild side for a Bava giallo (such is the scope of the director’s achievements, it’s easy to forget that he pushed on-screen violence to new extremes across two decades via ‘Black & Black Lace’ (1964) and ‘A Bay of Blood’ (1971)), they are all nonetheless magnificently staged, making full use of hazy, sun-dappled day time photography and an almost comical excess of looming, foreground foliage.

(Critics might be inclined to point out that, for all the accolades Bava has received for his technical prowess, he gets pretty damn goofy with the zoom lens in this one, but, I’ve got fifty plus Jess Franco films under my belt at this point, so watch me care.)

Repeated shots of plastic-sheeted corpses swinging upon hooks in the house’s meat locker meanwhile add a welcome touch of icy, macabre atmosphere to what is otherwise a weirdly sunny and relaxed take on horror film-making, and the unexpectedly gory demise of the fabulous Ms Fenech provides a genuine jolt that feels like a warm-up for the shock tactics of the aforementioned ‘Bay of Blood’.

Speaking of Fenech, I hope I won’t drift too far into dirty-old-man territory in pointing out that, as per usual, her frame provides a pretty substantial boost to the movie’s production values in and of itself, and, quite frankly, I don’t know if she ever looked better on screen than she does here (and yes, I realise that’s quite a claim). Elsewhere in the casting department meanwhile, ‘5 Dolls..’ pursues the usual giallo pattern of pairing up a selection of quote-unquote ‘foxy babes’ with a crew of craggy-faced, shady-looking and (for the most part) somewhat older gentlemen. I suppose at a push you could make a case that this reflects the fact that these characters are supposed to be a bunch of high-powered industrialists and their trophy wives… but to do so would be to imply that these people bear some kind of loose similarity to believable, real world human beings, and frankly nobody wants that.

Instead, let’s just accept that this was the dawn of the ‘70s, and that’s the way things were done. Then we can all settle back and enjoy the scenery – which was certainly the point of the exercise as far as Bava was concerned.

Of course, it could be argued that ‘5 Dolls..’ was not an *entirely* cynical exercise on Bava’s part. In his commentary track for the film, Tim Lucas is keen to place ‘5 Dolls..’ within his own auteurist take on the director’s work, specifically with regard to the his palpable distaste for the greed, excess and inhumanity of the film’s privileged characters. Compelling as Lucas’s case may be however, such theorising must inevitably remain a secondary concern in film that sees characterisation and plot machinations so comprehensively pushed to the sidelines in favour of a gloriously garish, over the top celebration of this period’s unique visual style.

Resorting to an iffy music metaphor to try to summarise my feelings for ‘5 Dolls For An August Moon’, I suppose you could say that, whilst this one is definitely never going to be the eternal, always-in-print, take-it-to-the-grave classic album in anyone’s collection, it still feels very much like the filmic equivalent of the cheesy charity shop lounge-jazz LP you bought because you liked the cover and just keep playing all the time because, hey, it makes you feel kind of happy.

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(1) In case anyone is interested, I’m currently going with: 1. Kill Baby Kill, 2. Danger! Diabolik, 3. Lisa & The Devil, 4. Black Sabbath, 5. Black Sunday, 6. Blood & Black Lace, 7. Baron Blood, 8. Whip & The Body, 9. Planet of the Vampires, 10. Rabid Dogs. I don’t have a Fenech list. Bring it on in the comments, fellow list-makers.

FRANCO FILES SPECIAL: Necronomicon (1967)

By designating this entry in the series as a ‘special’, I simply mean that it’s quite long, so be prepared. Unless stated otherwise, all background info and quotes are extrapolated either from the interviews accompanying the Blue Underground DVD release of ‘Necronomicon’ (under the title ‘Succubus’), or from Tohill and Tombs’ ever-reliable ‘Immoral Tales’, pp. 93-95. Much of the poster art reproduced below is borrowed from Wrong Side of the Art.

AKA:

Initially conceived as a low budget horror under the name ‘Green Eyes of the Devil’, this film was eventually shot under the title ‘Necronomicon’, and first screened in West Germany as ‘Necronomicon: Geträumte Sünden’ (that’s “Dreams of Sin” or somesuch). Perhaps most widely known by its American release title ‘Succubus’, IMDB informs us that it also went by ‘Delirium’ in Italy, ‘Paroxysmos’ in Greece and ‘Sex: Lidenskab og Fantasi’ in Denmark, reverting to its original ‘Les Yeux Verts du Diable’ for screenings in France.

Context:

Whatever you choose to call it, ‘Necronomicon’ certainly marks an important turning point in the career of Jess Franco, and arguably a pivotal moment in the development of European horror/exploitation cinema in general.

Artistically speaking, it was the first film that allowed Franco the freedom to move beyond the pulpy genre shockers he had worked on up to this point, and it certainly must have proved a bit of an eye-opener for those in the industry and who knew him primarily for The Awful Dr. Orlof. Basically, ‘Necronomicon’ sets the template not just for Franco’s own future work, but for that of many of his contemporaries too, as affordable colour photography, the lure of ‘edgy’, counter-culture informed material and a demand for stronger sexual content all pointed the way forward. If you’re looking for the genesis of the kind of art-damaged / psychedelic / horror-infused erotic thrillers that dominated a certain kind of cinema through the early ‘70s, and that Franco in particular specialised in, well… it all starts here.

Commercially, ‘Necronomicon’ is said to have done more business at the box office than any Franco film before or since(1), and it also netted him just about the only taste of mainstream critical interest he attracted in his entire career, making waves at the 1968 Berlin Film Festival and apparently eliciting praise from no less a figure than Fritz Lang, who is said to have called it “the first erotic film I've seen all the way through, because it is a beautiful piece of cinema”.(2)

Long before all that though, ‘Necronomicon’ began life as a run-of-the-mill horror project (the aforementioned ‘Green Eyes of the Devil’), planned by Franco in collaboration with Austrian actor/producer Adrian Hoven, and overseen by Franco’s usual backer at the time, Karl-Heinz Mannchen. After Franco and Hoven began scouting locations and shooting initial footage in Spain and Portugal however, Mannchen’s finances fell through, leaving things in limbo. Scrabbling around for a solution, Hoven put in a call to a friend of his, a dilettante would-be producer named Pier Maria Caminneci, offering him a free ticket to Lisbon if he wanted to fly in and check things out.(3)

As Franco recalled in later years, Caminneci proved to be a refined and affable character, though “sometimes insufferable because of his pretentious airs”, and the two quickly bonded over their shared love of jazz. More to the point, Caminneci was also extremely rich, well connected, and completely smitten with leading lady Janine Reynaud. A deal was done.(4)

Insofar as I can tell, Caminneci’s input (both creative and financial) seems to have altered the nature of the proposed film considerably, expanding its scope from a modest b-horror into a sprawling feast of daring ‘60s Euro-chic decadence, aimed just as much at an art-house crowd as the horror/sexploitation circuit. Accompanying this change of direction, it was Caminneci who helped give the project its new title too, with “Necronomicon” apparently being chosen after Franco spied what he insists was a copy of the forbidden grimoire of Abdul Al-Hazrad sitting on Caminneci’s shelves during a record listening party at the latter’s pad.(5)

Quite how the ravings of the Mad Arab fed into either Franco’s thin tale of ghostly sex n’ violence or Caminneci’s rambling, Fellini-esque script is anyone’s guess, but regardless, things continued apace. Franco was already friendly with French actor/producer Michael Lemoine, and had already offered the film’s lead role to his wife, the aforementioned Janine Reynaud, after a chance meeting in Rome. The ever-wonderful Jack Taylor was soon cast opposite her as the male lead (much to the chagrin of Hoven, who apparently wanted the part for himself), and Caminneci, Hoven, Lemoine and (of course) Howard Vernon were soon all fixed up with supporting roles. With Karl Lagerfeld on board to design Reynaud’s wardrobe (one suspects Caminneci’s connections may have helped out here), and some suitably eye-popping locations identified in Lisbon and Berlin, shooting began again in earnest.

Further upping the ‘class’ factor, celebrated pianist and classical/jazz innovator Friedrich Gulda was brought in to record a full orchestral score (Caminneci and Franco were both big fans), and, as previously mentioned, the film eventually made its debut in Berlin, picking up a number of international distribution deals (including a plum American contract from (s)exploitation specialists Trans-American Films), and went on to play theatrically in various parts of the world right through to the early ‘70s, cementing the names of all concerned in at least *some* people’s minds, and, we assume, making a tidy sum in the process.

Content:

One of those films that you can sit through multiple times and remember nothing beyond a few strange, shining images and the general impression that you quite enjoyed it, ‘Necronomicon’ is yet another Franco effort that doesn’t easily lend itself to textual analysis or summation. The notes I scribbled down during a late night viewing in April, convinced that I’d got a lead on some singular insights, now read like garbled nonsense, the indecipherable ravings of a sleep-deprived drop-out [No comment – ed.].

Blinking in the harsh light of day, I suppose what is chiefly notable about Necronomicon’s paper-thin storyline is the way that it forms a blueprint for the film Franco would proceed to re-make dozens of times over the following decades: a woozily paced trek through picturesque locations with a glamorous, tormented woman as she alternately seduces and kills a series of victims in her sleep/dreams/fantasies, en route to complete mental collapse, and/or some essentially empty consummation. Sound familiar..? Reynaud’s Lorna is a dry run, not just for innumerable future Lorna’s, but for Maria Rohm’s Venus and Lina Romay’s Doriana Grey too – the quintessential Franco protagonist in her first full-bloom.

Whilst Franco may have later described ‘Necronomicon’ as the first film on which he enjoyed complete creative freedom though, its difficult production background means that it actually plays as more of a collaborative effort than most of the films that followed – a circumstance that, in my opinion at least, doesn’t always work to its advantage. Franco is said to have shot most of the film on the fly, inventing scenarios from one day to the next, but Caminneci nonetheless takes sole credit for the screenplay (on the English version of the film, at least), and the attempts therein to reinvent the minimal horror plotline as an all-singing, all-dancing avant pop-art spectacular meet with mixed success at best, as vast swathes of discursive dialogue, intrusive voiceovers and unconvincing inter-character scenes all take their toll, making for trying viewing at times.

Not helped much by a distractingly glib, ‘arched eyebrow’-style English dub (the only language option available on the DVD under review, sadly), the script’s psychoanalytical and post-modern diversions are often pretty clunky and play, frankly, as pretentious garbage – chucklesome on the one hand, but unbearable on the other; cringeworthy attempts to lend the film some faux-hip intellectual credibility, handled so naively that they ironically make it seem far stupider than many of Franco’s straight up sex/horror films.

We cannot be 100% sure that this stuff is all the work of Caminneci I suppose (it seems likely that everyone threw ideas in here and there), but the tone is certainly a perfect match for the character sketch Franco provided for him, and it is notable that such content is entirely absent from subsequent Franco films, which, I would contest, demonstrate their psychological complexity and culturally-informed sensibility in a rather more subtle manner, without the need to throw in sophomoric shout-outs to Sigmund Freud and The Rolling Stones every five minutes.

That said, there are definitely some moments when Franco and Caminneci’s respective aesthetics come together to wonderfully goofy effect. For instance, it's hard not to love the scene in which Lorna visits ‘The Admiral’ (Vernon), the pair sitting in a bar playing some contrived word association game that Caminneci obviously saw as scaling dizzy heights of cross-cultural sophistication (“Henry Miller?” “Birds in winter”, “Charlie Mingus?” “Anger”, “The unconscious?” “Marquis de Sade”, and so on), as naked pretty boy bartenders stir cocktails with only upturned top hats protecting their modesty, and stock accordion music blares. Such a ridiculous assemblage of elements that for a moment all is forgiven, especially when Howard starts chewing pebbles(?!) out of his Dr. Orloff top hat, mere inches away from some fella’s junk.

Indeed, perhaps the best course of action all the way through Necronomicon is to try to ignore the top-heavy babble of the script, to treat any semblance of plot as entirely coincidental, and to just enjoy the film as a pure aesthetic object – a level upon which it never fails to please.

Kink:

Whilst actual sexual content here is far less explicit than what would become the norm for Franco productions post-1970, ‘Necronomicon’ is still pretty strong stuff for 1967. In fact as far as whacked out pop-art erotica goes, it remains kinky as hell, with violent S&M themed stage acts, aristocratic lesbian seductions and even some borderline male homoerotic moments, all overseen a leading lady who clearly has no qualms about showing off everything bar the you-know-what for the camera at the drop of a (top) hat.

Janine Reynaud, though considerably older than your average sex film starlet, smoulders all the more for her evident, um, experience, bringing an energy to her portrayal of a domineering sex fiend femme fatale, that, if it perhaps doesn’t quite reach the level of intensity achieved by Lina Romay a few years later, is certainly in the same ballpark.

Reynaud brings a mixture of sophistication and cynicism to her character that might well have eluded a younger actress, and if some chauvinist horndogs in the audience might have felt wary about the idea of lusting after a star who was pushing forty at the time of filming, you can be damn sure they had little to complain about after getting a good look at her assets in the hotel room striptease that occurs a few minutes into the film. At the risk of joining their unsavoury ranks for a moment or two, Ms Reynaud is *hot*, and none but a corn-fed fool would deny it.

Moving swiftly on, I believe ‘Necronomicon’ also marks the first of the numerous occasions on which Jess Franco chose to open a film with a scene of fantastical S&M violence that is subsequently revealed to be a stage performance in some only-in-the-mind-of-Jess-Franco nightclub, where a crowd of elegantly attired men and women clap enthusiastically. A quintessential Franco ‘primal scene’, variations on this little number are repeated in more films than I could possibly bother listing, but the one in ‘Necronomicon’ is particularly striking, with Reynaud licking the wounds of a shackled strong-man before slicing up her tomboy-ish female lover, and it also perhaps marks the genesis of Franco’s subsequent fixation with tying his characters to ‘X’-shaped wooden crosses (see ‘The Demons’, ‘Exorcism’, etc.).

More generally speaking, Caminneci’s bankroll and high-falutin’ aspirations give ‘Necronomicon’ the kind of playboy atmosphere that Franco was rarely rarely able to afford in later years, and it’s safe to say he made the best of it, with the cast & crew’s real life extravagance (“We ate well, we stayed in the best hotels,” Jack Taylor recalled, before noting that he still had to provide his own costume) perhaps spilling over into the film itself, as a general feeling of over-ripe, end-of-the-decade decadence predominates, honing in on the more erotically-fixated end of Fellini’s oeuvre with relentless efficiency.

The wild LSD party chez-Caminneci that occurs mid-way through the film is, in particular, a shameless Fellini rip, complete with the requisite transvestite, the dwarf butler, the animalistic degeneration of the pampered attendees, the whole nine yards. This fantasy of a decadent, doomed 1960s, in which designer clothes could be torn off any minute, where strange drugs and indescribably new experiences lurk round every corner, is cannily used by the filmmakers, contributing greatly to the tingly erotic frisson that permeates every frame of ‘Necronomicon’.

4/5

Creepitude:

Though gifted with a title and opening scene that make it seem very much like a gruesome horror film of some kind, as soon as the camera pans out for the big reveal in the introductory night-club sequence (Franco’s winking dismissal of his horror past, perhaps?), the tone chances drastically, and ‘Necronomicon’s violent and supernatural elements are thereafter pushed firmly into the background.

Partly undertaken in an effort to sell the film to a different (wider?) audience, this laissez-faire approach to genre also seems to have chimed with the director at the time of production. Despite having initially planned the movie as a straight horror, Franco appears to have been rather fed up with the restrictions of genre cinema at this point, later claiming that ‘Necronomicon’ was his first attempt to “broaden the scope of the horror film”, instead creating what he described as a “pure psychological film”, delivering a “clear, precise study of the symptoms of paranoia”.

Make of that what you will (if clinically diagnosed paranoia made the world look like this, I think we’d all be giving it a shot), but reminders of ‘Necronomicon’s b-horror origins nonetheless remain visible throughout, poorly disguised by the thin coat of art-house gloss. Some rather cheesy ‘horror-y bits’ give the game away quickly enough - check out the shock zoom on Howard Vernon’s slightly unconvincing ‘corpse’ (stabbed in the eye with a hat pin!), or the hilariously inept ‘killer mannequins’ scene - and the subsequent mixture of Euro-art vibes with blatant drive-in horror elements stands out as pure Franco, even if his usual ratio is more or less reversed here.

3/5

Pulp Thrills:

Not much doing here I’m afraid. Within the grand narrative of Franco’s career, ‘Necronomicon’ can easily be framed as the director’s big attempt to break away from the pulp traditions that he’d been tied to during the preceding decade, and even the amusing intrusion of plastic figurines of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and Godzilla, during a brief skit about Michael Lemoine’s character assuming a new role within the pantheon of horror icons, does little to change that. These inanimate cameos occur in a contrived, self-aware environment that acts as pure kryptonite to the pulp spirit – more Lichtenstein than Sax Rohmer, and a big thumbs down from this category’s judges.

Of course, some may argue that the whole ‘60s Euro-decadence thing constitutes a valid pulp aesthetic in its own right, and then there’s the whole Necronomicon tie-in, but, hmm, I dunno…

2/5

Altered States:

Perhaps realising that this was his opportunity to make his mark as a visionary, risk-taking director, Franco uses the combination of creative freedom and relatively lavish budget available to him here to turn in something truly special. Whatever you think of ‘Necronomicon’s content and intentions, in terms of attention-grabbing cinematic style, it is off the scale - perhaps the most visually arresting movie Franco ever made.

Most notably, much of the film is absurdly overlit. And I don’t just mean “it’s a bit too bright”, I mean the kind of thing that would give any trained cinematographer forty fits: often the screen is completely saturated with blinding white glare, blurring the image or hiding the figures onscreen entirely, giving characters a kind of ghostly halo and distorting bright patches of colour into grainy, fuzzed out blocks. Even now, nearly fifty years later, it still looks astonishing – challenging, disorientating and often extremely beautiful.

This technique gives the film’s exteriors an unearthly, disintegrating quality – a sort of coldly angelic feel, one step away from total oblivion, even as the bold primary colours (like the assorted passions on display) ring out red hot. At a push, perhaps this whole lighting scheme could be seen as a reflection of Lorna’s precarious state within the story: beyond the realm of the living, yet consumed by human desires. Or something. It looks pretty cool anyway, that’s what I’m trying to say.

Even random, in-car travelogue footage shot in the rainy Berlin suburbs looks quite compelling (shades of ‘Female Vampire’?), and many individual shots in the Lisbon sections in the film look quite incredible, the extreme lighting effects lending the compositions a semi-accidental painterly quality that takes the breath away. Just try freeze-framing the oddly composed long-shot at around the 15-minute mark, of Reynaud in the red dress, walking towards her Cadillac, with the Gaudi-esque monastery in the background. It’s like one of David Hockney’s LA paintings reimagined by Salvador Dali. Extraordinary.

Whilst I can’t speak for the input of credited “cameramen” Jorge Herrero and Franz Lederle, this technique strikes me as a great demonstration of Jess Franco’s off-the-cuff genius: taking a glaring in-camera ‘mistake’ that most filmmakers would have corrected immediately, and instead deciding to build the look of his whole film around it, giving ‘Necronomicon’ a highly distinctive style that I’ve never seen replicated elsewhere. (Even Franco’s own happy-go-lucky approach to photography in his later films rarely adopts this ‘light-bombing’ technique to anything like the extent seen here.)

During darker, less saturated scenes, quality varies (as per usual with Franco) between richly detailed, deep focus tableaus and totally random, slapdash stuff that looks like it was shot in someone’s apartment with about five minutes notice. Examples of his oft imaginative camerawork are easy to spot – a static scene focusing on a table in a bar with action filling both the foreground and background to Bruegel-esque effect, a love scene where the camera pans back and forth across back of participants’ heads, the good ol’ ‘sex scene shot through a fish tank’, and so on - but it is the blinding white light that will stick most strongly in the viewer’s mind after this one.

5/5

Sight-seeing:

Officially registered as a Spanish/West German/Italian co-production, ‘Necronomicon’s shooting locations were determined more by financial and political necessity than by choice: ducking out of Spain to avoid government censorship, the production’s main shoot took place in Lisbon, before the principals decamped to Berlin to pad things out and fill in the gaps.

Once again incorporating random circumstances into his artistic agenda, Franco claims that he thus conceived the idea of a film split between “two different worlds”, contrasting the Latin/Catholic traditionalism of Southern Europe with the secular, modernist vision of post-war West Germany. The extent to which this contrast can really be identified within the garish overload of the finished film is questionable, but either way, some of the scenery along the way is certainly worth a visit.

In Lisbon, we find some splendid hilltop vistas over the city, sea views, a delightful funicular railway, a ruined Moorish palace, some incredible Rococo interiors and - perhaps the film’s visual highlight - an absolutely jaw-dropping, gravity defying fairytale castle [actually a 16th century coastal fort, the Torre de Belém - see comments], within which Lorna supposedly dwells. It sure looks like a beautiful city. I’d love to visit sometime.

Meanwhile, Berlin offers drizzle, grey skies, and a vast traffic intersection overseen by a multi-storey carpark and gigantic, faceless skyscraper. A metallically decorated beatnik bar privides a backgrop for the finale, and vague John LeCarre vibes can be felt when Taylor and Lemoine share a conspiratorial moment atop a busy pedestrian overpass, as a nearby cinema billboard advertises ‘Dr. Shivago’ in 70mm.

Standing amid all this, dominating the background of many shots, is a picturebox medieval church – another example of Franco’s keen eye for disconcerting architectural clashes, exhibiting a mixture of modernist and gothic iconography that, whilst wholly accidental more likely than not, suits the aesthetic of this film very well indeed.

5/5

Conclusion:

As the dust clears and the white light fades, your final analysis of ‘Necronomicon’ very much depends I think on the angle from which you approach it. From the high-minded cinéaste point of view to which the film sometimes aspires, it could no doubt seem an abysmal failure: a garish disasterpiece of bad taste and frivolous excess, in which a gang of cynical exploitation producers trample toward the Fellini/Godard dollar with cruel and sloppy abandon, with any good moments that result arising largely from pure chance and technical ineptitude. From an exploitation fan’s POV meanwhile, it is liable to generate the usual litany of complaints: pretentious, incomprehensible, slow, with weak laughably weak horror elements, not enough skin, no story and so on and so forth.

Hit that magic sweet-spot somewhere between the two approaches though – a place where I hope most readers of this blog prefer to dwell – and ‘Necronomicon’ becomes something of a qualified triumph: a loopy, over-reaching slice of perfect pop-art erotica that finds Jess Franco’s visual imagination firing on all cylinders, with a cabal of like-minded freaks ready to write the cheques and do all the necessary heavy-lifting to help him realise his vision, however cracked and inconsistent it may turn out to be.

An essential rite of passage for any Franco fan, and a key component in piecing together an understanding his work, ‘Necronomicon’ hopefully remains a solid enough piece of cinema to prove intoxicating viewing for any open-minded fan of strange, stylish, way-out film-making, regardless of their opinion on the big JF.

(1) Whilst ‘Necronomicon’ is often referred to as Franco’s biggest success, personally I find it hard to believe it raked in more dough than, say, ‘Faceless’ or ‘Bloody Moon’ in the VHS era, never mind his ‘70s WIP epics (which reportedly made a ton in Europe), or even ‘The Awful Dr. Orlof’ (which played extensively in US cinemas through the early ‘60s). Anyway, with no reliable figures to work from, it’s a bit of moot point.

(2) Oft-repeated by Franco fans and supporters, the Lang quote should perhaps also be taken with a pinch of salt. The story goes that Howard Vernon overheard Lang’s remark after a screening, passed it back to Franco, and… well I’d like to believe it was 100% accurate, but you know how these things go. Lang never publically mentioned the film to anyone subsequently, as far as I know.

(3)  Caminneci had worked with Hoven on two previous films made in Germany, ‘The Killer With The Silk Scarf’ (1966) and ‘Death on a Rainy Day’ (1967). His sole directorial effort – entitled ‘How Short is the Time for Love?’ – appeared in 1970, with Hoven, Reynaud and Lemoine all on board. Insofar as I can tell, no one with access to the internet has ever seen it.

(4) According to Tohill & Tombs, Reynaud’s husband Michael Lemoine was aware that his wife was engaged in an affair with Caminneci during the production of ‘Necronomicon’, but “..stayed in the background, because it was good for business”. Beyond dutifully repeating that, I’ll try to leave any further speculation as to the private lives of these individuals similarly out of the spotlight.

(5) For those coughing and spluttering at this assertion, rest assured I have a follow-up post in the works specifically looking at Franco’s claim that he read a copy of the ‘Necronomicon’ at Caminneci's place.

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up, part # 1:The ‘60s

(Tandem, 1968)

(Lancer, 1968)

(Hodder, 1967)

Even more-so than movies or comic-books, you might assume that lower tier sci-fi paperback designers would have been a bit slow in picking up on youth culture trends, but just look at all this bad trip, pop-art madness - merely a taster of the innumerable eye-grabbing volumes that were hitting shelves prior to 1970, all waiting to be harvested from book fairs and charity shops the world over.

All of the above are more or less trad pulp skiffy yarns enlivened by some way-out graphics, but by way of contrast, here’s a rather toe-curlingly try-hard attempt to bring SF to the new youth market. The logic is sound: hippies read sci-fi, and half the people who write it seem to veer in that direction too, so let’s bang out some sci-fi for hippies. The execution however? I think I'll pass. ('She Stripped For Cider' in the author biog made me laugh though.)

Wikipedia reveals that 'The Unicorn Girl' is the middle volume of an apparent 'Greenwich Village Trilogy' published by Pyramid. Characters were shared, but each volume was written by a different author, the other two being respectively credited to underground press luminary and Crawdaddy! editor Chester Anderson, and "professional magician and magic author" T.A. Waters. Presumably any resemblance between "Mike and Chester, fearless hippy explorers of a thousand worlds" and their apparent creators would be wholly coincidental..?

 

(Pyramid, 1969)

All cover artists and designers featured in this post are uncredited, by the way.

Think Pink: Sex & Fury(Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)

Thus far in this series we’ve been looking at films with a contemporary setting, but there were also quite a few pinky violence-affiliated films with a period setting - attempts to incorporate the 'violent female action' sub-genre into the more traditional confines of the ninkyo (‘chivalry’) films pioneered by Toei during the ‘50s and ‘60s, presumably with the aim of rejuvenating the latter genre’s fading box office appeal.

Of the three films I’d consider a rough ‘holy trinity’ of these kinds of cross-overs, two - Toshiya Fujita’s ‘Lady Snowblood’ and Teruo Ishii’s startling ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’ – are very much borderline entries that I’d be reluctant to place under the ‘pinky violence’ banner. The third though – ‘Sex & Fury’ – certainly makes no bones about its alignment to the genre, as the reliably manic Norifumi Suzuki drags all the chaos and sleaze of his girl gang and WIP films back in time, with (needless to say) hugely entertaining results, working with what looks to have been an unusually lavish budget to create a movie that's basically the closest thing the world will ever see to a Pinky Violence Historical Epic.

As distinct from feudal era Samurai films, ninkyo movies are usually set in the Meiji era, which began with the end of Japan’s isolation from the wider world in 1868 and officially ended in 1912. A period of vast social change and political turmoil, the Meiji era can (in filmic terms at least) be roughly equated to Japan’s own ‘Wild West’, with the heroes of these movies – gamblers and gangsters attempting to uphold the traditional virtues of chivalry in the face of strife, corruption and malign foreign intervention – perhaps veeery roughly equating to the last-real-men-in-a-doomed-world heroes of a Leone or Peckinpah western.

I mention this background simply because it plays into ‘Sex & Fury’ to a considerable extent. Our tale begins in 1886 (or Meiji year 16) with a young Ocho seeing her father (a police detective) killed by yakuza. (Funny isn’t it how so many PV films feature daughters avenging their fathers, a fairly rare turn of events in Western revenge films?) He dies clutching a handful of hanafuna playing cards, providing the transition in to a wonderfully stylised opening sequence that sees Ocho, now grown up into the shape of Reiko Ike, tattooed and wielding a short-sword, striking combat poses amid a brightly-lit pop-art fantasia that reproduces the imagery from the bloody cards on a huge scale – a pretty striking visual device that immediately marks out ‘Sex & Fury’ as something a bit grander in ambition than your average PV flick.

This impression is underscored by the fact that the credits are immediately followed by a lightning fast history lesson, with captions and still photographs giving us the skinny on significant Meiji era events, including the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, leading all the way up to 1905 (Meiji 38). “Now is a civilised era of enlightenment”, the on-screen text concludes, on what we already know is going to be a blackly ironic note.

An independent woman par excellence, the grown-up Ocho seems to be doing alright for herself pursuing her interests as a gambler, sword-fighter and compulsive pick-pocket, but fate swiftly takes a hand when she steps in to aid the escape of an apparently crazed anarchist who has just tried to assassinate a big-shot politician named Kurokawa. (Very much a ‘modern’ sort of chap, he is seen engaging in internationalist power-broking in baronial, Western style surroundings.)

After Ocho subsequently witnesses an entirely unconnected (or is it..?) murder at a gambling house she frequents, the boss of the house apparently dispatches a gang of armed men to take her down, leading directly to what is almost certainly the film’s overall highlight, an absolutely breathtaking sequence that sees our heroine leaping nude from the bath and slaughtering about a dozen warriors in glorious slo mo – as the snow falls on the ornamental garden outside, naturally. I’ll admit that even on my second viewing I wasn’t *entirely* sure what’s supposed to be going on here plot-wise, but who cares frankly – the sight of Reiko Ike, blood-soaked, tattooed and naked, performing acrobatic leaps and dives as she severs limbs and slices throats surely has to be one of the quintessential images of all Japanese exploitation cinema.

It’s an exhilarating bit of filmmaking, inexplicably accompanied by a jaunty tune that sounds like something off a Herb Alpert album, and the crazy echo on the sword swoosh sound effects alone blows my mind. Aside from anything else, it’s a testament to the professionalism of the film’s editors, technicians and fight choreographers that they managed to cut together a five minute, multi-angle sequence in which a naked woman spins around a room fighting multiple assailants, without once breaking Japanese cinema’s pubic hair embargo. And if the rest of ‘Sex & Fury’ never quite manages to top this scene, well, it’s certainly not for want of trying. Unexpectedly throwing in a sequence that outdoes the finale of 90% of action movies in the opening fifteen minutes sets the bar pretty high for the subsequent seventy five.

By the time we’ve got our breath back and poured a stiff drink, an ambitious and convoluted tale has already begun to unfold, honouring the film’s historical setting with a real Dickensian sprawl of intersecting storylines, packed with intrigue and melodrama to beat the band.

First off, it turns out that the anarchist whose life Ocho saved is desperately in love with a foreign spy named Christina. Not only “the foremost female gambler from a Western country”, but also apparently “the most popular dancer in the stormy city of London, England”, Christina is played by none other than Scandinavian sexploitation goddess Christina Lindberg. Unable to even speak the same language, it seems its love at first sight for these two, prompting all manner of star-crossed shenanigans, set against some pretty complex political machinations. Christina’s ‘handler’ is a chap named Guinness, an Englishman and guest of Kurokawa who secretly aims to bring Japan under the influence of the British Empire by means of “starting a second opium war in this barbaric country”.

As an aside, can anyone help me ID the actor who plays Guinness? IMDB has him down as one ‘Mark Darling’ in his only screen appearance, but I’m SURE I’ve seen the guy in a few Euro-horror movies and such. Anyone care to jog my memory?


Like any good pinky violence heroine, Ocho has her own gang of loyal female buddies, time in the form of a sisterhood of fellow orphan pick-pockets who operate as part of a kind of benevolent Bill Sykes / Fagin type operation overseen by the big-hearted lady who describes herself as their adopted mother. Then there’s a sub-plot about Ocho taking up the cause of a dying gambler who was trying to raise money to stop his sister is being sold into slavery. Oh, and of course she’s also trying to identify the coded yakuza animal tattoos that identify her father’s killers, in order to wreak the necessary vengeance upon them.

So seriously, there’s all kindsa shit going on, all realised on the kind of scale that Western exploitation flicks of the same period barely even attempted. Suzuki certainly doesn’t skimp on the sex or the fury either though, happily rocketing through his usual line-up of OTT set-pieces, this time taking in a battle with switchblade-wielding nuns onboard an express train to Osaka, and Lindberg in a cow-girl outfit whipping a chained Ike to the accompaniment of spookshow organ music in a weird Christian chapel / torture chamber straight out of ‘School of the Holy Beast’ (what is WITH this guy’s thing for cowgirl outfits and Xtian imagery anyway..?). One particularly eye-popping / credulity-stretching scene even features Ocho’s pick-pocket friends being tied to the ceiling and beaten with sticks in a darkened room that looks like one of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable concerts, prints of Japanese military exploits projected on the wall overlaid with psychedelic lighting and flashing strobes.

Plenty of the usual rapey unpleasantness is also in evidence of course, but even several lengthy (semi-consensual) sex scenes don’t slacken the pace – they’re excitingly shot with kinetic camerawork and some winningly kinky details (the bit where Ocho kills a vengeance-recipient by smearing her body with poisoned perfume is worthy of Jess Franco’s fevered imaginings). Many things ‘Sex & Fury’ may be, but it’s NEVER boring, the beautiful, lively photography full of fast cutting, crash zooms and focus shifts, detailed close-ups and solid blocks of bright colour, reminiscent of both Jack Hill’s better exploitation efforts and the technicolor frenzies of Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Toyko Drifter’.

As with many of Norifumi Suzuki’s films, ‘packed with incident’ scarcely does the maximalist approach on display here justice. To all intents and purposes, it’s a‘70s exploitation fan’s wet dream come true, a rollercoaster ride through everything that made that decade’s popular cinema so wild and vibrant, and a directorial high wire act that serves up enough sex and fury to satisfy the audience’s appetites ten times over, with vast swathes of barbed socio-political commentary, historical melodrama and pop art visual excess thrown in for good measure – the kind of densely-packed, rip-roaring 90 minute entertainment that shows up today’s slack-ass multiplex directors for the time-wasting clowns they are. God bless you Norifumi, you freakin’ maniac.

Surprisingly, about the one thing this movie doesn’t manage to cram in is an enka ballad, so instead here’s a nice English language voice-over segment in which Christina Lindberg discusses the sad lot of a female spy.

VHS Purgatory: Zeta One (Michael Cort, 1969)

Say what you like about Nigel Wingrove and his Redemption empire (and there is plenty to be said), I can’t deny that I owe those sleazy mofos a colossal debt of gratitude. Not only for bringing the work of Jean Rollin to my attention (and indeed, pretty much singlehandedly rescuing his films from obscurity during the ‘90s), but also for introducing me to the likes of Bava, Fulci, Argento, de Ossorio, Jess Franco, even George Romero’s ‘Martin’ and ‘The Crazies’. Long before I began to develop a particular interest of the world of cult horror movies, all of these good things came my way in the form of Redemption VHS, all picked up more or less at random from creepy market stall traders during my lunch-break from whatever crappy temp job I was doing at the time, just because they were cheap, and looked weird, and I was bored.

Being Redemption tapes of course, they often had random bits hacked out of their running time, terrible cropped transfers, inexplicable softcore fetish photography on the front and back cover copy written by illiterates. But still, without their formative influence, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here writing this today. God only knows, I might have been somewhere else entirely, writing about some healthy and socially acceptable pastime that I’d taken up instead. Maybe I’d be skiing, or building model boats, or discussing the novels of H.E. Bates. Well fuck that – thanks to Redemption, I’m watching late ‘60s sci-fi sexploitation films, and there’s nothing you can do about it!

And even now, Redemption’s pioneering assaults on the PAL home video market are blazing a trail through my consciousness in an indirect sort of way. Certainly, no other critics or movie distributors have gone out of their way to point me in the direction of something like ‘Zeta One’, but heaven help anyone who’d stand between me and the copy of this ropey looking Tigon quickie I spied in a darkened corner of Edinburgh’s Avalanche Records last year, hidden behind a pile of oversized photo-books, affixed with a sign that said something like “VIDEOS - £whatever”.

For once featuring a Redemption cover model who is posed LESS salaciously than most of the women in the actual movie (what’s up with that?), the humble 84 minutes of this thing turn out to be, well… kind of extraordinary actually. Like a head-on collision between Jess Franco’s ‘Girl From Rio’, one of Lindsey Shonteff’s witless James Bond spoofs and the kind of dream a sixteen year old boy might have after too much cheese and a marathon screening of Gerry Anderson’s ‘UFO’, it’s certainly highly entertaining, if nothing else.


After an agreeably swanky credits sequence soundtracked by a crazy psyche-lounge Bond theme pastiche composed by Johnny Hawksworth (the genius who also brought us the Roobarb & Custard theme, believe it or not), the action, such as it is, begins in the slightly cramped bachelor pad of ‘Department 5’ agent James Word (see what they did there?). Word’s role in British Intelligence seems to consist primarily of being seduced by sexy enemy agents and feeding them a bunch of misinformation (OR IS IT?) when they pump him for secret info during pillow-talk, and his latest conquest is none other than the thoroughly personable Yutte Stensgaard, of ‘Lust For a Vampire’ fame. After a bit of chat and an extended bout of strip poker, they finally hit the sack, where James spins her a yarn regarding his recent encounters with a race of alien women who make incursions onto the earthly plain from a realm called, I’m afraid, ‘Angvia’ (and if you’re having trouble with that one, ask Johnny Alucard). “I think it’s out in space somewhere, or perhaps it’s not… perhaps it’s right here, in a negative time zone or something”, Word helpfully explains.

As you might expect, from hereon in things get pretty weird pretty quickly, as the film explores the earth-bound activities of these, uh, Angvians, who seem chiefly concerned with kidnapping earth girls and indoctrinating them into their “vast supernatural ant colony”, transporting them back to Angvia by means of “some sort of time or space machine housed in a pantechnicon, or in other words, a large van” (thanks James).


As fans of trashy movies and pulp adventure stories have long been aware, societies of women deprived of male companionship will naturally tend to fall back on a dress code consisting of revealing and impractical fetish gear, and the ladies of Angvia are certainly no slouches in this department, adopting a lively variation on the quintessential ‘roman’ look (ill-fitting fringed togas, nipple tassels and heavy golden accessories) before stripping down to some truly startling Guido Crepax style metal & rope bikinis for combat and ‘physical endurance training’.

Although brief, our visits to Angvia are pretty cool, the film’s budget at least stretching to some truly whacked out psychedelic visuals and brightly-coloured, geometric sets – including a ‘self-revelation room’ walled with pulsing mylar sheeting like something out of Ira Cohen’s ‘Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda’ – all accompanied by bursts of demented Sun Ra style abstract electro-blather that provide a stark contrast to the ham-fisted library cues used through most of the rest of the film (sounds like someone in the editing room was jamming ‘whimsical chase themes vol # 27’ pretty heavily, sad to say). I’d like to be able to credit these way-out sounds to composer Hawksworth (they certainly tally with the gratuitous dissonance he threw into the opening theme), but with a movie like this I guess it’s equally likely they just stole them from somewhere else, or cued up ‘fucked up atonal space jazz vol # 12’. Who knows.


Thus far, it seem as if this whole Angvia business takes its inspiration either from cheesy ‘alien women’ flicks like 1956’s Anglo-American ‘Fire Maidens From Outer Space’ (very much the direct forerunner of the kinda stuff we’re witnessing here), and partly from Sax Rohmer’s Sumuru stories. I’ve always been quite fond of Rohmer’s conception of a hidden island inhabited by a race of man-hating female warriors and their all-powerful queen (sort of doing for the gender issue what Fu Manchu did for racial equality), and have always been kinda surprised that the idea wasn’t seized upon more frequently by exploitation/adventure-happy late ‘60s filmmakers. As it is, Harry Alan Towers (don of the Christopher Lee ‘Fu Manchu’ series) did at least commission the aforementioned Lindsay Shonteff to make ‘The Million Eyes of Sumuru’ in 1967, a film chiefly notable (or so I’m told – I’d love to actually see it sometime) for preceding the also aforementioned ‘The Girl From Rio’, which began filming as a proposed sequel, retaining the character of Sumuru and her secret city of Femina, but quickly spiralling off onto some other shit entirely as Jess Franco’s wayward imagination took control.

In terms of both its sci-fi take on the Sumuru mythos and its ultra-kinky pop art aesthetic, ‘The Girl From Rio’ would seem like a natural companion piece to ‘Zeta One’. Any similarities though can probably be regarded as purely coincidental, as ‘Zeta One’ was actually directly inspired (although curiously this is acknowledged nowhere in the credits) by Zeta magazine – a totally bizarre mod/sci-fi ‘men’s mag’ published in London in the late ‘60s. Sadly, very little info on the magazine seems to be available online, but you can look at some scanned pages from an issue here, and you totally should, because they’re really far out! Seemingly an attempt to blend avant/arty softcore photography with some kind of pulp sci-fi photo-story, the scans clearly reveal that the whole Angvia concept, the characters and situations found in the film, and overall approach to costume and design, came straight from the pages of the magazine. Crazy stuff.


Anyway, back to the movie, and back on earth the agents of Angvia take care to adopt appropriate garb, which, this being 1969, naturally consists of bright red mini-dresses, white leather thigh boots and Mary Quant flapper wigs. As they hop around London trying to induct a young stripper called Ted into their ranks, the girls are pursued not by James Word and Department 5 (he’s back at the shack bedding another Angvian agent) but by some curious characters who seem to be their chief antagonists at earth – renegade aristocrat Colonel Broughton, played by James Robertson Justice, and his chief crony Swyne, played by Charles Hawtrey.

Yes, that James Robertson Justice and that Charles Hawtrey.

I know, I know.

By means of assorted capers too convoluted to bother going into here – including a thoroughly incongruous and unconvincing torture chamber sequence in which a poor thigh-booted maiden is subjected to the indignity of having Justice and Hawtrey leer over her going “oh, my dear.. my dear..” and so forth – the Colonel ends up dispatching his private army of ne’erdowells (and seriously, they’re one rough looking bunch – I think the producers just hung around outside a casting call for a Hammer tavern scene and picked up the rejects) to hunt an Angvian prisoner Most-Dangerous-Game style across his ‘Scottish’ estate.

This prompts Zeta herself (the hereforeto unmentioned Dawn Addams) into action, mobilising a squad of Angvian shock troops to take on the Colonel’s men, and thus before long we find ourselves witnessing the delirious spectacle of a gang of deerstalker & tweed-clad bully boys running around some National Trust woodland pursued by squads of buxom, Crepax un-bikini and flapper wig clad Angvians (one of them none other than Hammer fan favourite Valerie Leon), who proceed to zap them to death with invisible laser beams fired from their fingers! What a sight! Surely my eyes doth lie when they present to me with such wonders!


I’d like to think that this singular sequence represents the vision those swinging cats at Tigon had of the coming decade. With censorship on the retreat and the counter-culture encroaching further into mainstream society, who can blame them for picturing the 1970s as a wondrous era in which the fusty guardians of the old order would be roasted alive in their plus fours amid a hurricane of gigantic boobs and invisible laser beams, to the accompaniment of parping, faux-funky chase music?

That such a starry-eyed vision so swiftly ran aground in the face of the three-day week, ‘Mutiny On The Buses’ and close-ups of Robin Askwith’s pimply arse is a tragedy beyond words. No wonder Tony Tenser packed it in to sell wicker furniture.

For a brief moment though, we can watch ‘Zeta One’ and enjoy the last gasp of a rare moment of cultural optimism that extended even into the world of fly-by-night soft porn movies. Full of seedy detail, unlikely conversations, perplexed looking actors, opportunistic location shooting and all manner of mystifying strangeness, almost every shot in ‘Zeta One’ is an unadulterated joy for fans of Vintage British Weird, a perfect piece of bonkers late night viewing on all levels.

With the exception of a 1972 short subject, ‘Zeta One’ marks writer/director Michael Cort’s sole statement in the cinematic medium, but IMDB does at least boast a nice low-res picture of him playing the trumpet. What a fella!


As is inevitably the case with VHS reviews, the images used in this post aren’t my own screengrabs, but are respectfully borrowed from here, there and everywhere – most notably from the ever-wonderful Island of Terror. The poster above was found at the no less wonderful Pulp International.