12th Jujy 2008

What a show, what a show!

A kind of brief addendum to last week’s column, this.

Those Frightfesters whose interest I manage to successfully pique with these sporadic missives may -- unless they’re blessed with the memory of Leonard Shelby -- recall my singing the praises of Odeon Entertainment last go round. The catalyst, of course, being the fantastic British B-movie documentary “Truly, Madly, Cheaply” which was unleashed by BBC4 last month and which featured a heavenly host of eccentric cult features from Odeon’s label and labels like them.

What follows are some brief thoughts on one film in particular that can’t fail to draw the attention of those readers of this site who are rabid fans of flesh, blood and all the layers of the human body that lurk in between.

(Look in next time for more lurid treats from Odeon featuring Patrick Troughton, Judy Geeson and Tod Slaughter!)

Peter Walker’s “The Flesh & Blood” show (which, it must be said is far more flesh than blood) is a marvelously and reassuringly creaky piece of pureblood British exploitation. So much so, it’s only missing perhaps an appearance by Beryl Reid or a member of the “Carry On…” cast (the nearest we get is little Timmy Lea) and some kind of pagan sacrifice to render it fully blown archetype of the deeply nostalgic form.

A half dozen gadabout acting types who spend most of their resting hours in various states of rather loush nakedness, are summoned to a dingy seaside theatre at the behest of a mysteriously unseen theatrical producer. There, they are met by a bouffanted Ray Brooks who is charged with conspiring with them to create an improvised stage piece in the limited glare the extremely rundown limelight. Before too long, another malevolent force conspires to off these not-so-bright young things once and for all.

Its plot is as rickety as the boards upon which the troupe, featuring a young Robin Asquith and Candice Glendening (as perky, though far less anguished, here as she was 4 years later in Norman J. Warren’s “Satan’s Slave”), fear to tread. There’s an experimental performance piece the actors-as-actors perform with little-to-no irony that seems to cement erstwhile actor himself Walker’s distaste for the whole pretentious business of play. In addition, the mystery itself is not hard to unravel, especially if one is a fan of the more famous Agatha Christie mysteries. Yet the whole affair is so imbued with ramshackle charm, a delightfully carnal eye and a devious, wicked glint that it works almost completely in its modest aims. For all its b-movie trappings, it’s a sad kind of film, seeming to both yearn for and disdain a time and place that no longer exists. This, being a Peter Walker film, is no surprise. There’s far more simmering under the surface than the lo-fi exterior might suggest.

Whereas the films of Norman J. Warren were about fabulous ambience and mood and jolting the audience emotionally with sudden instances of memorably cruel bloodletting, Peter Walker remains one of cinema’s great -- and cunning -- cynics. Here, as would become his trademark, Walker uses a quintessentially British setting (see: “House Of Whipcord” and “Frightmare” especially) in not only the rundown seafront location but the disused community theatre as well. He constructs sequences from elements of British life that are astonishingly quaint -- the local café, the ritual of afternoon tea and the dressing up box -- in a concerted and mostly successful effort to poke delicious fun at the moral majority. To compound the joke, that moral majority is likely typified by the very folk in the BBFC’s Soho Square offices who would have no doubt wished to keep the more lurid excesses of Walker’s films from public view: the fuddy-duddies, the squares and most importantly, like, the *olds*, man.

In Walker’s world, the young are the lovingly admired purveyors of the fleshy delights of lust and the provocateurs of sharp, shocking violence. Vitally, though, this violence is not perpetrated by their own hands or through their own actions. Rather, it comes via the reprimand of an older generation, driven to bloodlust by this liberal, libidinous and entirely new way of living. Throughout his pictures, Walker appears to treat the elderly with a devious distrust that belies either a mischievous childhood or a dismayed and disgruntled acceptance of impending maturity. It’s a delicious irony, one almost dulled by years of faux puritanical ‘slasher’ pictures that don’t really get the joke: the joke being that the older generation is utterly and often conspiratorially capable of being maddened to murder by youthful dissent. The “have sex and die” mantra isn’t some intellectual subtext recently discovered and those elderly characters are not merely there to wag fingers in warning. In Peter Walker’s “Friday 13th”,Crazy Ralf would be unmasked as Pamela Vorhees’ bloody accomplice and Jason his love child.

“The Flesh & Blood Show” is a positively crepuscular ‘giallo’ -- it’s literally one of the darkest horror films I ever seen, most of which seems to be intentional, since the functional print is suitably bright and clear during daylight scenes -- one that now makes its way to DVD from Odeon Entertainment in widescreen, with informative liner notes by Steve Chibnell. Look out for it on 21st July. An essential purchase for the dedicated genre fan.

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