Leisure Investment Co/Coronet Film Corp, USA, 1982; 89 min
In his first feature, director Eric Western crosses T.A.P.S
with Carrie to turn in a pacy, imaginative and highly original shocker.
A chubby orphan from a white trash
background enrols in a prestigious US military academy and becomes the
victim of some vicious bullying. He tries to stay out of trouble by nerdishly
absorbing himself in computers, but is forced to take revenge when the
nastiest of his tormentors kills his pet dog. By combining his technical
expertise with a new-found knowledge of the occult learned from books he
discovers in a chamber below the academy’s chapel, he summons up a horde
of demonic boars. These razor-tusked monsters first kill the bullies and
then destroy the academy itself.
Almost equalling Sam Raimi’s The
Evil Dead (1983) as one of the genre’s most assured directorial debuts,
Evilspeak is a wild, manic and — despite its low budget — often
visually stunning film. Memorable moments include a gripping scene in which
the killer pigs run amuck in a luxury bathroom with gory consequences for
the hapless occupant, and the climax when they rampage through the fire-consumed
chapel.
Despite its moorings in pure fantasy,
the BBFC insisted on over three and a half minutes of cuts before the film
could be certified for video release.
Dir. Eric Weston; Prod. Eric Weston & Sylvio Tabet; Scr. Eric Weston & Joseph Garofalo; Star. Clint Howard, R G Armstrong; With Joseph Cortese, Lynn Hancock, Claude Earl Jones, Haywood Nelson, Don Stark, Charles Tyner
UK Vid. Videospace, QRT 89 min (unrated), Beta
& VHS; Apex, QRT 96 min
(BBFC:18), Beta & VHS
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THE EXORCIST
Hoya Productions/Warner Bros, USA, 1973; 122 min |
Dir. William Friedkin; Prod.
William Peter Blatty; Scr. William Peter Blatty (based on his novel);
Star. Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max Von Sydow; With Linda
Blair, Lee J. Cobb, Jack McGowran, Kitty Winn
UK Vid. Warner Home Video, QRT. 122 min (unrated), Beta & VHS |
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aka The House On Straw Mountain (GB pre-r), Trauma (US); Norfold International Pictures, GB, 1975; 117 min
Butchered by the censors who objected to the film’s explicit
linking of sex and violence, Exposé lost over half an hour
of footage before being passed for cinematic exhibition. This truncated
version (the only print to have made it on to home video before the Video
Recordings Act) still managed to find its way on to the DPP’s video nasty
list, although a further cut version has recently been certified 18 and
released on the Siren label.
European exploitation regular Udo Kier puts in an impressive performance
as a paranoid author living a wealthy life on a large county estate but
plagued by violent nightmares. Having already produced one best-seller,
he hires a young girl (Linda Hayden) to type-up the manuscript of his next
work. Hayden is raped by two locals but manages to dispatch them with a
shotgun. Later she seduces both Kier and his lover (Fiona Richmond). Revealed
as a psychopath, she stabs the latter with the same knife she had already
used to cut the throat of Kier’s elderly housekeeper. Kier looks like suffering
the same fate, but Hayden is interrupted by one of the rapists who, barely
alive himself, re-enters the fray to stab her to death. In the film’s denouement
Kier is revealed as a fraud: the real author of his first novel was Hayden’s
late husband who committed suicide. In a closing tableau reminiscent of
that of Last House on the Left, the
film ends with Kier — reduced to hysterics — surrounded by the bloody corpses.
Written and directed by James Kenelm
Clarke, who had made an influential Man Alive programme for the
BBC on sexploitation movies, and produced by Brian Smedley-Aston, who brought
us Jose Larraz’s highly enjoyable Vampyres (1974), Exposé
was obviously intended as a sexier, gorier synthesis of Psycho and
Straw Dogs. Unfortunately, and probably as a result of the drastic
cuts required by the censors, the film we are left with is neither sexy
enough for the softcore porn audience, nor gory enough for the hardcore
horror one.
Dir. James Kenelm Clarke; Prod. Brian Smedley-Aston; Scr. James Kenelm Clarke; Star. Udo Kier, Linda Hayden, Fiona Richmond; With Vic Armstrong, Karl Howman, Sydney Knight, Patsy Smart
UK Vid. Intervision, QRT 86 min (unrated), Beta
& VHS; CBS, QRT 86 min (unrated), Beta & VHS;
Siren, QRT 80 min (BBFC:18), VHS only
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