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
 
 
 

THE EXORCIST  Hoya Productions/Warner Bros, USA, 1973; 122 min

The most successful horror film ever, The Exorcist still manages to scare the living daylights out of audiences over two decades since it became the must-see film of the early seventies.
    With a harrowing screenplay by author William Peter Blatty, who brilliantly condensed his lengthy bestseller into a dozen nerve-jangling scenes, The Exorcist remains one of the most terrifying features in motion picture history. Few who have seen it can claim to have been unaffected by this harrowingly definitive depiction of demonic possession.
    The enormous power of the film to draw one in makes sure that the most chilling moments are not the ground-breaking special effects sequences, but rather the cerebral shudders induced by, for example, the demon’s psychological attacks on the young priest or it’s hateful mocking of the victim’s mother. Set beside these, the famous projectile vomiting and swivelling heads are just above-average shocks of the kind found in traditional blood-and-thunder frighteners. During its original US release the film caused unprecedented hysteria: many patrons were forced to leave the cinema early; others fainted, vomited or hyperventilated and it was not unknown for paramedics to be called in.
     Sheer terror aside, it is the expository scenes which really show the film to be superior to most of its genre stablemates. Rather than the kind of perfunctory bridging scenes typical of the genre, The Exorcist provides a number a parallel narrative strands which are absorbing even when set apart from the main body of the film. The subplot concerning the death of  Jesuit Father Karras’s (Jason Miller) mother and his battle to regain his faith, for instance, is intelligently handled and clearly well-researched. Also well developed is Lieutenant Kinderman’s (Lee J. Cobb) investigation of the suspicious death of a drunken foul-mouthed movie director (Jack McGowran), which plays like a superior thriller in its own right.
    The performances are uniformly excellent, with Academy Award nominations going to Jason Miller, Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn (standout in her highly affecting portrayal of a mother literally at her wits end). A huge critical as well as a financial success, The Exorcist was also nominated for best film, best direction, best art direction, best cinematography and best editing. It won the awards for best screenplay and best soundtrack.
    Required viewing for any student of modern cinema, few features have had such a lasting impact on the medium in general and on the the horror genre in particular. The Exorcist proves that original, thought-provoking horror is not just the province of auteurs like Romero, Argento or Cronenberg. Intelligent stories, well scripted, competently directed and given the big budget boost of first division actors are always capable of enjoying mainstream success. The importance of The Exorcist in achieiving critical recognition of horror as a legitimate cinematic genre cannot be overstated.
    Despite irrefutably being one of the most important motion pictures of the last thirty years, the BBFC steadfastly refuses to certify it for video release, claiming that if they did so they could not control the dissemination of the film to children and teenagers who, they say, are particularly susceptible to the disturbing message of the film. Ironically, in taking this position they demonstrate the absurdity of the Video Recordings Act by admitting that it fails in its primary function, that of preventing the supply of adult films to minors.
 
 

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

A rare still showing an excised "crab-walking" sequence

 
 
 
 

EXPOSÉ

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