The Blind Side of God (1987)

I haven't mentioned the late Cliff Twemlow, (the man who single-handedly created a string of Manchester based low budget action movies in the 1980s), for quite a while now.  So, this time around. I've decided to present a 'trailer' for one of his movies, The Blind Side of God.  I say 'trailer', in reality it is a very elaborately staged show reel designed to be shown to prospective investors and distributors.  Sadly, funding wasn't forthcoming and The Blind Side of God was never made.  Which is a pity, as I would happily have watched it.  I suspect that, if pitched ten years later it might have attracted funding - peadophilia was more of a 'story' in the late nineties, propelled into the public consciousness by the tabloids.  But, back in 1987 is just didn't register with the public in the way it does now.  Nevertheless, his choice of theme shows that Twemlow was as remarkably prescient as ever, (he pioneered direct-to-video releases, for instance and correctly predicted that streaming and downloading onto computers was the future of movie distribution).

Judging by the showreel, Blindside of God would have been a typically action packed Twemlow production, featuring him as a gun-toting vigilante accompanied by lots of explosions and car chases.  The interesting thing is that this type of movie was still being made (albeit on larger budgets) in places like France and Italy throughout the seventies and eighties.  Brutal vigilante cops, usually patterned after Dirty Harry, were de riguer on the continent back in those days.  But in the UK, the nearest equivalent of these genres was to found on TV, in the form of series like The Sweeney and The Professionals.  Frustratingly, outside of a few outings like Get Carter, Sitting Target and The Squeeze, the beleaguered British film industry showed little interest in pursuing this type of subject matter.  It was instead left to low budget operators like Twemlow and Lindsay Shonteff (whose Clegg is an unjustly neglected masterpiece of the hard boiled private eye genre).  It's tempting to think that, with bigger budgets and better distribution, Twemlow could have been producing the equivalent to French policiers or Italian poliziottesch
movies. A man can dream.