More British Seventies Sleaze

We live in an age where the strangest things, in TV terms, seem to happen.  One of the streaming channels I get via my Roku box, for instance, just showed a double bill of Alison Elliot movies, Pete Walker's Home Before Midnight (1979) and the notorious proto-slasher Killer's Moon (1978), directed by Alan Birkinshaw.  At least, I assume it was a double bill of her movies as she was the only common cast member between the two as far as I could see. Then again, it could have been a double bill of seventies low budget exploitation movies, or even a double bill of British movies highlighting a more than slightly disturbing attitude to rape, (which lingers in the UK to this day).  Or perhaps it was just coincidence that she was in both films.  To get the obvious out of the way, if you aren't familiar with Alison Elliot, (and there's no reason you should be), she was one of those young British actresses of the seventies and eighties who gained a certain cult fame from appearing in a few low budget sexploitation titles before seemingly vanishing.  Elliot is interesting because, apart from her starring roles in the two aforementioned titles in her late teens, she subsequently had a number of prominent roles on TV before falling off the radar in the mid-eighties.  My best guess would be that she took a career break to start a family and never got back into the business, (or simply tired of it all and decided to do something more sensible than acting for a living).  

Home Before Midnight represented something of a return to his sexploitation roots for Pete Walker, after his long series of horror films.  It tries to have its cake and eat it by presenting itself as a serious exploration of the issues and moral questions surrounding statutory rape and underage sex, while also providing the viewer with plenty of sex and nudity.  The plot involves a popular and successful song writer who picks up a girl in a rainstorm with the best of intentions, but proceeds to have a sexual relationship with her, before finding out that she's fourteen.  Despite this, he continues with the relationship until it is uncovered and finds himself facing rape charges.  Much is then made of the fact that, initially, he thought she was older, (which he might be forgiven for as Alison Elliot was eighteen or nineteen when she played the role of the girl and looked it), which, it is implied makes it OK.  The problem with the film is that, as far as I'm aware, unlike some US States, the UK doesn't have an offence of statutory rape.  As it was always clear that the girl consented to sex , the issue would be whether that consent was legal as she was underage, meaning that the main charge he would be facing would be sex with a minor, (of which he is eventually convicted).  While bringing in the rape charge places the main character in greater jeopardy, for the sake of drama, it is simply unrealistic.  Regardless, the film still seems to think that he has been unfairly treated for being sent down and having his life ruined for having sex with a schoolgirl.

These days, of course, as someone prominent in the entertainment industry, he'd probably find himself facing a major investigation and accused of 'grooming' and peadophilia.  With good cause.  Despite the underlying attitudes of the film, it actually isn't normal for adult males to want to have sex with children, even if they do look older and to continue to do so when you've established that they are underage is indefensible.  (Sorry to sound so moralistic, but as somebody trained as a teacher, this is an issue I've had to consider very carefully.  I know that teenaged girls under sixteen can sometimes look much older, but the onus is still on any adult encountering them to establish their true age before getting intimate with them).  Another problematic aspect of the film is that, although they are played by young adult actresses, it presents Elliot and her friend (played by ill-fated former page three girl Debbie Linden), as fourteen year olds, making their multiple full frontal nude scenes uncomfortable, to say the least.  Of course, that's partly the point - to make the viewer complicit with the underlying theme of the sexualisation of underage girls by contemporary society, but it also feels cynical and exploitative - the proverbial having its cake and eating it I referred to earlier.  Whatever one might think of its implicit attitudes to rape and underage sex, like all Pete Walker films, Home Before Midnight is actually very well made, with the director eliciting good performances from his cast and making excellent use of his limited resources, with lots of well shot location work. Walker might have been an exploitation director, but he was also a professional film-maker and it always shows.

The Walker film at least accepts that rape and underage sex are considered serious issues by both the law and society, which is more than can be said for Killer's Moon.  The film, which features a number of schoolgirls being raped by a gang of maniacs at least shows it as a horrific trauma for the victim, but then undermines with a bizarre piece of dialogue which seemingly dismisses rape as being relatively trivial.  "Look, you were only raped, as long as you don't tell anyone about it you'll be alright. You pretend it never happened, I pretend I never saw it and if we ever get out of this alive, well, maybe we'll both live to be wives and mothers", a girl tells her friend who has been raped. Perhaps most astoundingly, novelist Fay Weldon, half-sister of the director, later claimed to have rewritten the dialogue for the film, (uncredited), so presumably must take responsibility for this line.  Even more incredibly, she professed being proud of her work on the script, which she thought was too good for the film!  To be absolutely fair, that dialogue and the whole rape business are only part of the problems afflicting Killer's Moon.

A lot of people have written reams about Killer's Moon, so I'll try to brief, but its fundamental problem is its lack of style and purpose.  A brief synopsis of the scenario - a quartet of psychos escape from a secure psychiatric cottage hospital (!), who, as a result of drug therapy believe they are in a dream where their actions have no consequences, at the same time that a coach carrying a group of schoolgirl choristers has broken down nearby, a night of terror ensues - makes it sound as if it was conceived as some sort of parody.  Except that it isn't - it is apparently intended as a serious shocker.  But even there it fails - the killings are decidedly short on blood and gore and the suspense non-existent.  The dialogue is, for the most part, repetitious, with the whole 'We're in a dream' business seemingly repeated in every other line.  The acting is highly variable and the plot consists of far too much running around in either the woods with murky day-for-night shooting, or the hotel where the girls have taken refuge.  Add some animal cruelty, (a dog has its leg chopped off - off-screen - and a cat has its tail cut off), to the multiple schoolgirl rapes and the somewhat offensive depictions of mental health and you have what critic Matthew Sweet once referred to as the most tasteless movie in British cinema history.  (To be fair, I 'm sure I've seen worse and, personally, I found the film less offensive than simply inept).  The whole thing is flatly directed and drags badly in the middle.  Still, the Lake District locations look good.  Frustratingly, like a lot of low budget movies, you can't help but feel that Killer's Moon had the germ of a decent idea in the experimental drug therapy angle, but threw it away as a plot device rather than exploring it.  Ultimately, it falls into that category of a bad movie that isn't even bad enough to be really funny.  Sure, it is full of ludicrous dialogue and scenarios that seem as if they should be laughable, but they are handled so poorly that even unintentional humour is drained from them.

I feel I should add that, despite the depictions of animal abuse, no animals actually were harmed in the making of Killer's Moon.  The cat already had no tail and the three legged dog had actually lost its leg while heroically tackling armed robbers in its home - it won the animal equivalent of a VC for its valour.  The dog also gets its revenge in possibly the only scene that made me laugh, (so ineptly is it staged), when it attacks its mutilator, tearing his throat out.