OFFSCREEN mind the gap: British cult cinema

This year’s Offscreen, the festival for lovers of out-of-the-ordinary and non-conformist cinema, explores British cult cinema and in particular the work of the demonic iconoclast Ken Russell. Dr Ian Hunter, author of the book British Trash Cinema, will be coming to Cinema Nova from the University of Leicester to provide expert introductions to some of the films. A foretaste.

XTRO (Harry Bromley Davenport, 1983)
This grotesque sci-fi horror film is a video nasty that came to be on the banned list.
Hunter: “The strangeness of Xtro appeals to British cult-lovers. I wouldn’t go looking for more profound themes in it. Great Britain had big problems with censorship in the past. For a while in the early 1980s, there was no legislation about videos. The market was flooded with exploitation films. That caused a panic. Videos were banned and seized. But that created an aura about those films.”

THE WICKER MAN (Robin Hardy, 1973)
The ultimate cult classic, according to Offscreen. They don’t mean the US remake with Nicolas Cage.
Hunter: “For its release, the film was brutally cut and added to a double bill with Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Rumour had it that some of the footage had been mixed into the concrete of a motorway. Nonsense. But cult-lovers are crazy about the mystery surrounding the genuine version and they make a fetish of lost footage. It is not real horror, but an unusual mix of police investigation, musical scenes, eroticism, drama, and an unexpected, gruesome ending. People see in it an allegory of Great Britain in the 1970s: permissive and anti-permissive, divided and radicalising.”

(The Wicker man – Xtro – Village of the Damned)

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (Wolf Rilla, 1960)
A macabre film that combines the fear of parenthood with Cold War paranoia. But is it not more of a classic than a cult film?
Hunter: “Cult films don’t stay cult films. They go through phases. Blade Runner was a flop at first, then a cult film, and now it’s a classic. Casablanca was cult in the 1960s, when people went to the cinema dressed as Humphrey Bogart. Thirty years ago, Village of the Damned was cult, when you could only see the film by staying up very late if it happened to be on TV by accident or by going to a film archive.”

DR JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE (Roy Ward Baker, 1971)
Dr Jekyll doesn’t turn into a nasty guy, but into a beautiful femme fatale! Terrific horror from the renowned British Hammer studios.
Hunter: “The critic David Pirie once described Gothic horror as the British genre par excellence. In the 1930s, America laid claim to the genre via the Universal film studio. But the key material is British and Irish: Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Frankenstein, Dracula. In the 1950s, Hammer Films brought the genre back home. Hammer was really innovative. They were the first to show horror in colour and played with the sexual subtext to the delight of the public and the despair of the critics.”

THE DEVILLS (Ken Russell, 1971)
The uncensored version of Russell’s notorious masterpiece – full of religious hysteria, torture, violence, oversexed nuns, and hyper-stylised baroque.
Hunter: “Ken Russell didn’t make exploitation films, but serious, artistic films – with eminent casts – that were pretty extreme. The censor didn’t know what to make of them. He is part of the great British romantic tradition, with a touch of surrealism, eccentricity, and nonsense and came up with a distinctive camp style that saw high and low culture as equally valuable expressions of erotic energy.”

(Dr Jeckyll & Sister Hyde – The Devils – Raw Meat – Lisztomania)

RAW MEAT (Gary Sherman, 1972)
An atmospheric horror film in which police detective Calhoun investigates mysterious disappearances in the London Underground. Literally an underground classic.
Hunter: “In the London Underground, travellers keep on disappearing. It turns out to be the work of a cannibal, a descendent of Victorian workers who got stuck underground. The cannibal can only say one thing: ‘Mind the gap.’ It is a highly thought-of, unusually likeable, melancholy film with powerful camera work. The cannibal is not a monster, but someone who looks after his family and is a victim of capitalism. That interesting sub-political tinge is something you get in a number of British films of the time.”

LISZTOMANIA (Ken Russell, 1975)
A risqué, vulgar fantasy about the life of the pianist Franz Liszt. With Roger Daltrey as the composer and Ringo Starr as the pope!
Hunter: “Russell had made his name in the 1960s with dramatised documentaries, about the classical composers Edward Elgar and Richard Strauss among others. When he started making fiction films, he focused even more on the theme of sexuality: the repression of sexuality, and also sexuality as a source of creativity. Lisztomania is extravagantly phallic and turns Liszt into an early rock star whose sexual appetite stimulates creativity.”

OFFSCREEN film festival • 5 > 23/3, CINÉMA NOVA, CINEMATEK, BOZAR & CINEMA RITS, www.offscreen.be