Satan's Playthings

AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970)
ASSAULT (1971)

AND SOON THE DARKNESS sees English nurse Pamela Franklin contend with a serial killer and the language barrier in rural France. The film was needlessly remade in 2010, where American girls go on a bike trip in a remote part of Argentina.

THESE thrillers both exploit rural settings as key plot devices, and play like a rebuttal to the sexual freedom of the Love Generation. Directed by Robert Fuest from a script by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, AND SOON THE DARKNESS tells the story of Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), two young student nurses from England on a cycling holiday through rural France. Jane intends to keep to a schedule, but Cathy wants to enjoy the surroundings at a slower pace, especially the local males. This conflict of interests leads to an argument where Jane leaves Cathy to lounge at an off-road spot. However, when Jane returns she can find no trace of her friend and, asking around, learns that a few years ago another blond woman was sexually assaulted and killed in the area. Joined by scooter-riding Paul (Sandor Eles), who claims to be a detective for the Sûreté, the evidence leaves Jane unsure as to whether he might be the killer.

The movie is set completely in broad daylight and unfolds almost real-time over a single afternoon. The bare openness of the fields and countryside brood with sinister effect, as the provincial landscape is a foreboding character in itself. The French language notably is not subtitled so the viewer feels the same alienation as Jane ("Meutre? That's French for "murder" isn't it?"), who is faced with a catalogue of unnerving locals all strangely lukewarm about the need to find Cathy; even the English schoolmistress Jane encounters is matter-of-fact ("loathsome business, sex.") AND SOON THE DARKNESS may be too slow-burning for some - especially as it shows restraint at a time when nudity and gore were beginning to characterise most output - but this British film prefigures the Backwoods Brutality cycle that would be defined by the classic slices of Americana THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE HILLS HAVE EYES.

An uninspired tale of killer-baiting, ASSAULT is also known under a dizzying amount of alternative titles, including THE CREEPERS, IN THE DEVIL'S GARDEN, TOWER OF TERROR and even SATAN'S PLAYTHINGS. This is a 1980 re-release ad mat for a Miami theatre.

Based on Kendal Young’s novel The Ravine, Sidney Hayer's ASSAULT begins in Devil’s End wood, where Heatherdene Arts School student Tessa Hurst (Lesley-Anne Down) is raped. When a second girl is attacked and murdered in the same location, detective Velyan (Frank Finlay) is struggling for clues, as Hurst is psychologically traumatised and unable to speak. Velyan seeks the help of Dr Greg Lomax (James Laurenson) in profiling the offender, and eyewitness art mistress Julie West (Suzy Kendall) offers herself as bait by using tabloid journalist Denny (Freddie Jones) to run a story announcing she is about to complete a photo fit painting of the killer. The investigation takes on a different angle when Lomax decides to use Pentothal on Tessa to bring her out of her comatose state, but when he arrives at the hospital dispensary to collect the drug, it transpires that a fellow doctor has taken the supply.

Although any number of Italian gialli were set in Britain and/or were UK co-productions, ASSAULT is unique in that it a completely British giallo, illustrating plot devices made famous by the genre. Sadly, unlike the Italian entries, the cinematography here is staid and unimaginative, and the execution linear and logical. The production uses that infamous British trait of casting twenty year old vixens as fifteen year schoolgirls, and dressing them in mini-skirts short enough to get any real schoolgirl expelled. The most lurid scene involves the headmistress's lecherous husband Leslie (Tony Beckley) and a student librarian on a ladder; the "student" is played by Janet Lynn, a British sex star of the period who had featured the year before in Pete Walker's COOL IT, CAROL. Finlay and Laurenson make turgid investigators, and it rests with honey-blond Kendall - who starred in Dario Argento's notable giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE - to bring some interest to the screen.

Maids of Evil

HALFWAY INN (1970)
SOME LIKE IT SEXY (1971)

Before a brief career in features, the Collinson Twins appeared
in the bawdy 8mm short HALFWAY INN.

TWINS have long been a source of fascination in cinema, and they usually get a raw deal. Representing duality and split personality, they often symbolise the battle between good and evil, and signify that sinister events are about to happen. Female examples in this intriguing sub-genre include Brian DePalma's breakthrough hit SISTERS - where Margot Kidder stars as twin siblings, one of whom is most probably a psychopathic killer - and Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING, where the pre-teen Grady Twins are one of many mirroring devices used to add to the horror of Jack Torrance's descent into madness. More recently, Wolfgang Büld's lively TWISTED SISTERS stars Fiona Horsey is an unrelenting power struggle between good twin/bad twin, and even a first season episode of THE X-FILES - EVE - featured nine-year-old twin sisters separated at birth killing their parents.

Born to an English Royal Navy father, Maltese identical twin sisters Madeleine and Mary Collinson caused quite a stir upon their arrival in Britain during April, 1969. After various modelling assignments they became the first twin Playmates in the October 1970 Playboy, after attending a party where they met Victor Lownes, the head of Playboy's European operation. The Collinson's sealed their pop culture immortality by taking the title roles in Hammer's TWINS OF EVIL a year later and, after five flirtations with the turgid British sex scene - the two under consideration here, plus squalid entries GROUPIE GIRL and PERMISSIVE, and the Keith Barron/Kenneth Cope vehicle SHE'LL FOLLOW YOU ANYWHERE - Hollywood beckoned, but their only American credit was LOVE MACHINE, where they shared a shower with John Philip Law.

The Collinson Twins quickly bore of Christopher Matthews - as does the viewer - in SOME LIKE IT SEXY.

HALFWAY INN is a thirteen minute short from George Harrison Marks, the glamour photographer, publisher and filmmaker whose early work included THE WINDOW DRESSER, where his partner Pamela Green starred as a cat burglar who hides from the law by posing as a lingerie shop dummy. Marks' background as a music hall performer is evident in the "little stories" devised for his 8mm films, some of which were appealingly macabre: in PERCHANCE TO SCREAM, an evil inquisitor sentences women to be whipped and beheaded by a masked executioner. It should be remembered that the twins were only seventeen (at most) at the time, and their scenes in HALFWAY INN are relatively strong for 1970. The film is a period piece where a man is soon consumed by a comely maid; after flirting over dinner there follows several sexual encounters, and the man is reduced to exhaustion by the apparently relentlessly lusty maid, and flees. It is only at the end that we are shown that there are in fact two maids, who have been joyfully sharing the intimate duties.

Unlike Continental erotica, British sex films were mainly comedies, a thinly veiled critique on our own private lives. However, the problem with this throwaway sub genre was that the productions were not titillating or funny. Donovan Winter's SOME LIKE IT SEXY was originally released as COME BACK PETER in 1969, but after several countries complained the film wasn't sexy enough extra sequences were shot, including the Collinson Twins in a sisterly menage a trois with professional ladies man and E-type Jag-driving Peter (Christopher Matthews). This "improved version" is also noteworthy for having a body double for Mattews whose standard posterior is replaced by an actor who possesses the hairiest arse in motion pictures. Both versions follow Peter's sexual adventures with the likes of a middle-aged socialite, a blues singer, a hippy and even a Salvation Army officer, surreally inter cut with flashes of a butcher hacking at a side of beef. This inexplicable image is explained in the twist "sex fantasy" ending, where Peter is revealed not as a super stud but as a butcher's delivery boy on the Fulham Road, where the colour image drains to monochrome as he climbs into his tatty white van.