gavcrimson

One for fans of cheerfully rude British cinema.... we're talking Sex Lives of the Potato Men level here...as washed up, coke snorting adult video director Damien Self (Simon Weir) and his even more obnoxious producer James Steel (Kieran Chalker) attempt to turn around the fortune of their failing porno operation by replacing flesh and blood porn stars with three sex robots. Only for the sexbots to start thinking for themselves and turn against their chauvinistic owners. Smutty, bloke humour is the order of the day here, but it also rubs shoulders with flashes of surprisingly satirical commentary on A. I., the metoo movement and female body image. The film hides it well, but there is a brain here. Making this, in it's smarter moments, a micro-budgeted Brit variation on The Substance, albeit had that film made the Dennis Quaid character the centre of attention. It's similarly visually hyperactive and in your face, with the downfall of it's train wreck of a protagonist being played out within a confined, claustrophobic setting. The film's concerns about A. I.'s potential dominance of the movie industry- the sexbots quickly master film editing and scriptwriting- and identity thief -Damien models one of the sexbots on his porn star ex-girlfriend- feel particularly topical. Damien's realisation that in terms of being stripped of his long ago artistic integrity and being answerable to unscrupulous masters, he's every bit a machine as the sexbots, leads to a surprisingly redemptive coda. My only gripe with the film is the CGI bloodshed, I just don't think the technology is quite there yet to accurately replicate flowing liquid, resulting in spurting blood having an awkward animated look. Low budget filmmaking's current favouring of this seems doubly baffling given that a bottle of old fashioned stage blood isn't exactly the price of caviar these days. Still as this is hardly a gorefest, the violence in the film being limited to only a few brief seconds, this is only a slight irritation, and these sexy but deadly dolls are well worth a look. The amount of female nudity in the film indicating that along with recent efforts like Graphic Designs, Dirty Work and Darker Shades of Summer, low-budget British filmmaking has got it's sexploitation groove back. Elsewhere Kieran Chalker brings some sweary, geezer gangster energy to Psycho Sex Dolls, as you might expect from someone who has been in a few Rise of the Footsoldier movies, and Simon Weir gives a debauched tour-de-force as a character who seems to be equal parts Ben Dover and Charlie Endell (esquire). As far as recent movies about sexbots go, Psycho Sex Dolls is more ambitious than Gerard Daly's V1200 (2019) and sexier than Louisa Warren's Cyberbride (2019). On a personal note, I was somewhat amused that Damien Self opted to give one of the sexbots a Manchester accent, as a Mancunian I'd never considered our accent to be particularly sexy, we should be flattered... I guess.

The spirit of dark and lonely water meets British sexploitation in one of David Hamilton Grant's support features/Eady Money cash grabs, as a couple drive to the countryside, eat watermelon, make love, then encounter the grim reaper. Despite nudity from an uncharacteristically busty Felicity Devonshire (the result of real life pregnancy) The Kiss reportedly didn't play well to the dirty macintosh brigade...too arty and glum...and fell under the radar of everyone else. I guess folk horror themed pregnancy porn was never going to have mass appeal. The Kiss is well shot and atmospheric, especially when the grim reaper turns up. If truth be told though, it's fairly underwhelming in horror movie terms and the centrepiece sex scene comes across as a tokenistic gesture to the X-cert market by a director who seems more at home filming bunny rabbits and butterflies amidst a background of the English countryside. Not helped by the fact that the only copy in circulation looks to have been re-scored, re-titled and possibly cut down from 18 minutes to 9 minutes.

Currently only around in an Italian language version with Japanese subtitles, Naked England is an Italian made, Mondo movie look at British customs, sexuality and eccentricities. A subject matter that dictates Naked England has more in common with Arnold Louis Miller documentaries like Primitive London and London in the Raw than the Italian made Mondo Cane. Thus giving you the unusual spectacle of Italian filmmakers imitating British filmmakers who were in turn imitating Italian filmmakers. Naked England opens with a man on a tranquil golf field, his launching of a golf ball then quickly cuts to a ball of the wrecking variety making short work of old tenanent housing. This metaphor of the new demolishing the old is reflected in the ensuing crowd shots, Naked England was made at a time when top hats and bowlers were still a common site on the heads of Londoners, but were beginning to share pavement space with girls in short skirts... young, dandy fellas and the bald heads of Hare Krishnas. The timing of Naked England certainly can't be faulted, this was a period when the rest the world looked to London as a colourful, cultural trendsetter, and the makers of the film sure managed to grab a generous slice of the Swingin' London pie. The film might have been more accurately titled 'Mondo Kings Road'.

Some of the subject matter of Naked England includes women's wrestling, trepanation, and a ''School for Wives' where a professional stripper teaches the average housewife how to act sexy for their husbands. As is the nature of the beast, Naked England is mainly bogus, highly sensationalistic, and must have had the effect of getting red blooded Italians on the next plane to England while being treated with much amusement by a UK audience, where it's fakery would have been more apparent. Particularly questionable are scenes of Jesus freaks holding a public crucifixion and the depiction a Nazi themed restaurant, where customers pay to be brutalised by staff dressed in SS uniforms, then suffer a mock gassing...an experience akin to the 'be black baby' sequence in Brian De Palma's Hi Mum. Saying that the film does specifically identify the restaurant in question- Alexander's club on the Kings road- which does check out as being an authentic location back then, and for libal reasons surely wouldn't have been name checked in the movie had there not been some credibility to this Nazi fetish sequence. Another authentic London restaurant, Melita, is similarly portrayed here as a sexuality transgressive hotspot...with a montage of transvestites preening and making out memorably scored to 'Eloise' by Barry Ryan. The use of too theatrical, too red looking, stage blood rules out the crucifixion and trepanation scenes as being real, ditto a scene of the police tangling with criminals, which leaves the latter with faces full of Kensington gore and plays like a warm up for a scene of a blag going down in The Sweeney. On the other hand, scenes of junkies shooting up in the underground toilets of Piccadilly Circus are as grueling and real as anything in Tony Klinger's Extremes.

Distributed by Miracle Films on the lower half of a double-bill with Pete Walker's Man of Violence, Naked England played the Leicester Square Jacey cinema in July 1969, before resurfacing at the Edinburgh Jacey cinema in January 1971, then transferring to the Liverpool Jacey cinema in March 1971. The more titillation orientated Mondo movies were all welcomed in British cinemas, with the likes of Naked England, The Queer.... The Erotic, Mondo Sex and Excuse Me, Do You Like Sex, showing up on the Fleapit circuit during the late sixties and early seventies. By the time VHS came along though, the perception seems to have been that these films were then too tame, and too dated to warrant being preserved on the new media. The copy of Naked England that is currently on the film collectors circuit looks to have been recorded off Italian television, and has managed to acquire Japanese subtitles along the way.

Unlike many foreign Mondo movies which turned an eye towards Britain, but faked the location work, Naked England was predominantly shot on British soil, meaning you do get lots of late 1960s London here. From a Brit-Sleaze perspective, there's also footage of an exhibition of Harrison Marks' photographic work, with Marks' friend and straight man Stuart Samuels seen manning the counter and selling prints of Marks work. While a suspect look at Nude psychotherapy, which just seems to be an excuse to fill the screen with naked glamour models, offers a fleeting glimpse of Esme Johns, thus shattering the idea that Groupie Girl was her only movie.