Straight on Till Morning

This is not your usual Hammer House film.

The Brenda character is perhaps one of the strangest in cinema. She's desperately naive to the point of delusion. Los in her own fantasy world of fairytale endings she struggles to engage in the realy of her new life in London. The dog kidnapping scene where Brenda transform into a fairytale character of her own creation is a perfect example of this.

The weirdness and disconnectedness of the characters of swinging early 70's party scene reflects the lucid dream like quality of the film. The film occasionally jumps to alternative scenes, sexual, ordinary, her mother back home, they all suggest that Brenda's decisions could have led her down a different path.

When it seems that Brenda's bizarre plan to find a husband is starting to pay off, she stumbles into another person's fairytale. Peter offers Brenda what she wants but in exchange he takes her personality, renaming her as a character in his own delusional fantasy.

What follows is a superbly sinister and uneasy relationship. The tension between Peter and Brenda moves between a kind of marriage of convenience, dark sexuality and childish fantasy.

A brilliant example of 70's British horror. Well worth a watch.

The swinging sixties are coming to an end in swinging London but there are still some hang overs from the 1950s and still plenty of odd ball characters. Pregnancy outside of marriage was still much looked down upon and under the guise of the 'flower children' it was perfectly possible for even homicidal maniacs to not seem out of place. Rita Tushingham is as great as ever and this much under rated actress puts in one of her more endearing performances. Shane Briant is eerily convincing as the psycho and the rest of the cast including James Bolam are all fine. Some decent location shooting is always appreciated around this time and here we get a couple of boutiques and some very moody stuff around the then recently completed South Bank complex. Plenty of surprises and well worth catching as one of the most unusual hammer movies.

If, like me, you like your Hammer films to feature vampires and things that go bump in the night, you're likely to be disappointed with this film. After the first few minutes, I wasn't expecting Straight on Till Morning to be any good, but things do pick up; and once they do, the film does become interesting and represents a more than decent seventies offering, even if it isn't what we've all come to expect from Hammer studios. The film is set and shot in London and features a typically British seventies style, as the fashions and set design are very true to the period. The film plays out more like films such as 10 Rillington Place than your average Hammer Horror fare, and focuses on Brenda; a shy, irritating and naive girl who goes to live in London after telling her mother that she's pregnant. She moves in with the pretty Caroline, but begins to feel lonely and while out walking one night, spots a dog that she decides to kidnap. Upon returning the dog to her owner, the rather odd looking Peter, and telling him why she did it; he asks her to move in and she accepts. However, she doesn't realise that her new housemate is actually a vicious psychopath...

Straight on Till Morning isn't particularly violent or bloody, but that isn't to say that the film isn't disturbing. Most of the film's nastiness is implied, and while I wouldn't have minded seeing Shane Briant's silly hairstyle psycho going on the rampage with a Stanley knife, the way that director Peter Collinson ('Fright', 'The Italian Job') goes about implementing these scenes does give the film more of a poignant edge. The lead role goes to Liverpudlian actress Rita Tushingham, and for me she's just a bit too irritating. She fits the film perfectly by the way she looks and acts, but I found it very difficult to care about what happens to her due to the fact that I had to cringe during her every scene. Shane Briant is the other side of the offbeat central duo, and the most memorable thing about his appearance in the film is his haircut - which is ridiculous to say the least! This does, however, make his role all the more intriguing...as I never thought that someone who looks so silly would be capable of murder! The ending is a bit forced, but its fun enough getting there; the atmosphere is claustrophobic and the relationship between the leads is never boring. Overall this isn't a great Hammer film - but it's a different one and I enjoyed it.

Straight on Till Morning is certainly one of the most atypical films that Hammer Studios ever produced. It begins like a social realist kitchen-sink drama, replete with fragmented snapshot montage editing similar to Ken Loach's Up the Junction – incidentally, a film remade by Peter Collinson the director of this film. And for the first third of the film it seems like this is going to be another such gritty drama, however, it takes an unexpected detour when it suddenly turns into a psychological thriller. It's an extremely unusual combination that isn't entirely successful but definitely interesting. In actual fact it's one of Hammer's more intriguing efforts in my opinion because it's so weird.

The story is about a naive young girl called Brenda who moves to London to try and find a man. She winds up staying with a very strange foppish man called Peter who is in fact a serial killer of women.

The social realism and montage heavy editing is entirely at odds to anything else Hammer ever put out. This is a film that has way more in common with the British New Wave than it does with anything previously produced by the famous studio. None of the characters are particularly likable, with the men in particular very creepy and/or deeply unpleasant people with appalling haircuts. The central relationship between Brenda and Peter is, to put it mildly, bizarre. It's difficult to see what either of them sees in each other; while Peter's strange issues with beauty are a little hard to fathom. Nevertheless, I thought this one was not bad at all. It wasn't predictable in the way that most Hammer films tend to be. It was pretty bleak and overall a commendably uncommercial offering. Definitely worth a look if you like downbeat psychological dramas.

Niave, homely Brenda ("A Taste of Honey"'s Rita Tushingham) desperate to find a man willing to give her a baby, leaves home to move in to an apartment with her "friend", after she back stabs her. She runs into the night only to find and kidnap a dog in hopes of meeting it's owner. Which she does. But life isn't romantified and has little use for idle dreamers. This is one of the later Hammer films, and i adore it. It's nihilististic, misogynistic, realistic tone is great. Well acted and suspenseful. This physcological thriller is one to see. On the downside, none of the characters are really sympathetic.

My Grade: B

DVD Extras: Commentary by Rita Tushington and Journalist Jonathan Sothcott; Peter Collinson Bio; and Theatrical Trailer