Month: October 2023

MAXINE. (2022) A NETFLIX TRUE CRIME SERIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.

MAXINE. (2022) A TRUE CRIME DRAMA WRITTEN BY SIMON TYRRELL.
DIRECTED BY LAURA WAY.
STARRING JEMMA CARLTON AND SCOTT REID.
ORIGINAL NETWORK: CHANNEL 5.
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TO WATCH ON NETFLIX.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I watched this true crime mini-series on Saturday night. Naturally, I found it bleak and disturbing but, contrary to some other reviews it’s received, I also found it very respectful to Holly and Jessica, the two little girls at the centre of one of Britain’s most intensive crime investigations ever, back in the summer of 2002.

The topic of the two girls is touched on with the lightest of hands, ditto the girls’ parents, and even what is revealed about the murders is restrained and not too salacious. The series mostly concentrates on the role of Maxine Carr, Ian Huntley’s girlfriend, in the cover-up of the murders, and on her relationship with Huntley, the killer of the two girls.

We don’t see the murders. They were committed while Ian Huntley’s girlfriend at the time, Maxine Carr, was away in Grimsby, visiting her mum. Ian Huntley remained at home in Soham, Cambridgeshire in East England, in the tied cottage he’d been given when he started work as a senior caretaker at the local Village College. (Maxine had worked as a teaching assistant in St. Andrew’s Primary School in Soham, and had briefly taught Holly and Jessica in 2002.)

Maxine comes back from her visit to her mum when she receives Ian’s phone call about two little girls who’ve gone missing in Soham. Maxine is shocked when she realises that the two girls had been in her class; she’d even been given a handmade greetings card from one of the children.

She’s even more shocked when Ian Huntley starts blabbering on about how he fully expects to be charged for the murders as he’d been the last person to see the children alive, in his garden, while he was supposedly washing his dog. They’d trotted straight off then, apparently, the two girls, ‘happy as Larry,’ off to buy sweets from a local shop, according to Huntley.

Huntley is also worried that his previous brushes with the law involving the sexual abuse of minors might come back to haunt him. Maxine throws herself whole-heartedly into keeping her lover out of jail. She scrubs the entire house from top to bottom, so there’d be nothing to see when the police come calling, which they do.

The real question is this: did Maxine know that Huntley had killed the girls, and so was she covering up for him in full realisation that he was guilty? Or did she really believe his lies that he was innocent, and that the only reason he was worried about the police coming was that he’d been ‘wrongly accused’ of rape in the past and was afraid of being wrongly accused again? Even by the end of the series, we’re still not entirely sure which it is.

Maxine doesn’t appear to have had a happy life. (No excuses, I hear you cry!) Insecurity about her appearance led to her developing anorexia at age sixteen. Brought up by a single mother, she had a string of crappy jobs and crappy boyfriends before finally settling down with Ian Huntley and her temporary job as a teaching assistant, a job she’d apparently wanted for a long time.

She probably thought she’d hit the jackpot with Huntley. Own car, good job that came with a house, and he loved her so much he couldn’t bear for her to be apart from him, texting and phoning her like crazy when she was away at her mum’s, and giving her the odd slap when he thought she’d been flirting with other men. How wonderful to be the love object of such a passionate man! (Object being the key word here.)

We see a bit of the court case, and we also see Maxine withdrawing from Huntley around that time in order not to be tarred with the same brush. We see what their separate sentences are to be, and we get to make up our own minds as to whether or not Maxine Carr got off lightly.

The three episodes, each forty-five minutes long, are unremittingly bleak, but then, there’s nothing to laugh at here. Probably the most concerning point the show brings up is the following: According to Wikipedia, by 2001, Huntley’s proven and alleged criminal activities had been reported to Humberside Police on ten occasions and to the social services on five occasions.

So, what was he doing working in a job in which he had pretty much unlimited access to children and young people? The law regarding this kind of thing was tightened up after the murders. I would imagine that someone like Huntley would find it harder nowadays, if not impossible, to get a job working with children or young people. At least one good thing came out of that dreadful summer.    
 
 

VAMPIRE CIRCUS. (1972) A SEXY HAMMER HORROR REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS. (1972) BY HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS.

DIRECTED BY ROBERT YOUNG.

MUSIC BY DAVID WHITAKER.

STARRING ADRIENNE CORRI, THORLEY WALTERS, ANTHONY HIGGINS, AKA ANTHONY CORLAN, LYNNE FREDERICK, JOHN MOULDER-BROWN, DAVID PROWSE AND ROBERT TAYMAN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This film is a super-sexy spectacle with a stellar cast. A film with the word ‘vampire’ and the word ‘circus’ is bound to garner interest amongst movie fans. Throw in the words ‘Hammer,’ ‘nudity’ and ‘sex’ and you’ve got yourself a stylish, slick production that’s easily one of the most memorable of the Hammer vampire canon.

The vampire fangs here, incidentally, are longer and more lethal-looking than in any of the other Hammer vampire films. Frankly, they’re terrifying, possibly because they’re so realistic-looking. They look exactly like real gnashers, only much longer.

The colours of the film are vibrant and fluorescently shocking, especially in the bright shocking pink tunic worn by the sullen-looking Emil, and the music is eerie, unsettling and oh-so-effective.

So, what’s going on here, anyway? Well, we have the rather isolated and primitive Serbian village of Stetl, and the time is the early 1800s. A certain Count Mitterhaus lives in his huge mansion in the woods, and he has been known to make away with the women and the children of the village and use them for his own nefarious ends.

These nefarious ends are probably also sexy ends, because the Count himself is kind of a sexy dude who looks like he’s always at least thinking about nookie, if not actually doing it, with his tight black trousers and frilly white blouse and things. Talk about a dedicated follower of fashion.

At the start of the film, we catch him in the act, as it were, of draining the blood of a pretty little blonde girl, a villager’s daughter. She’s been brought to the Count by another villager, this time the sexy wife of the village schoolmaster, who clearly isn’t giving her what she needs in the bedroom, just like the schoolmaster’s wife in Ryan’s Daughter. Clearly, school teachers’ wives are a sorely neglected lot. You know, sexually, like. It’s probably all that excessive homework-correcting that does it.

Well, Count Mitterhaus has a cure for that sad condition. Just as he’s about to administer it, however (it’s a sexy cure, lol), an angry mob of townsmen break into the castle and stake the Count right through his sexy, ever-loving heart. The bally cheek of them! The Count gets the last laugh, however.

He puts a curse on the town of Stetl, and vows that the lives of the children of the village will be forfeit in exchange for his own life. Then he dies sexily, and some-not all!- of the film’s sexiness goes with him. Fear not, though, gentle reader, he will return, but I won’t say when, and things may get sexy again…

Anyway, fifteen years later, a mysterious circus comes to town, just as the word is getting out that Stetl, ravaged by a plague, is a dying village. Some of the villagers remember the Count’s curse and despair of ever again being plague-free and acceptable in the eyes of the other towns hereabouts.

The Circus of Night, however, proves a welcome distraction for some of the villagers. The Burgomeister’s daughter, the comely Rosa, becomes immediately besotted with the exotic Emil, whose alter ego is the black panther mixed with something dangerous which the dozey Rosey probably wouldn’t even give two hoots about if she knew about it, so enamoured is she of Emil the sexy circus acrobat.

Men like Emil only ever use women like Rosa, though, so fully expect her to come a cropper. Her old man, the Burgomeister, is played by the wonderful Thorley Walters, by the way, a Hammer stalwart who knew a thing or two about playing the Burgomeister of an Eastern European hamlet in the far-off olden times.

Expect a bombshell about the Gypsy Woman and ring-mistress, played by the gorgeous Adrienne A Clockwork Orange Corri, to be revealed along the way, along with a good deal of flesh belonging to David Prowse, the circus Strongman. Prowse went on to portray Darth Vader in the original Star Wars Trilogy, and he was also in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, so take that, Where Are They Now? Heh-heh-heh.

So, will the village doctor manage to get through the barricades and collect vital medicines for the sick townspeople? They’d better not sneeze on me, the germy feckers. Will the doctor’s son Anton ever get to seduce Dora, second only in line to Rosa as this film’s candidate for the drippiest lippy and the mopey-est cow-eyes?

Dora is played by Lynne Frederick, by the way, the actress who was married to actor and comedian Peter Sellers at the time of his death in 1980. She gained the unwelcome title of gold-digger when she copped for the lot, as it were, and refused to give any more moolah to her husband’s children than the pittance their pops had left them. One might argue that she was only going along with her husband’s wishes; on the other hand, he was just about to cut her out of his will (supposedly) when he had the heart attack that killed him, so who knows…?

Anyway, to get back to the fillum, who are the strange employees of the Circus of Night, and what, if anything, is their connection to the long-deceased Count Frilly Knickers Mittelhaus? I’ll never tell, so you’ll just have to watch this extraordinary horror movie to find out, folks.

Look out for the stunning array of circus animals (we’ll have to draw a veil here over the way movie animals were treated back in these days; it’s the only way I can get through this!) and the inclusion of the names of Billy Smart’s Circus and a female of the Chipperfield’s Circus family in the credits. They were called in to give advice on making sure that the animal actors were treated properly and only were given the colour of M&Ms they specifically asked for and absolutely no bloody brown ones…!

Check out too the way-beyond-sexy performance of exotic dancers Milovan and Serena (she’s the naked one in the body paint!). The whole film is pretty damn sexy, actually, even when there’s nothing particularly sexy going on on-screen. You should totally watch it if you haven’t seen it before. Watch it, and get your sex on.      

THE STORY OF O: UNTOLD PLEASURES. (2002) AN EROTIC MOVIE REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE STORY OF O: UNTOLD PLEASURES. (2002) DIRECTED BY PHIL LEIRNESS.

WRITTEN BY DOMINIQUE AURY, MARC CHAPMAN AND NADEJDA KLEIN.

STARRING DANIELLE CIARDI, MAX PARRISH, NEIL DICKSON, MICHELLE RUBEN AND KATHERINE RANDOLPH.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

“Did you like it when I slapped you?” he asks her.

‘More than I should have,” she replies shyly.

Well now, you could do worse than spend an evening goggling at this sexy movie that claims to make FIFTY SHADES OF GREY look like playtime on Balamory. I definitely enjoyed it and only wish that other films would approach the sticky subject of sadomasochism with the same openness and gusto.

It’s based on a French erotic novel from 1954 by a lady called Anne Desclos. She hid her identity by using pen-names such as Pauline Reage and Dominique Aury, but her sexy secret’s been out for some time. She revealed it herself, in fact, in an interview in 1993 when she was eighty-six years old.

Google a picture of Anne Desclos. She looks the very picture of the polite lady novelist, or an Agatha Christie-type writer of detective stories. Who would have though such filth was fermenting in her cardigan-covered bosom? Not me, that’s for sure!

I’m not sure where the story is set in the film. It could be America, or France, because of the chateaus and stuff. O is the lead character. Yes, her parents actually named her O! It’s the shortest name you can conceive of and it seems to represent, in this instance, all the o-shaped ‘holes’ which a young lady possesses and which can be plugged or stuffed in different ways by men, the superior sex. Well, I bet you weren’t expecting that, lol.

O is an attractive young woman in her late twenties. She is a photographer compiling an avant-garde book of images glorifying women’s sexuality. Her model is a stunning Russian woman called Jacqueline who asks her how she can make a book about women’s sexual desires and needs and fantasies if she hasn’t even explored her own fantasies yet…?

One time, during sex with her tennis coach boyfriend Rene, Rene slaps O on the buttocks, then notices that her sexual excitement subsequently is nearly off the chart. He gets a sneaky idea, which culminates in his driving the curious and blindfolded O to a chateau out of town which houses the strange and mysterious being known as ‘Sir Stephen…’

Stephen takes to the feisty, pretty photographer immediately. He’ll finance her book for her, so she won’t have to worry about a thing financially, in return for just one teensy-weensy little thing.

She’ll be his sex slave for a total of seven (drunken) nights, and will do anything he requires her to do, whether for himself or any other male who happens to be around; Rene the boyfriend, perhaps, or one of the no-doubt well-hung male valets and servants who occupy the chateau.

The themes of the movie are love, male domination over the female and female submission to the almighty male. In the book, O is taught to never wear panties, or anything else that might prevent her from being permanently available for oral, vaginal and anal intercourse.

She- and other women in the house- submit to being naked and whipped savagely with a riding crop by a massive topless man dressed terrifyingly like an old-time torturer for the Inquisition or an executioner. She is pierced and branded, tied up and chained, and her anus is widened by the insertion of increasingly large plugs. Nice work if you can get it, lol.  

Highlights of the film include a night of graceful Sapphic love as O finally takes the ravishing Jacqueline to bed. Jacqueline’s sister Natalie turns up, wanting to be a photographer just like O, and O tries to help her, but I wasn’t too pushed about Natalie at first, feeling that she didn’t add much to the mix.

But then Sir Stephen tells O that he’ll grant her wish for him to pay for Natalie’s education. Naturally, though, there are conditions, and it won’t just be a simple whipping this time. O nervously listens as her benefactor talks of his conditions. Will she accept his offer, or will there be too many strings attached this time…? Oh, the suspense!

I think this film is more explicit than FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. I like that it tackles the subject of female submission, and portrays a woman who, shyly at first but then more confidently, learns to ask for what she wants; to be dominated and beaten by a man. Yes, the feminists would go crackers over this sentiment, but it’s what the girl wants…

There are so many men nowadays who want to be dominated by females that that’s often all we hear about. But not all women want to strut about in thigh-high, glossy black leather boots, shouting orders to the man grovelling naked at her feet with a ball gag in his mouth. Some women just want to be women, and they want for men to be men, if that’s not too much to ask for in 2023. Great film. Love it.