In the 60s and 70s there existed a scatter of interesting writer/directors with leftfield ambitions that failed to exploit their true potential because they weren’t given the plums by the film industry establishment, and who either died tragically young and artistically unfulfilled, or sought refuge (and employment) in the more financially stable but anonymous world of television and advertising. But with every new format that comes along, there is a window of opportunity for rediscovery thanks to the fetishistic diligence of niche and peripheral distributors who pop up shop with a three-year lease. The BFI’s Flipside label is one, intent on creating an arcane collectors’ film label of forgotten oddities that came too soon, from auteurs that never were.

Directed by Joseph Despins and William Dumaresq, Duffer is an American Dreamer in London, a mop-topped, spotty face eyeing up mini-skirts on Hammersmith Bridge. Yet he’s no Yankee Billy Liar - narrating his day-to-day musings, his life is less comic despair than Oedipal nightmare. A paternal grotesque, Louis Jack, routinely beats him and later sodomises him, and on one occasion films worms slithering over his naked chest for his amateur cine porn. However, the boy remains sympathetic to his abuser, seeking comfort in the bed of a prostitute, Your Gracie. It’s not quite the familiar rites of passage one might find at the Hogwarts franchise.

Perhaps a surreal cousin to the same year’s Bronco Bullfrog (also recently released on the Flipside label) or Jerzy Skolimovski’s Deep End (1970), with a lingering, hand-held camera and extreme close-ups of non-professional faces that we no longer see on the screen. It’s a mixture of vérité naturalism and magical realism, shot, í  la nouvelle vague, at weekends on non-sync 16mm with a crew of three people, that suggests, very briefly, that our national cinema might have been heading in the right direction, were it not for the intervention, later that decade, of a group of young graduates from Collett Dickenson Pearce aiming Westward Ho for the midnight express train. Nostalgia enthusiasts will no doubt get misty-eyed at a scene showing the 28 Routemaster journey to Westbourne Park, and a John Menzies outlet at Paddington station.

Forming a late night double bill horror that would’ve played well in rotation at the Scala, the disc’s second feature, The Moon over the Alley, also shows Notting Hill when it was still a slum. A Brechtian musical for the multi-cultural dispossessed, with the ensemble cast breaking into Kinks-style kitchen-sink ditties, and cinematography by Peter Hannan, who would go on to shoot Withnail and I, this is far more than merely one of those council estate genre pieces that middle-brow critics have been sniffy about in recent times. It was directed by Despins and Dumaresq a few years later for the BFI Production Board, and with UKFC funding soon to revert back to the former, one hopes, albeit in vain, that British film can start dreaming like this again.

Robert Chilcott

Premiered at FrightFest in August, F. is a very enjoyable and well-made film clearly modelled on John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 but takes place not in a near-empty police station, but after hours in the empty corridors and classrooms of a contemporary British college. After being attacked in his classroom and finding no support among his colleagues, English teacher Robert Anderson (David Schofield) turns to alcohol and eventual burn-out. One of his pupils is his daughter, with whom he has lost connection, and as he tries to repair this relationship while facing his other demons, he finds himself confronted by a relentless attack on the school by a group of faceless thugs and bloodthirsty killers in the guise of those folk devils du jour, the hoodies.

The cast universally contribute to the film’s success but David Schofield is especially effective and notable for his role as Anderson. While steeped in conventions and plotlines with which we are all too familiar, F. is nevertheless an interesting, clever and very watchable low-budget film, which has both relevance and panache. Definitely director Johannes Roberts’s best work to date.

James Evans

Since its initial release 30 years ago, Andrzej Żulawski’s daring depiction of a marriage falling apart has been hailed as a masterpiece and dismissed as pretentious trash.

Since its initial release 30 years ago, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) has been hailed as a masterpiece and dismissed as pretentious trash. In the United States it was cut down from two hours to 80 minutes, turning an already confusing film into something incoherent, while in the UK it became arguably the most bizarre film to end up on the ‘video nasties’ list. It was removed the following year, but its presence on the list brought Possession to attention of a great many horror fans who mistakenly believed it was another gratuitous slice of Euro-splatter, with effects courtesy of Alien‘s Carlo Rambaldi. That assumption was probably dispelled by the time the lovely Isabelle Adjani - already known to horror fans for her roles in Werner Herzog’s exquisite Nosferatu remake and Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) - started giving birth to a tentacled monster in a deserted subway tunnel. Shattered illusions aside, Possession did find some appreciation within the horror crowd - especially among lovers of David Cronenberg’s unique brand of ‘body-horror’ - although it remains difficult to assess in genre terms. It does include a monster, graphic gore and explicit sex scenes, but despite these elements the film remains a domestic drama at heart, albeit a twisted and somewhat disturbing one.

With their marriage reduced to a series of violent and bloody confrontations, Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) begin to look elsewhere for affection. Anna gives birth to a monstrosity that she then takes as her lover, guarding it from the attentions of her jealous husband. He in turn begins a relationship with their son’s teacher, who appears to be an exact duplicate of his wife. In effect, both seem to have created a ‘perfect’ replacement: Anna has a tender and affectionate lover that possesses no part of her husband, unlike her human child; Mark’s new lover has the body of his attractive wife but with an entirely different personality. During the writing and shooting of Possession, Żuławski was going through a difficult and acrimonious divorce, and it is clear that despite the fantasy trappings, much of the film was informed by the director’s recent experiences. Thoughts that would normally remain unspoken - the desire to kill or physically injure one’s former spouse, for example - are given a physical form and acted out by Adjani and Neill, both of whom seem to live solely for the opportunity to hurt each other, ignoring their child in the process. Anna’s monstrous offspring is the physical realisation of both her guilt and self-loathing, and her repressed sexual appetites, but neither the monster nor the doppelgänger are realistic partners. In the end, Żuławski can think of only one suitable conclusion to his tale: the destruction of the entire family. It’s a downbeat, pointless ending, but it really is the only appropriate one.

Jim Harper

Watch the official trailer for Possession (1981):

If you were to whisper words of reproof into the ear of Serbian director Uros Stojanovic, they would be: ‘Less sex, more hearse.’ His film, Tears for Sale, is darkly delightful - a fairy tale for grown-ups, lit by a constellation of candles, which mostly adheres to the Gothic sensibilities of Stojanovic’s wayward imagination. Except for the extended sex scene - which takes places in a hearse - but looks like it was filmed by someone else entirely; someone whose sensibilities are more aligned with rubbish soft porn than the witty, off-kilter work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (of Amelie fame) or Guy Maddin (Careful, The Saddest Music in the World).

Set in an isolated Serbian village at the end of WW1, Tears for Sale tells the story of two sisters - Ognjenka, with a blonde rope of Rapunzel hair, and her dark-locked, tempestuous sister Mala Boginja, who has a penchant for bathing in the cursed pool formed by her great-grandmother’s tears of grief. The siblings are professional mourners, paid to wail at funerals, and there’s a lot to cry about. Ravaged by war, the male population’s been decimated. The women are left on their own, bereft of male company, denied the chance of children and made madly melancholy by the intoxicating spider brandy that conjures visions of their dead loved ones, who re-appear with decomposing grace from behind the splintered bar mirror.

There is one man left on the mountain, decrepit Grandpa Bisa, a dead ringer for Herman Munster, but Ognjenka unfortunately kills him by the power of her screams, and to escape death the sisters must find a fresh man to replace him. If they fail, they will be cursed, and their granny’s dead spirit, newly awakened by the crow-head-dressed witch, will never rest.

The duo take the road, followed by a host of screeching CGI bats, and begin their quest, leaving behind their beautifully realised village with its mined vineyard, flickering shadows and pool of tears, for an adventure in the modern world, bright with sunshine and flapper hats.

The sisters met Arsa, a dissolute dandy and self-styled King of the Charleston and his cohort, Dragoljub, The Man of Steel, both blithely cast as sexual stereotypes by the ever-mischievous Stojanovic. The sisters, separately smitten - Ognjenka with the Man of Steel, Mala Boginja with the King of Charleston - decide not to take their conquests back to the village. Ognjenka heads towards Belgrade with the Man of Steel (who dreams of plummeting off a high-rise building unharmed), while Mala Boginja highjacks a hearse and embarks on that very regrettable sex scene. But no one can escape their destiny in Tears for Sale; the sisters and their lovers are inextricable drawn back to their Grimm home, with tragic consequences for all concerned.

It’s a tale told in broad emotional strokes, with characters that verge on the cartoonish, but there is a genuine poignancy to the visually gorgeous Tears for Sale - the smashed mirrors, the bloodied feet ripped apart by broken drinking glasses in a masochistic tango, the vine-twisted hair-band adorning the latest women to meet her fate in the deadly vineyard suggest the devastating consequences of conflict - loss, sadness, a fatalistic bravado. But none of that excuses the sex and death scene.

Eithne Farry