Death Shock

I spent 15 years trying to find this film before finally picking up a UK pre certificate tape of it.

Well it was pretty much just as I expected it to be.Lots of soft core action with obscured viewing angles and action just out of screen etc. In fact you could be forgiven for calling this a soft core Ben Dover since the director Steve Perry went on to create the Ben Dover series and this plays exactly like a Ben Dover film. You do get the feeling that there are hardcore scenes that have been removed but I don't know of a stronger version.

Not really worth the £50 I paid for it (uk pre certificate tapes are very collectible) but a worthy addition to my collection none the less.

I liked Death Shock. I thought it wasn't a bad movie. The plot may have been a bit thin, and the acting sometimes wooden, but the sex scenes were very good considering it was made in the UK, and was about as hot and legal as it could be. The female cast are good looking, and included if I'm not mistaken, Virginia Slade, an extremely attractive model and actress. I believe she had a run in at one time with Lord Lichfield over some sexy snaps, and she also acted in various theatre productions in the UK. For me, she made the movie and her scenes were hot. I think the producers could have titled the film better, and I also wonder if there was a harder version made for Europe etc.

Perhaps it was all the lead paint chips I ate as a kid, but I actually kind of LIKE British exploitation films. This film, however, has a pretty bad reputation even in that generally dismal genre, so after it (quite surprisingly)became available on American DVD, I had to see if it was as bad as people say. Well, it might actually be worse. . .

I have nothing against DIY (do-it-yourself) film-making--I once was a DIY filmmaker myself in the early 90's. But there's a big difference between a true cult film like "The Evil Dead" and a bunch of fools getting drunk and shooting something on video in their backyard. Well, except for the massive amounts of softcore sex, this is actually much closer to a drunken backyard SOV effort. You could best describe it as having all the production values and talent of a hardcore quickie, but being strictly softcore and rather dishonestly trying to pass itself off as a "horror" movie (with a bunch of sex-mad daytrippers running afoul a coven of satanic nudists in the English countryside--or something like that). It's almost impossible really to create an effective horror atmosphere on 80's porn-gloss video, and it's even harder to develop any kind of real plot when everything grinds to a halt every five minutes for a ten minute sex scene.

This movie has a few good points. It's only 50 minutes long, and with that (and all the sex), it's less boring and tedious than a lot 80's American SOV "horror movies" like "Blood Cult" or "Boardinghouse" (I couldn't get drunk enough to shoot a movie as bad as those in my backyard). The girls (like future British porn starlet Linzi Drew) aren't gorgeous, but they're reasonably attractive, and being an American, it's refreshing to hear orgasms being unconvincingly faked in thick British accents for a change (there's not nearly enough "cockney porn" out there). And while it comes just about as close as possible, this movie mercifully doesn't cross into hardcore, so you you don't have those wonderful, out-of-focus extreme close-ups of Ron Jeremy's fat, hairy, and sweaty scrotum thrusting in and out of camera as he does his thing with some poor "actress" (Jeremy isn't even in this fortunately). This isn't really a horror movie, but at least it doesn't delve into THAT kind of horror!

'Death Shock' (1981 Video) is an insalubrious looking no-budget DTV 'horror' travesty from Grindhouse Britain, 'starring' that titillating triumphantly twin peaked tabloid temptress, the INFINITELY more salubrious-looking 80s sexpot Linzi Drew! The dung-dense, questionably ribald sex-occult narrative therein proving to be so profoundly complex that it could only be successfully realized with any degree of thematic efficacy by utilizing, not one, but two stalwart directors! Yet even with these two swoggle-eyed, scum-slinging dross-hounds at the increasingly unstable helm, 'Death Shock' remains a slender, sleazily scintillating morsel of richly questionable, fleshly-fabulous, sinfully suggestive Witchgrinder General fare!

Tyro polymath helmsman Frank Thring later 'directed' the subtle, and somewhat introspective work 'Come on my feet please!' Which I understand might well be part of his long-mooted, dialectical triptych regarding the merits of seminal discharge on disparate fleshly parts of the female anatomy; yet Frank Thring's unassailable, filmmaking legacy remains the somewhat paltry, stupefyingly shock-less 'Death Shock', and for your viewing edification, it has been lovingly shot in a gloriously fuzzy analogue haze of murksome 'Umatic video' (probably?), its unambiguously penurious look and grubby, Vaseline-lensed villainy adds a welcome, greasy-palmed verisimilitude to the sordid, multitudinously mucky narrative therein that the more degenerated celluloid Sin-seeker might well find just as boorishly appealing as I did! Forget the fright wig-exposing clarity of HD, I'd like to see a remastered Super-8 version of this bunghole'd B-Movie balderdash!!!!!

This shot-on-video British obscurity is more of a sex film than a horror yarn, in that most of the running time (barely an hour) consists of very '80s looking actors engaging in over the top sexual practices with each other for scenes which drag on endlessly. You know the film is going to be a cheesy delight from the opening scene, in which a barely-dressed girl discovers a satanic sect of naked men in a forest and flees, before being sacrificed, stripped and captured (but not necessarily in that order) by the mysterious cult. Straight afterwards we're introduced to a bunch of really bad actors (two guys and three girls) who have come to enjoy the sunny delights of the English countryside by indulging in a bit of the old rumpy-pumpy, which they do, both in and outside on their car.

Clichés abound as the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and a too-nice vicar takes the group to an isolated mansion, inhabited by an overacting host who screams sinister. There's also a maid whose large bosoms constantly threaten to spill out of her skimpy attire and a sadistic dwarfish manservant who has designs on one of the visitors. The host invites the group to stay the night, which means the plot is put on hold for yet more sexual shenanigans to take place as we bear witness to the (very) explicit activities that take place in the bedrooms. Finally, the finale comes and not a moment too late: the film ends with some cheap and unfunny jokes and a twist ending you can see coming a mile off.

I'm not sure why this has been marketed as a horror film because it really isn't. It's just a sex film with mildly mysterious horror trappings, or clichés should I say. The horror elements are very weak and only take up about ten minutes of the screen time. Most of the running time consists of large-breasted women with big hair and unappealing moustachioed skinny guys engaging in all kinds of adult acts whilst badly saying some of the worst-written dialogue there is. So if you're after a weird and unintentionally funny sex film then this may be the one to watch. Fans looking for an obscure British horror gem should seek elsewhere, unless you have a fondness for high cheese and a tongue-in-cheek attitude.

I have been reviewing the pre-certificate release of DEATH SHOCK on the ADB video release label, which follows the short feature film with a compilation of out-takes called, oh so hilariously, "It'll Be Alright on the Bed!". Let's just say that if these clips are the 'best' and 'funniest' of the out-takes then I'd hate to see just how boring the worst are.