News

The second of nine films made by director Jess Franco and writer-producer Harry Alan Towers over the course of only two years, The Girl from Rio is their jazzy, featherweight riff on the spy-fi genre, a heady blend of international intrigue and semi-science-fictional elements, popular (especially in Europe) in the wake of the James Bond films. It’s also a sequel of sorts to Towers’s earlier film The Million Eyes of Sumuru, directed by Lindsay Shonteff, based on the exploits of the Sax Rohmer super-villainess. Though in this film, for some inexplicable reason, the character is regularly referred to as Sunanda (obviously and not very convincingly dubbed in post) and listed in the credits as Sumitra. Blame it on Rio!

Like many a Franco film, The Girl from Rio opens with a protracted erotic dance routine: Clad only in a webbed body stocking, Yana (Beni Cardoso) does her number for a recumbent man,...

Cliff Twemlow is, for me, something of an enigma, an urban legend, even a myth if you like. I remember reading about this self-made film star in the pages of Darkside Magazine – his films seemingly lost to the VHS era in much the same way as Lindsay Shonteff’s oeuvre. Speaking of VHS, Twemlow is probably best known for G.B.H., a British gangster movie that became notorious after it featured on the video nasties list thanks to the garish artwork – Cliff’s character covered in blood brandishing a hammer!

What I didn’t know about Twemlow is that he wrote music, and performed not only as part of a band (under the name Peter Reno) but also penned theme songs under the same name for the De Wolfe label – over 2000 pieces of music in fact, themes that went on to be featured on TV shows of the era! Twemlow was also a novelist,...