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| Cliff and pals in Mancunian Man |
Cliff Twemlow, one of the UK’s most prolific and dedicated filmmakers, is still unknown to many viewers. During the latter part of the 20th Century, the former nighhtclub bouncer and TV theme tune composer dedicated his life to building a film industry in the heart of Manchester. In September 2023 we spoke with director Jake West about tribute documentary Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life Of Cliff Twemlow, and now it is about to become available alongside a collection of restored Twemlow works loving curated by Severin Films.
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| Cliff Twemlow in bouncer mode, in G.B.H. |
In anticipation of this release, we sat down with one of the men behind Severin Films, David Gregory, to talk about the restoration project and why it matters. Sadly, the films will not be getting a physical releasee in the UK, though they will be available in digital form.
“In the UK, we’re still suffering from the remnants of the Video Recordings Act in 1985, which came about because of the moral panic in the early Eighties when video first came in,” David explains. “It was that violent films were entering the home setting, mainly the working class – that’s what powers-that-be were worried about. Those laws are still in place, even though the BBFC have become a lot more lenient.” He hesitates briefly. “I wouldn't go as far as to say they are good in any respect. They're not.
“Basically, you have to spend a lot of money to rate a film. You could be the new Jurassic Park movie or you could be GBH2. You have to spend the same amount of money to get your film rated to release on home video and unfortunately, because we like to do comprehensive box sets, etc., that's a lot of films that need to get a BBFC certificate – and this is only on home video, this doesn't apply to digital. So basically we could release all that stuff on digital and that's also played in the home. Basically what they should do is be a free service. If the government says you have to get a rating to release a film in the UK, then it should be free. And it's absolutely outrageous that it's not the case because it's going to kill physical media in the UK, which is already struggling.”
I ask if he would be happier if there was a system that graded fees according to, say, the budget of the film, and he says yes, but he thinks it would be very hard to police.
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| Cliff Twemlow and star Brett Sinclair relaxing behind the scenes. |
“I honestly think the company should be trusted to put their own ratings on the film. If there's any actual illegal content on the film then that should covered by other laws, you know, whereas something where it's just an action movie set in Manchester, which would probably be a 15 by today's standards...” He sighs. “I really don't think that you should have to pay for the privilege to put that out in the UK. And it's an extension of the fact that Cliff was a very independent filmmaker. I mean there's a lot of no-budget filmmakers around the country and other countries. You can make your movie, you can put it up online and sell copies of it. You can't do that in the UK, which stifles the birth of no-budget independent filmmakers. The Peter Jacksons of the world could not emerge from the UK.”
GBH seems very tame today, I note - but it was one of the original video nasties.
“It was. It was a Section 3 nasty so it was never actually prosecuted, but yes it was. And I think it was more to do with the cover than the content. The cover with Cliff hoisting an axe at you, right at you in a way. White tuxedo splattered in blood and ‘Not for the squeamish’ next to it. That's why I got it off the shelf at 12 years old.” He grins.
We discuss his first encounters with these films and why this material appeals to him so much.
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| The piscine anti-hero of never-completed Cliff Twemlow project The Pike, which was inspired by Jaws |
“It was that and basically because of the Video Recordings Act and having all this stuff taken away from us,” he says. “When I was at impressionable age, when I was absolutely obsessed with horror films, which I kind of still am, but in that time you couldn't find them, you couldn't get them. There were only three [TV] channels at that time. So the fact that a video shop emerged and you could get all of these films – I wanted to see them all, you know? And I saw a good number of them before that particular paradise was taken away from us.
“That's why I started to meet other people who were in collecting these films.It was underground at the time and it was quite exciting. I didn't really think that the police were going to bang down my parents’ door and take me away but, you know, I heard of people who were raided. It was pretty rare, but it happened. So that started me on that road to trading tapes and then ultimately buying rights and putting them out. But GBH is the one that I saw as a youngster. It was only when I actually met Brian Sterling Vete, who was the one who represented the parties who owned the films, that I found out just how many of these films existed. And then as we went on, we found out there were even more. It became quite comprehensive over time.”
So is GBH responsible for Severin Films existing?
“I don't know whether it would be GBH. It would probably be two movies. One afternoon, my partner in Severin, Carl [Daft], and I – we went to school together – we rented Bloody Moon and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That was the afternoon that I would pinpoint as changing everything.
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| The gentler side of Cliff Twemlow |
Many of the short-term cinema releases and VHS hits of that era did not survive the passage of time. Assembling good quality versions worth preserving is not an easy task.
“We have to try and find the best possible elements and quite often those elements just don't exist,” David says. “We have to scour collections around the world and things like that, and find out if there's a better version. It was slightly different here because most of these films were shot on video rather than on film. There was no film scanning except on Tuxedo Warrior, the first film that Cliff made as an actor based on his Bouncer novel. The rest were videotapes, which you would think should be easier to maintain and preserve, but no, all the master tapes were long gone.
“The first job I ever had out of school was working for a small video distributor in Nottingham. It turned out that the fellow I used to work for still keeps all the tapes that he had from back in the Eighties, and he had master tapes of GBH under the title The Mancunian. I think was the only actual 3/4 inch tape. The rest were either commercially released VHS and Betamax tapes or pre-release tapes that the director had sent out, or even DVDRs that he later sent out because none of the actual masters were there. So it was up to Mark Morris of Nucleus Films, Jake West's partner, to actually use different versions. If there was one that had a tape glitch, you could take that frame from another version and put it in. So there was just as much restoration on these as there was on a 35 millimeter.
“Restoration software is AI and has been for quite some time, but you still have to go in with your human eyes and make sure it's not taken out somebody's arm thinking that it's a scratch or a glitch, and that happens a lot. So you can't just put the AI on and say ‘Right, that's a beautiful restoration.’ You go in frame by frame and make sure that it's all correct.”
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| Cliff Twemlow playing a villain in The Eye Of Satan |
“We didn't change any of the films that were finished. There's sometimes two versions of the film. GBH, for example, has two cuts of the film because it was finished twice, and Cliff also changed Tuxedo Warrior into two other movies where he shot new footage and put that in. We left that all as he wanted it – or as the filmmakers wanted it, I should say. It wasn't all just him.
“In some cases, they would start a project, they would shoot a promo and then not finish it. They'd abandon it to go on to something else. He seemed to have a short attention span when it came to projects. Tokyo Sunrise was the one that was the one we did the most on, because during the course of making the documentary – towards the end, in fact – Brian Sterling Vete found a box of rushes in the storage room in his attic, and he also had the scripts, so he gave that to Jake. Jake was actually able to assemble a 20 minute version of Tokyo Sunrise from the script. It's now a tightly edited example of a film that was never actually made.
“We cover a lot of it in the documentary. You know, like the fitness video that he did, Fitness Over 40. We put that in. We like to make it as comprehensive as possible. And John Saint Ryan, the guy who we interviewed in Los Angeles, who went on to quite a successful film career, he had another film that was directed by David Kemp Watson, and Cliff was a supporting character and he owned that one, so we were able to get that off him.
“The whole point is preserving these films and making them available to the kinds of people who like this sort of film. These are the kinds of films that I have always liked. This is the sort of thing that I want to be treated like Citizen Kane, you know? Maybe not The Eye Of Satan equally, but you know what I mean. If we're going to put it out, we want to put it out in the best possible presentation, within reason.
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| Cliff Twemlow showing off the results of his passion for bodybuilding |
“Sometimes we only have a 35 millimeter print that's been projected a thousand times, so it's got an enormous amount of scratches and fading and things like that. So we'll do a lot of restoration like we did on a lot of the Bruceploitation. They were in very bad condition, but we did as much colour correction as we could, took out as many of the most egregious scratches as we can. But it would take thousands and thousands of hours to make this perfect, and in some cases the information just isn't there. If you've only got one print of something and there's a massive scratch through the middle of a frame, you can't just paint it back in. You could take a piece from the next frame, Photoshop-style, and put it in the previous frame, that sort of thing - but it's just not commercially viable to spend thousands and thousands of hours on the clones of Bruce Lee.”
The Twemlow project is a piece of UK filmmaking history, I note.
“Very much so. And I love stories of no budget filmmakers and their gangs of merry people who just go out and make films. I mean that's where a lot of regional horror came from, which is probably what attracted me to the genre more than anything else when I was young. It's like, ‘Wow, it looks like these people went out with their friends into the woods behind their house and just threw blood at each other. I can do that!’ You know? And the way people do that and find the right people who have specific areas of expertise – I mean, these people took this stuff seriously even though they had no resources. I find that extremely charming and extremely entertaining.”
In this case, a lot of them are still friends, which helped when it came to tracking down material.
“That was one of the fortunate things. Because they were such a tight-knit group and there were people married to each other, people who trained with each other at the gym and that sort of thing, they did actually swap tapes with one another and that was fortunate. That's how we were able to get some of the tapes of films that we thought were lost. And so that's been one of the pleasures of doing this particular one. Just seeing everybody just so happy that this day is finally here. It's bittersweet, of course, because Cliff isn't here to see it, but just the fact that he's getting his due because he never quite made it. He had such huge ideas that it was almost unrealistic that he would actually reach these lofty goals, but the fact that he just kept trying and kept a smile on his face and stayed creative with it, and those friends kept going along for the ride, that is very invigorating.”
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| The spaceship model from Cliff Twemlow's science fiction thriller Firestar: First Contact |
I suggest that Cliff is also notable because he realised that there was going to be a market in VHS before other people did. David nods.
“He did have a visionary kind of side to him. The idea of using a video camcorder that people would use for home movies and weddings and things like that to actually shoot a movie didn't seem feasible to most people, but now we look back on it with a sense of nostalgia. It actually looks kind of cool when you look at some of that early video, which is very hard to recreate now. When you look at the VHS films, they don't look like original VHS films. They look like they're shot on an iPhone or something better. Time has been very kind to these things. GBH in particular is good example of. It’s like that is a snapshot of Manchester that you wouldn't get if it had been a more expensive film, which would have been shot in studios with stars, so you wouldn't actually get that sense of reality from it.”
This collection will be some people’s first encounter with Cliff’s work. Where should they begin?
“I would actually suggest starting with Mancunian man, because it really is an excellent teaser to what you're about to experience,” David says. “Jake did a fantastic job with this documentary. We take our documentaries very seriously at Severin and we try to tell these stories in a professional and entertaining way. But as far as the movies go, I’d probably go to GBH because it really is the epitome of Cliff's actual life, and also his big ideas on a tiny budget.”
Bloody Legend: The Complete Cliff Twemlow Collection will be released by Intervision Picture Corp as a nine disc box set in the US, and in the UK nine of Cliff’s films, plus the documentary Mancunian Man, will be available on digital platforms from Monday 28 July.
