NON-CANONICAL: MANCUNIAN MAN: THE LEGENDARY LIFE OF CLIFF TWEMLOW
Low budgets, grit and determination
Mancunian Man gets its Manchester screening on the 12th of November at Cultplex, then plays at The Abertoir Festival in Wales (www.abertoir.co.uk), The Bristol Cube Cinema on the 20th of November and The Derby Quad on the 24th of November, it will receive its digital release in early 2024 from Severin Films
Keep reading for an interview with director Jake West.
The fact that Cliff Twemlow’s name isn’t more widely known, even as a footnote in British cinema, is something of an oddity. Working non-stop, throughout his life he would be a bouncer, a bodybuilder, a novelist, a composer and musician, a scriptwriter and an actor, to varying degrees of success.
From the early 1980s until the mid-90s, he would produce, write and star in multiple pictures (sometimes two a year), not including films where the shooting began but budgetary issues meant that they were never completed. In Mancunian Man, director Jake West brings the same research and care to Twemlow’s life and work, as he had done previously with his two features on the Video Nasty scandal.
Interviewing friends and colleagues, West builds a picture of a man brimming with ideas. One who, without any real budget or resources, rolled with the punches to get the best results he could, be those personal or professional. Utilising new technology for the time, Twemlow bypassed the typical route for a film (distributors and cinemas) and instead shot on video, distributing films to video stores and going directly to the consumer.
While it would be hard to argue that he achieved any real success with his films, the lengths that Twemlow went to in the making of them leads to some hilarious anecdotes. Whether it’s cutting deals with companies to source completely unsuitable vehicles for his projects or cutting corners on costumes which results in him playing a satanic character with dayglo green eyes, Twemlow becomes a font of dos and don’ts for potential filmmakers.
It's clear that he was widely liked and admired as well. While the interviewees don’t shy away from the more intense aspects of his personality, they acknowledge his ability to talk them into playing roles on-screen and off time and time again. His passion drove the rest of the crew to take these low-budget B-movies through to completion. At some point in each of the interviews, his co-stars all seem to have a moment when they question why they continuously followed Twemlow, with the only answer available being: ‘That was Cliff.’
And while each of the films he would produce (Twemlow never directed, although he had such control over each film that he may as well have) could never be considered masterpieces, the documentary shows the development of his work. By the end, it genuinely felt like he was on the cusp of being noticed outside of the Greater Manchester area. In fact, had he been almost anywhere else, he would have fit in perfectly with the shot-on-video genre filmmakers filling out video store shelves during the same period.
Mancunian Man isn’t all funny anecdotes and bizarre stories, however. Twemlow had a packed, but relatively short life, dying at 59 in 1993. West documents the toll that his hard-living lifestyle would eventually take, and the impact that his continued struggles to make films would have on him.
Like West’s previous documentaries on the Video Nasties, as well as his various pieces for Blu-ray and DVD extras, Mancunian Man showcases his ability to draw stories out of people. This is both an insightful look at a man most will never of heard of, and a touching tribute to a local legend who tried to bring Hollywood to the north of England.
Director: Jake West
Jake West is a British filmmaker and co-owner of Nucleus Films. He has directed Razor Blade Smile and Evil Aliens, as well as the documentaries Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape and Video Nasties: Draconian Days.
Where did the idea for the project come about? Were you aware of Cliff Twemlow before this?
I became aware of Cliff when I was doing the video nasties documentaries because G.B.H. was one of the films on the Section 3 list [these movies could not be prosecuted for obscenity but could be seized for less obscene charges]. And that's when we interviewed C.P. Lee, who wrote the book The Lost World of Cliff Twemlow: The King of Manchester Exploitation Movies.
He was flying the flag of Cliff, and, at the time, I only knew about G.B.H. and C.P. came along and he was talking about these other films that Cliff had done. He had done a whole bunch of other stuff, but I've never seen them and a lot of them have never been released.
Then just before the pandemic really hit in 2020, David Gregory from Severin Films got in touch with me and asked me if I wanted to take on a project about Cliff. He knew that I was aware of Cliff from G.B.H. but he was talking about a feature-length documentary as Severin was working on licensing a number of Cliff’s films for an upcoming boxset.
We started doing research and stuff and then three years later, you've got the film. It was done over a period of time, as it took a long time to track stuff down, track people down, and track down all the footage. So really it was a big kind of exploration and the more I learnt, the more I kind of got sucked down into this black hole because it almost seems unbelievable the things that he did in his life.
What appealed about the subject matter?
He did so many different things, from bouncer to singer, to being in bands, to writing music and theme tunes, writing horror novels, writing an autobiography, and becoming a filmmaker, producer, actor, and writer.
He was kind of like a working-class polymath, somebody who, when he turned his attention to something, he just did it. Maybe not always in the most skilful way but that's what makes the journey so endearing. He was never put off by the things that interested him. He’s an inspiring character because he just went for it and it kind of makes you feel and it kind of makes people think ‘Maybe I could do that’.
The fact that he was in Manchester in the 1980s when there was virtually no filmmaking going on means that you get to discover this kind of pocket universe of British cinema history, which most people would never even know happened.
It definitely speaks to the time we’re living in now, where we’re encouraged to use the technology we have at our disposal to go out and create something.
Cliff latched onto the fact that you could shoot a film on video and release it for people to watch in their homes. He was like a pioneer of the shot-on-video (SOV) movement. All his films, apart from Moon Stalker, were shot like that because he realised that he could bypass a lot of the costs associated with filmmaking.
But he was Mancunian through and through. He loved the place he was from, and his stated intention was not just to make films in the UK; it was to make Manchester the Hollywood of the North. I’m not sure you could say he managed that, but you've got to love his ambition. He was certainly one of the only regional filmmakers of that time and he probably made more independent movies than any other director in Britain in the early ‘80s.
He was certainly very active. The documentary shows him as someone who was always working on something.
Yeah, but it was always about what interested him. He wasn’t afraid to move across genres. So, he made a crime picture like G.B.H. and then he would go and make a meta film about filmmaking (The Ibiza Connection). Then it would be a James Bond thing like Eve Island and then horror, then science fiction, like the Alien rip-off Firestar: First Contact.
But what I really liked about Cliff was even though he's not an undiscovered Spielberg, he was always willing to just throw his lot in and give it a go. His films are completely unpretentious and there’s a real kind of grit and realism to them. The people in them are his friends who are like martial artists from the gym, local models, or people from the bar, so you get to see what culture was like in the 1980s. That's fascinating as well.
It really shows him as a larger-than-life character. Someone who had a gravity that pulled people in.
Cliff was brilliant at galvanising people. Brett Sinclair says that he could literally talk anyone into doing anything. He was great at finding locations for free or blagging and pretending that they had permissions. There are all these hilarious stories because they weren't really doing things the right way, but they were sort of cheeky chappies who just made shit up as they went along.
What I think is so entertaining about the documentary is that kind of realness. It’s like glorious chaos, the whole thing.
A lot of his more chaotic ideas seemed to revolve around the vehicles he used for his films.
Yeah definitely. He bought one car for The Ibiza Connection, which was a white Ford Capri called Striker and he was going to try and use that in a series of other films but they lost so much money on the film that he had to sell the Capri.
As we go through the films though we see Cliff’s vehicles get worse and worse, from Bond cars in G.B.H. to a hire van in The Eye of Satan. He's this supernatural character, he’s the devil's disciple, who has the power to turn himself into a black panther, and yet he drives the worst vehicle in the world because the company said they would let him have it for six months if he advertised it in the film!
Then in Predator: The Quietus he’s a bounty hunter using a Fiat Panda instead of a Land Rover, which they could have had. He went the cheap route because he could get the car. You could argue that it wasn’t the right decision for the film and that sometimes his own kind of cheapness tripped him up slightly.
But having said that, when you watch the films, they're more entertaining because those choices are just so absurd. You have to have a certain kind of enjoyment of B-movies and trash cinema to really suck the full marrow out.
It’s a very entertaining film but there is also a sadness to Cliff’s life. Like he gave so much of himself to these projects.
I think that every filmmaker who watches Mancunian Man will understand the journey and any independent filmmaker will certainly recognise a lot of what happened as part of the difficulty of learning to make a film.
Although everyone could potentially make a film with their phone, it doesn't mean that they can organise people to turn up and do the things that are needed; to do the special effects and the makeup and costumes, or to organise locations or setup the lighting.
Filmmaking is a big puzzle, and it takes a long time to learn how to do those things. If you look at Cliff’s work you can see that they got more technically proficient as they went along, but that they were hampered by not having much money. It often felt like he was stuck at the same kind of level, but if you compare G.B.H. to something like Firestar then it's much more assured.
I think that Cliff would be inspiring to any person who's made a film or is thinking of making a film because you could learn a lot from what Cliff did wrong. Some of them are obvious like don't have a huge party the day before you start shooting. But deep down, I think Cliff enjoyed a level of chaos.
Even if he didn’t enjoy it, chaos seemed to have a way of finding him, especially for Target Eve Island, when the US invaded Grenada during filming.
Yes, what timing! I mean how incredible would it be as a filmmaker, to be shooting one day and then the next a war breaks out? I mean, that's just insane.
He tried to use his advantage and rewrite the script around it, which is completely in his character. I love the way that Cliff just rolled with the punches and tried to make things work. I think there's something incredibly admirable about the way that he was determined to modify the situation to suit him.
You mentioned that Severin Films is working on a boxset of Cliff’s work. That’s a big deal considering none of his films have been available since their VHS releases.
The biggest problem we've been encountering is finding decent-quality copies of the films because they were shot on video, and often it was very low-end video production stuff. It's not like a bit of film where you can scan it and you can get more information out. You can do a certain amount of cleaning up but overall, the information just isn't there.
So, the biggest thing is tracking down materials to get the best quality stuff and sorting out the different rights. There will be a boxset. I can't reveal exactly what's going to be on it yet, but it will be released next year, so people will get a chance to explore Cliff’s work further.
What about your next project? Is there anything in the pipeline at the moment?
Well, Marc Morris and I (co-owners of Nucleus Films) have been working on this, as it’s sort of a co-production with Severin. Beyond that, I've got another feature film that I've been trying to make for several years.
The pandemic has made getting finance tricky, but I'm hoping to make a narrative horror feature, maybe at the beginning of next year. It depends on finance, so we shall see.
I also directed a segment for the anthology film Midnight Peepshow, which did the festival circuit last year and is now going to be released, I believe in February, by Dark Star Pictures in the US and I assume it will then go onto streaming platforms.
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