Mr. Dors on the loose in ‘Don’t Open Till Christmas (1983/85)’

DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS (aka Frohliche Weihnacht)
(1983/85)
Directed by Edmund Purdom, Derek Ford and ‘Al McGoohan’(Ray Selfe), with Edmund Purdom, Alan Lake, Caroline Munro, Mark Jones


Despite being shot in a decade when dodos and British horror films were becoming synonymous Don’t Open Till Christmas initially must have seemed like an idea that couldn’t fail. Producer Dick Randall was an American film mogul who lived in Rome throughout the Sixties and Seventies. At the time Italy’s rich film industry attracted many Americans and Brits. One of Randall’s countrymen, Lady Frankenstein director Mel Welles remembers ‘Dick was a sharp businessman with a great sense of humour. Chubby, with a thin Gilbert Roland moustache and of shortish stature. He was, like Harry Alan Towers, the consummate low budget producer cum film broker of the era’. In the Eighties Randall spent a good deal of his time in London, owning a flat in the West End where he oversaw his production/distribution outlet Spectacular Trading and also had his hand in the copyright side of the music biz. Don’t Open Till Christmas seems to have been envisioned as a British version of Randall’s big 80’s horror hit ‘Pieces’ (mil gritos tiene la noche). Applying an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ logic Don’t shares that films co-producer Steve Minasian, its ultraviolent set pieces, and one of its stars in good old Edmund Purdom, but by all accounts the result was lucky to see the light of day.

Cliff Boyd (Gerry Sundquist) and girlfriend Kate Briovski (Belinda Mayne) are drawn into a series of Yuletide murders when a masked man gatecrashes their Xmas party and incensed at Kate’s father being dressed as Santa Claus promptly spears him through the head. Brooding Purdom and bald former sex actor Mark Jones (Layout for 5 Models, Secrets of a SuperStud) play baffled detectives on the trail of this psychopath who has made quite a habit of going round the West End bumping off anyone dressed as Santa Claus. ‘It was the costume that he was wearing’ Purdom tells Kate ‘he was the victim of another Santa murder’.

By day Cliff and Kate are buskers in the London underground, an occupation that brings them into contact with Cliff’s old friend Gerry (Kevin Lloyd) a low rent porn photographer. Gerry invites the couple over to his studio for tea, but has murkier motives. He and Cliff conspire to get Kate to pose for some topless girl/girl photographs with Gerry’s all-too-willing model Sharon (Pat Astley). Proper girl that Kate is she’s horrified at this suggestion, but the men’s plan really goes haywire when thoughtless Gerry gets out a Santa costume specially for the saucy photos. Repulsed, Kate storms out of the studio, but Cliff decides not to follow because as dirtbag supremo Gerry points out ‘you won’t do yourself any favors with her tonight’. Sharon who isn’t very bright (there are dumb blondes, there are very dumb blondes and then there’s dumb blondes played by Pat Astley) ends up wearing Gerry’s Santa costume and making a drunken pass at Cliff outside the studio. ‘Come on lover-boy, put your arm around Momma keep her warm’ Sharon says while flashing a boob at an embarrassed Cliff who tells her they’ll probably end up arrested if she carries on like that. Sure enough the police show up forcing Sharon and Cliff to make a run for it fearing they’ve been mistaken for ‘a couple of gays’.

After a quick dash around the block Sharon escapes the police but finds herself down a back alley face to face with the Santa-hating masked man. Thankfully for her the mystery man only holds a grudge against male Santas, and after touching her up with a cut throat razor (!), disappears into the night. ‘His eyes, they seem to smile’ she tells the police who arrest her for indecent exposure anyway. A real life nude model/porn actress herself (who once appeared on the cover of Films and Filming) Blackpool born Astley exits the film flashing at Edmund Purdom while defiantly proclaiming ‘I’m a professional’.

Despite such perks of the job, Purdom’s detective spends most of the film wandering around London in a bored daze (‘he’s always going off on his own somewhere’). Jones who at one point thinks the murders are the result of ‘gangland rivalry’ between men dressed as Santas becomes more and more suspicious of Purdom’s walks around town. A scruffy omnipresent newspaper hack called Giles Morgan (bad boy actor Alan Lake) whose responsible for headlines like ‘Santa slain in Soho’ also drops hints that Purdom has quite a few skeletons in his closet and that Jones would do himself a favour by solving the crimes himself.

With ‘only three more killing days till Christmas’ (as one of Giles’ lurid headlines puts it) the killer certainly has his work cut out for him. Anticipating the Christmas rush Santa impersonators are everywhere! One pervy department store Santa even goes to a Soho peep show dressed in his work clothes. The ‘experience’ Santa (as he’s billed) isn’t about to experience anything of interest as a peep show girl (Kelly Baker) only makes bad jokes and ‘X’-mas themed dirty talk from behind a pane of glass. ‘Santa’ becomes more and more nervous and frustrated. Unimpressed by her terrible dancing (‘what do you expect Flashdance?’) this Santa is clearly after something a bit more ‘I’d like to have you sitting on my knee’. Alas his misery is further increased when the killer bursts into the peep show booth and butchers him in front of the girl’s eyes.

With Purdom cracking under pressure of the job, Jones goes over his head to arrange a stakeout (apparently at a circus’ toilet!) that entails two undercover policemen dressing up as ‘decoy’ Santas. All merrily goes well with the cop Santas handing out toys to children, that is until the killer shows up with a blade attached to his shoe and kicks one Santa in the groin. A backup Santa (screenwriter Derek Ford in a rare in front of the camera role) wrestles with the killer only to end up with his eyeball on his cheek. As Purdom earlier remarked ‘Christmas is no time to be a policeman’.

Back at Scotland Yard, the girl from the peep show (named Cherry in the film and more bluntly ‘Experience girl’ in the end credits) is in protective custody. Although all the police’s star witness can provide is a laughable reprise of Pat Astley’s speech about smiling eyes ‘if I saw those eyes again I’d recognize him, if he were smiling’. Refusing 24 hour police protection, Cherry heads back to her old peep-show job (where she’s filling in for her mother!). Unfortunately her first customer is he of smiling eyes who rampages through the peep show booth, leading to a chase around London streets that ends with her being dragged down into a cellar and subjected to an anti-peep show rant ‘£5 for this, £15 for that, you’re not selling desire, you’re selling your soul’. In the process she also gets a good look at the killer, why it’s none other than Alan Lake’s Giles. ‘I hate Christmas, I hate everything it stands for’ Giles wines in his ‘sinister’ voice. Flashbacks eventually elaborate revealing that as a child Giles discovered his Santa-dressed dad shagging some blonde tart, then later witnessed this naughty Santa throwing his mother down the stairs.

Unbeknown to Giles, Kate in the course of her ‘little investigation’ has become aware who the killer is and his motives but strangely doesn’t bother to share this information with Purdom (who she has a dinner date with) or Cliff (who enviously tries to break up the dinner date). That night Giles pays Kate a surprise visit revealing that he is in fact Purdom’s ‘mad’ brother. ‘I thought I’d give him a real case to work on’ Giles raves before simultaneously strangling and stabbing the film’s heroine to death. Across town Purdom also reaches the end of his mortal coil when he learns the hard way why his film is called Don’t Open Till Christmas. All of which leaves Cherry the captive peep show floozy alone to face off against the anti-festive Giles who with his eyes practically bulging out of his head plans to make her ‘the supreme sacrifice to all the evil Christmas is’.

Don’t Open till Christmas is an uneven patchwork of a film, and not without good reason. Although no doubt planned as a fly-by-night horror quickie, the production was a deeply troubled one that took nearly two years and three men behind the camera to make. Director/Star Edmund Purdom made a complete hash of it, and a replacement director had to be found in screenwriter Derek Ford who eventually got fired. It was in fact editor Ray Selfe, who finished directing the film and also had the unenviable task of making his efforts and the aborted work of his two predecessors resemble a movie.

Despite the best attempts of one time sex cinema owner Selfe, the released version of Don’t bears all the scars of a film re-shot, re-cut and reinvented numerous times. Many scenes (Purdon’s failure to turn up at an inquest, Cliff’s arrest for the murders) as well as one apparently crucial character (Dr Bridle played by Grange Hill’s Nicholas Donnelly) are eluded to but appear to have been lost to the cutting room floor. The narrative is severely mangled and with no real main characters, various protagonists randomly pop in and out of the action. By the end most of the ensemble are either forgotten about or mean-spiritedly bumped off (Kate’s murder comes completely out of the blue) as this rag-bag tumbles towards an abrupt excuse for a finale.

Of the two original directors Purdom’s attempts at directing are best described as ‘ill-advised’ but it’s a pity his successor Derek Ford didn’t have more of a say over Don’t. Unquestionably this is Ford’s worse work as a director but his script is often brimming with black humour at the expense of the killer’s daft crusade (‘what possible reason would I have for killing Santas’ one suspect pleads). As well as delighting in portraying the soon to be dead Santa impersonators as creeps, winos or wide-boys out to make a buck from the festive spirit. Many of the lines in Don’t Open Till Christmas are actually funnier than anything Ford got down on paper for his real comedies like What’s Up Nurse and What’s Up Superdoc, but then Derek Ford was a man of contradictions. In the end Ford could never quite shake off the sex film director tag, both on and off screen, so its no surprise to find Don’t Open Till Christmas retains the atmosphere of a Ford sex film, both in the seedy Piccadilly Circus area locations and the seaside postcard caricatures like the ‘ducking and weaving’ dirty photographer and the gormless glamour model. The inclusion of a scene where Cliff tries to coerce his girlfriend into a lesbian photo shoot, hardly the typical behavior of a clean cut horror film hero, is pure Derek Ford, whose The Wife Swappers (1969) is a whole movie centered around respectable people being lured into kinky pastimes. The casting of Mark Jones, Alan Lake and the always fun to watch Pat ‘Blackpool Patrica’ Astley only adds to Don’t Open Till Christmas’ overall blurring of British sex and horror film.

Presumably after Ford was booted out of the directors chair ‘additional scenes written and directed by Al McGoohan’ (probably Selfe) were shot to salvage Don’t Open Till Christmas. The newer footage, randomly inserted into the narrative, adds up to little more than a typical Dick Randall crash course in opportunistic filmmaking. One of the ‘dreadful Santa Claus crimes’ is staged in the London Dungeon for no reason other than to act as a glorified advert for the famed wax museum. Further novelty value is provided by Dusty Bin era Caroline Munro who appears as herself and sings disco track ‘I’m the warrior of love ’ (the Munro scene was shot in just one day, George Dugdale aka Mr Munro, a pal of Dick Randall, also worked on the film without credit). Rounding off the tagged on bits and bobs are ‘slasher movie’ sequences in which nobody actors dressed as Santas, wander onto the screen only to meet their maker at the hands of Lake’s psychopath (or at least Lake’s masked stand-in) a few seconds later. Faces instead of chestnuts are roasted on an open fire, machetes embedded in heads and brains blown out- so much stage blood is flung about that the filmmakers offer special thanks to the people who made it (‘Kensington Gore’) in the end credits. Don’t Open Till Christmas’ vomitous highlight and the scene that no one forgets, finds an obese Santa Claus using a urinal only to be literally caught short when the killer creeps out of a toilet and castrates him.

Commercial as these 11th hour excursions in bloodshed must have seemed in the climate of early 1980’s horror cinema, they only caused the film further problems upon its British release in the closing months of 1985. After all the tail end of the ‘Video Nasty’ furore was not perhaps the greatest of time to present the sight of Santa being castrated in a urinal as entertainment. As anyone who has ever bothered to watch the UK video of Don’t will attest the censors had a field day with the film, removing nearly all the violent scenes in the most amateurish way possible. Censor cuts range from the obvious (Pat Astley’s cut-throat razor molestation is missing), the petty (a few seconds reduced of a Santa being stabbed) to the farcical (even the sight of a female mannequin got the chop!) A true botched job the BBFC approved version of the film is so nonsensical it’s hard to believe Vestron video bothered to release it at all.

Predictably in the years since its release Don’t Open Till Christmas has slipped into obscurity and time has been brutally unkind to the cast and crew as well. The acting world’s answer to Bill Sykes, Alan Lake was well known in the British film industry for being mentally unbalanced and prone to on-set violence (the Lake legacy is best summed up in Noddy Holder’s recent autobiography where he is referred to as ‘a well known character in acting circles of the early Seventies, (but) also a notorious nutter’). It’s hard to tell whether Lake’s dilapidated look in Don’t Open Till Christmas was for the role (making him look old enough to pass as Purdom’s brother) or whether drug use, heavy drinking, a prison sentence for assault, and a stormy marriage to Diana Dors had just caught up with him. Unable to keep it together after Dors’ death, Lake shot himself in October 1984 before ever seeing how his menacing off-screen reputation transferred so well to film. Gerry Sundquist’s career never really got started, previously he’d played a shotgun victim in the opening scene of The Black Panther (1977) and the Travolta role in the flop British version of Saturday Night Fever that was 1979’s The Music Machine. After Don’t Open people weren’t exactly standing in line to employ Sundquist and in 1993 he committed suicide supposedly by throwing himself under a train at Norbiton station. Derek Ford succumbed to a heart attack in 1995, Dick Randall died from a stroke a year later, one of his associates later claimed the work done in this period helped ‘drive him to an early grave’. Kevin Lloyd had a high profile British television career after Don’t Open but became equally well known for his battles with alcohol, and took his final bow during a terminal booze binge in 1998. Ray Selfe who also worked as a ‘film doctor’ on Emmanuelle in Soho and Don’t Scream It’s Only a Movie (a horror film compilation featuring Vincent Price), passed away September 2001 from a heart attack. Of the survivors, Pat Astley never appeared in a film again and retired from acting, while Edmund Purdom- a well known skirt chaser despite his stuffy persona and chief claim to fame being the Hollywood biblical epic The Egyptian- has only made fleeting film appearances since. These days Purdom lives quietly in Rome with his photographer wife and cites listening to classical music as a hobby. A few years ago he narrated a religious propaganda video called The Seven Signs of Christ’s Return- along way from the time when his bread and butter came from lending vocals to Mondo movie tripe like ‘Excuse me do you like Sex?’.
Hands on heart, Don’t Open Till Christmas is unlikely to feature on anyone’s list of favourite British horror films in the near future. The film aims to be as colourful a B-movie as anything else with Dick Randall’s name on it, but the overall feel is one of desperation, from the repetitious score to the tacky gore effects and the casting of neglected, forgotten or never made it actors. But despite (or perhaps because) of these reasons the film still intrigues in an end of the pier pantomime way simultaneously being sad, distinctly British and all very low end of the showbiz ladder.

Before his death Derek Ford worked with wheeler dealer Randall one more time on Attack of the Killer Computer (1990), a gore film whose actresses where mostly recruited from the world of video porn. Dancer, Carry on Columbus thespian, and Song for Europe writer Peter Gordeno had the dubious honour of playing a music industry kingpin whose computer system called S.E.X.Y, turns on him and his bimbo girlfriends. Messy results include death by scalding and an out of control electric toothbrush, while the film’s ‘highlight’ was apparently a porno actress’ breasts exploding in a sun bed, all of which was tricky to achieve on a budget jokingly referred by one crew member as being ‘about £1.50’. Attack was mostly shot at Randall’s West End Flat and Peter Gordeno’s Weybridge Cottage house. Gordeno’s son was a budding musician and recorded a ‘poptastic’ Randall owned song called ‘Urge to Kill’ for the film. In honour of this Attack of the Killer Computer was later re-titled Urge to Kill. And the result? we’ll never know, while Don’t Open Till Christmas was just about salvageable Attack of the Killer Computer/Urge to Kill never left Spectacular Trading’s shelf. Currently the property of Dick Randall’s widow Corliss- more than a decade after it was made the Ford and Randall swansong remains unseen.

Don’t Open Till Christmas may not have been the end of Dick Randall’s career, but it was the last interesting chapter in his story. The final Randall productions that saw release (Slaughter High in 1986 and Living Doll in 1989) are well made yet routine 1980’s horrors. But that these business as usual productions appear to have passed without the headaches of Don’t Open Till Christmas is perhaps all Mr Spectacular Trading could have wished for.

Text: Gavcrimson 2002
E-Mail: [email protected]