Eskimo Nell

Having just graduated from film school Dennis Morrison (Michael Armstrong) is disappointed to find none of the major studios are exactly beating a path to his door. His break, it seems, will have to come in the form of Benny U. Murdoch's (Roy Kinnear's) BUM Productions, whose breast-obsessed proprietor (a poster for Doris Wishman's Deadly Weapons is visible on his office wall) has the idea for a sex film based on the bawdy Victorian-era Ballad of Eskimo Nell.

The first problem is that in order to finance the film Murdoch and his new found directorial talent must woo three different backers, each with their own very different conception of exactly what Eskimo Nell should be and determined that their protege should have the starring role.

Hard-nosed exploitation veteran Big Dick wants a no-holes barred hardcore porn film starring his squawky voiced girlfriend Billie Harris:

"What I need is 90 minutes of good solid pornography, none of that simulated crap. I want to see everything, so you shoot it for real. I want to see girls being whipped, plenty of flagellation, bondage, rubber appliances, leatherwear, chains, lesbianism. kinky gadgets and you can throw in a bit of bestiality at the same time…"

Dick then tops it off with the memorable conclusion "… and in the second scene…"

The philanthropic Ambrose Cream wants a kung-fu musical starring his latest find, Millicent Bindle.

And gay accountant Vernon Peabody wants to make a cross-dressing musical with his toy-boy Johnny in the lead.

If this wasn't enough Dennis's friend and screenwriter Harris Tweedle (Christopher Timothy) is a naive innocent with a penguin fixation, while his girlfriend Hermione's (Katy Manning's) mother, Lady Longhorn (Rosalind Knight), is a Mary Whitehouse style family values campaigner (a staple of this genre) who would be shocked if she knew what her prim and proper daughter's boyfriend was really working on.

Yet, when Benny flees with the backers money and leaves Dennis and company contractually responsible for producing the films, Lady Longhorn proves to be their salvation. She will bankroll the film – on the understanding that it's wholesome family fare starring her offspring.

Thus Dennis sets to work on his Eskimo Nells…

Somehow, miraculously, they all get made. Even better, Lady Longhorn has secured a charity premiere for Eskimo Nell, with royalty in attendance. Unfortunately a mix up means that Big Dick's hardcore version has been sent instead…

The 70s British sex film was a curious beast. With the sophisticated European erotica epitomised by Emmanuelle seemingly too "foreign" and "arty" for Britain's exploitation filmmakers to mimic and the illegality of hardcore production and distribution preventing the possibility of a US-style "porno chic" boom – though Eskimo Nell's sharing of the comedy angle with Deep Throat and the author-less 'literary' source one with Behind the Green Door and Autobiography of a Flea suggests a greater degree of affinity here – the dominant form continued to be that of the sex comedy.

While attracting little attention from serious critics – and probably 99.94% of it negative – these films were popular with British audiences and, if nothing else, helped keep people in work, including many a British thespian and director.

More recently, however, the genre has seen a resurgence of interest, both popular in terms of that whole 70s retro thing, and academic, in terms of the inevitable need to find 'new' fields to annex now that the territories of "Hammer horror" and "Carry On" have been thoroughly mined for their cultural significances. (It also helps, of course, that in terms of production context, audiences and criticial receptions in many respects the 70s sex film represents their logical continuation and combination.)

While it would take a more dedicated soul than myself to sit through all the Confessions… series – never mind dozens of deserved obscurities that should probably never have passed through the projector light at all – there are, as with any genre, certain landmarks that can be recommended to the curious tourist.

Eskimo Nell is one of them.

It's got a name director, Martin Campbell, who went on to bigger and better things in the shape of Goldeneye and Zorro. (In a curious piece of pseudo-auteurist coincidence, Campbell's previous sex comedy also featured a mysterious masked man, the titular Sex Thief, played by David Warbeck, for many years Roger Moore's understudy as James Bond and the "all because the lady loves" action man in the Milk Tray adverts that formed a familiar part of the cultural landscape for anyone growing up in 70s Britain.)

Likewise it's very structure as a kind of The Producers / Otto e mezzo / Le Mepris / Day for Night / Beware the Holy Whore / The Pornographers / Singing in the Rain / your-choice-of-self-reflexive-film-about-film here grants it that Brechtian / deconstructive / (Post)modernist ironic / your-choice-of-theoretical-critical-cultural-studies-buzzword allows for that old defence of being knowingly, deliberately and consciously bad.

Not, however, that it really is. While some of the humour is a bit obvious – the woodsman for the hardcore film getting his dick chopped in the clapper board – or runs the risk of growing tiresome through over-repetition, other aspects, like Dennis's garbled pseudo-intellectual justifications and rationalisations for his compromised magnum opus, are intelligent satire. What, after all, is the method actor's motivation for getting an erection?

You know that even if Dennis and his colleagues really don't have a clue their creators, in the shape of exploitation film-makers and co-writers Michael Armstrong (the development) and Stanley Long (the idea) very definitely did.

Perhaps the film's greatest strength, then, is that despite being a seemingly ridicuously over-the-top farce it actually has the ring of truth, with the sense these aren't so much wholesale inventions as slight exaggerations of real-world situations and characters drawn from the filmmakers milieux: In his excellent book Keeping the British End Up, Simon Sheridan identifies, via Long, that Murdoch was inspired by Tony Tenser of Tigon and Big Dick by Samuel Z Arkoff of AIP. Sharp-eyed horror fans, meanwhile, may note that the strapline for Dick's Vampire Vomit, "the only film guaranteed to make you sick" is a neat in-joke relating to Armstrong's own Mark of the Devil, the horror film memorably distributed with barf bags for the audience.

There isn't really much to say about this Region 2 DVD of Eskimo Nell. Presented full frame – probably the original aspect ratio – it looks and sounds fine for a cheap 70s exploitationer, better than American hardcore releases from the same time but nowhere as good as the Emmanuelle DVDs.

The only extra is a gallery of 11 stills from the film. Though it's unlikely that Martin Campbell will ever want to revisit the film, a commentary from Armstrong would have been very nice and – one assumes – not beyond the realms of possibility given his contributions to some of Anchor Bay's British horror releases.