User Reviews

SPOILERS Derek Ford's two films of 1975 appear to have been conceived as showcases for two little known starlets in an attempt to turn them into the hottest, newest star. The Sexplorer ‘promotes' Monika Ringwald and Diversions aka Sex Express ‘promotes' Heather Deeley. Both actresses appear in every scene of their respective films, with the focus centred around female protagonists-a rarity in British sex cinema. Ford was a contradictory case, who had little positive to say about the type of films he made nor the audiences who enjoyed them, reiterating how boring he found filming sex scenes. However from 1963's The Yellow Teddybears to 1990's Attack of the Killer Computer, you're unlikely to find many Derek Ford credits that aren't in the sex or horror exploitation realm.

Heather plays an apparent prisoner travelling by train, accompanied by two guards, a man (future Eastender Derek Martin) and a woman whom she's handcuffed to. Bored by the journey, Heather starts dreaming up a series of wild fantasies. In the first she's being chased around a barn by a poetic stud-who seems to fancy apples more than our heroine. What a berk!

The second fantasy, inspired by one of Deeley's fellow travellers reading a ‘Vampirella' comic is the one that made Diversions notorious. In this Deeley plays a wartime nurse gang-raped by soldiers. The experience leaves her totally deranged, to the degree that she murders her sexual partners, like hardcore-loop perennial Timothy Blackstone who she knifes to death and castrates. Heather, naked and dolled up in blue eyeshadow, sensually rubs stage blood over herself after the kill, an image of eroticism and grotesquery. When we next see Heather she's driving around London (great vintage footage of Piccadilly Circus). She spots a man dressed like a magician and beckons him into her car. Back at her house she repeats her sex/snuff act, but this time the knife just bounces out of the man on top. Heather looks up to discover she's having sex with a Vampire (you meet all sorts in Piccadilly Circus). The next fantasy is a Commuter Husbands era sex farce-centred around a room-for-rent advert being mistaken for a girl-for-rent one.

Back onboard the Sex Express, Heather visualises the ticket collector as a gun crazy Nazi. ‘Inspired' she then daydreams herself as a sex slave of two Nazis and their female superior during WW2. A savage scenario by any yardstick, it's unlikely any British sex actress, bar Deeley, would have agreed to be filmed this way. The DeWolfe music cues used for the Nazi sequence are more familiar from their use in 1970's horror films-which seems appropriate. Finally Deeley buys a vintage camera from a brick-a-brack shop, takes it home,does some sexy poses in front of the antique, and ends up seduced by the camera's previous owner a Tod Slaughter-look ghost (Anthony Kenyon).

The end of the journey, the handcuffed escort and prisoner are separated. Heather is revealed to be the escort, not the prisoner. While her captive is taken away, Heather homes in on a male passenger.

Diversions was a minor release in the UK, it received pans in ‘The Monthly Film Bulletin' who thought it silly, even ‘Cinema Blue' was disappointed with what they considered more mild than wild filmmaking. Such opinions give the impression Britain's critics were watching a different film-and to a degree they were. Ford cut two edits of the film-‘Diversions' a 87 minute variant to be shown only outside the UK, and ‘Sex Express' the truncated 50 minute UK release version-with the Nazi scene omitted and the castration sequence notably reduced. The significant difference is that Sex Express is a softcore film, Diversions has Deeley, Blackstone, et al acting out the sex scenes for real. Ford was extremely secretive about shooting hardcore for export prints-previously his films had such material inserted by foreign distributors-(i.e. ‘Pimps of Perversion' the Gallic edit of ‘Groupie Girl')-by the mid-Seventies Ford quietly cut out the middle-man.

Seen in its complete, expanded version Diversions is neither silly,mild nor seemingly the work of someone who found sex scenes boring.

The lengthy silent sections and zig-zagging between fantasy and reality, give Diversions a dreamlike surreal slant, unexpected from Ford whose films usually are heavily narrative-led. With the overseas edit Ford, free from worry about his reputation within the British Film Industry, doesn't know when to stop, finding in Heather Deeley a willing participant. Out of the blue moments of hardcore sex and horror contribute an off-balance but highly intense tone. Ford's sideline in cranking out horror film scripts was never more obvious. The Timmy Blackstone murder is remarkably similar to the butchering of the prostitute in the Ford scripted ‘Corruption'(1967). Both sequences repeating a blood on breasts motif, and presenting violence in the manner of a sexual kink. More troubling is that Deeley acts as much the playful sex kitten in the mutilation aspects as she does the sex.

For its director and star however, Diversions was pretty much the beginning of the end. In the Eighties, with the British Film Industry being dismantled piece by piece, Ford took to anonymously working on sex and horror quickies in Italy and Sweden, like the ski-resort gore film ‘Blood Tracks'. Eventually he abandoned film work altogether turning to penning paperbacks like ‘The Casting Couch'-centred around the alleged sexual favours of Jean Harlow and Betty Grable. Much as he tried to deny it, exploitation film blood ran through the veins of Derek Ford, right till the end. Diversions hasn't been seen in the UK since the late seventies. Neither has Heather Deeley, an incredibly popular girl in the mid-Seventies, forgotten and vanished by the decade's end. Nobody knows what became of Heather. Her final role was in the Fiona Richmond vehicle ‘Hardcore'(1977)-where she plays a swinger who watches sex on close circuit TV- a sad and lonely image.

Diversions is Derek Ford's zenith as a sex and horror man, and he tried his best to make sure none of his fellow countrymen ever found out about it.

A film which holds a special place in British cinema history, being as far as I know the only hardcore pornographic feature made on film by a British director and cast during the so-called "Golden Age of Porn." Saucy film director Derek Ford (The Wife Swappers) and his cast go all the way, and so in the uncut version released for the overseas markets, there's meat shots, money shots and all kinds of sucking and f**king. There's also some very odd, dark-minded stuff going on in here, making it more than simply a hardcore version of one of the sex romps British producers were making during the 70s. This is intense and intriguingly sick stuff at times.

A woman (Heather Dealy, who is excellent) is escorted in handcuffs onto a train with a uniformed female warder, and whilst journeying fantasises about the others in the carriage. First, one of the men reminds her of her first lover, and we get a flashback to a barn where she is playing hide and seek with him; he pretends to fancy the apples in the barn more than her (!), and makes an improvised Arcimboldo-type figure from the fruits; she gets jealous of the figure and he gets her clothes off and his cock inside her. As if the strange cod-poetic talk in this episode weren't strange enough, she next fantasises about screwing a man in her carriage reading a Vampirella comic; she envisions the man having sex with him, then things go pear shaped: the sex is interrupted by a memory/fantasy of soldiers gang-banging her, and so she grabs a knife and stabs her lover to death, licking and smearing the blood, masturbating with the bloody dagger and finally cutting off his dick and sucking the severed organ! She then buries the body and drives off into the night in search of another victim, only to find that the next man she picks up turns the table on her as he is a vampire.

Losing in this fantasy sobers her a little, so the next sex vision has her living in the flat of a whore and hiring herself out to a hunk who visits, the twist being that he wasn't the client she thought he was but a flat-hunter; this segment ends happily with the two of them having had such good sex that they end up shacking up together. Things turn sordid again in the next story, as she imagines the prison warder and two Nazis sexually abusing her in German WW2 uniform. The last segment has a her as a collector of Victoriana who buys a vintage camera which is haunted by the pornographer who used to own it - she has a threesome with this masher and his maid.

The film is brilliantly put together, with some fine and disorientating editing, some great camera-work & shots and a kick-ass funky soundtrack. It's positing of a lurid and shocking fantasy life going on as a train rides through the English suburbs and countryside suggests an England very different from the surface politeness and drabness - a world of licentiousness, death-worship and weird desires. It's great to have the film as a record of something else going on in England at the time than strikes, disillusion, saucy smirking and Puritan censoriousness.

It is telling that the fantasist at the centre of the film is in handcuffs, but there's a twist at the end of the tale, as it's not the protagonist that gets delivered up to the prison officer at the end of the journey but her warden. Is it that the fantasies have freed her from her bondage, or that those in charge of imprisoning people are hypocrites with fevered desires? The film's original trailer spoke of "a woman who can't tell fantasy from reality" and the film's end gives the whole thing an air of illusion - and that's only appropriate, for what is this kind of fantasy but propriety's daydream, and what is propriety but a fantasy of the desiring mind? The DVD I saw was taken from the print in a terrible condition, and given the historical importance of Diversions as the UK's only home-grown pornographic feature film before the advent of video and DVD and the relaxation of the censorship laws, I would say that the BFI ought to look to restoring the film to its original glory; it says more about Britain and the secret life of both its cinema and its people than most other Brit films made contemporaneously.

British exploitation director Derek Ford decided in 1975 to make a sex film with a difference: it was to be an anthology, perhaps inspired by the popular Amicus films earlier on in the decade. The rarely-seen SEX EXPRESS is the result, an utterly weird and sometimes shocking mixture of hardcore sex inserts within five different short tales. The linking story concerns prisoner Imogene (Heather Deeley) travelling to a location by train; it is here that we the viewer are privy to her innermost thoughts as she contemplates her situation, and then we witness her memories and fantasies (involving the fellow carriage members, saving money by re-using actors) which make up the five mini-films. Despite being made on a clearly low budget with less-than-impressive acting, this film curio stands as a one-off; a sex film with some really quite revolting scenes of horror and degradation to more than make it worth tracking down by the British horror fan.

The first story is a rather harmless piece of fluff involving a farm boy and girl as they cavort in the sun on a warm autumn's afternoon. Antics move to a barn, where the boy begins a long and rather boring speech about the various redeeming qualities of apples, turning them into objects of lust and desire, somewhat bizarrely. Soon enough the film settles into more routine sex territory as he begins a frenzied bout with his girlfriend in the hay, shot in explicit detail. The second story is the most infamous in the film and quite rightly so. It begins typically enough as Deeley and British porn star Timothy Blackstone engage in some sexual shenanigans on a sofa. The viewer is somewhat disturbed by Deeley's flashbacks involving her rape and violation by a gang of soldiers in an unnamed combat situation. Even this doesn't prepare one for what is to come.

Reaching under the sofa seat, Deeley pulls out a knife and proceeds to stab and kill her lover in the mid-throes of passion. Pretty gruesome stuff, especially when she proceeds to satisfy herself with the bloody knife before finally castrating her prone partner - in ultra-graphic detail, might I add, which will cause all male viewers to cross their legs in horror - and playing with his severed, bloody member. This is certainly the most explicit and disturbing sequence I've seen in any British horror film and its inclusion is quite unknown, other than to shock the dirty mac brigade by its unexpected appearance. Thankfully things ease off for the third story, a simple case of mistaken identity leading to lots of passionate love-making in a bed; a most singularly unsurprising and ineffectual segment of film-making.

However, the fourth story moves back into horror territory with a Naziploitation segment recalling ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS. Deeley is a captured prisoner subjected to rape and humiliation by various German officers, before things move into a more "pleasant" period of straightforward sex. The final story is a bizarre comedy, in which a haunted camera leads to a period sex film in which a moustache-twirling playboy enjoys the affections of both Deeley and his own maid. Again, this is pretty weird stuff, but more amusing than previous segments. The film's conclusion reveals that Deeley was not in fact the prisoner, but her handcuffed partner is, leaving her to go off into the sunset with a handsome fellow passenger. Eagle-eyed British viewers may note that an erstwhile EASTENDERS star makes an early appearance as an escort in this scene!

As far as films go, SEX EXPRESS is a rather cheap and dodgy affair, badly edited in places and poorly acted throughout. This matters not, as it's a sex film and the only thing people who want to see in this (aside from us horror fans, of course) is the hardcore sex content. Heather Deeley is impossible to dislike as the lead and puts her all into the part. The film's dark edge and sudden bursts of graphic violence and degradation make it a real oddity; a unique foray into the darkest recesses of the human mind, a film which lingers in the memory as a chill and somewhat unsettling piece of exploitation.