Director: Jake West
Editor: Jake West
Producer: Carl Daft & David Gregory
Running time: 122 minutes
Year: 2023
Certificate: Unrated
He’ll blow you a kiss and then blow you away… (Trailer line from Tuxedo Warrior)
Plenty of people, at some point in the lives, think that they could make a movie and many of them try, usually ending up making one or two short films that only ever get seen by friends and family or, if they’re lucky, by a wider film festival audience. Making a feature film is a whole different kind of ball-game and anyone who succeeds in making an independent movie deserves some kudos for just having the balls and tenacity to see it through to completion because it’s f**king hard. Jake West’s new documentary about maverick Mancunian (as in someone hailing from Manchester) entrepreneur, song-writer, author and film-maker, Cliff Twemlow, highlights this fact. And Cliff’s story is all at once fascinating, funny, heart-breaking and inspiring, in equal measures.
Of course there have been documentaries about wannabe film-makers before, one of my favourites being American Movie (American Movie (1999) – IMDb), which is an excellent film about the human spirit and tenacity, of which Cliff Twemlow seemingly had plenty in spades. And, fair play to director Jake West (Razor Blade Smile, Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape) for shinning a light on this relatively obscure British filmmaker who, outside of Manchester and cult film fans, who have an interest in ex-‘video nasties’, remains largely unknown.
On a more personal note I first heard about Mr Twemlow through reading The Darkside magazine’s second video nasty book, where they reproduced the video sleeves of some of the lesser known ‘nasties’ including Cliff’s first feature GBH or Grievous Bodily Harm, a Manchester-set bouncer/gangster movie featuring lots of punch-ups and gratuitous violence. I’ve been after a copy of the film on VHS for years, but tapes fetch stupid prices that I’m not prepared to pay. The most expensive tape I ever bought I reviewed a couple of years ago for this very site, namely Clockwork Terror (Clockwork Terror (aka Murder in a Blue World) – Blueprint: Review (blueprintreview.co.uk)), for which I paid nearly £25, if I recall correctly. By contrast, the last GBH tape that I saw on eBay (quite recently, actually) had an asking price of £100. Gulp!
Anyway, back to the review proper! Mancunian Man charts the rather mixed career of Cliff Twemlow, who made most of his money over the years writing jingles and songs for adverts and TV programmes. In fact, he funded many of his endeavours into filmmaking using his royalty cheques. In parallel to his music career, Cliff was also into body-building and fitness, making sure that he was never again picked-on and mistreated as he had been for a while when he was evacuated to a farm as a little kid. And, from body-building, he also went onto to have a parallel career as a bouncer, ‘policing’ some rough clubs and pubs in Manchester. Inhabiting such an environment encouraged Cliff to write books (e.g. Tuxedo Warrior) about his experiences and this led, eventually, to him making his first feature, the aforementioned GBH, which is set in this milieu.
Unlike many muscle men, Cliff was reputedly a very approachable and decent sort of guy who was very gentle and was admired and liked by most of those who met him, and had the gift of being able to persuade anyone to help him in any number of the projects that he’d dreamed up. He was forever writing scripts, by hand, and sharing ideas with his close friends. Cliff was a hard-worker and was always pushing both himself and others.
From GBH, which made quite a bit of money on the video circuit, certainly more than its meagre £20K budget, Cliff went onto a second film project, namely Target Eve Island, which was filmed in Barbados. Sadly, the film remains unfinished to this day, despite having had a bigger budget and plenty of actual Falklands war footage as background, accumulated accidentally when they did the second part of filming in Grenada when war broke out!
Not put off by a stream of bad luck and bad decisions, Cliff moved on to his next film, Ibiza Connection, which again remains unfinished as the backers didn’t come up with all the money that they’d initially promised.
However, by this time Cliff had really caught the filmmaking bug and continued to shoot promos for various film projects he was trying to get off the ground; these included Mason’s War (about am SAS soldier returning from the Falklands), The Blindside of God (about a paedophile hunter) and Moon Stalker (a kind of ‘An American Werewolf in Eccles’!). Following his promo for Eye of Satan, which he was shooting on 16mm, Cliff moved onto a bigger project, Firestar, which actually had Charles Gray and Oliver Tobias starring in it. In actual fact, Twemlow was a bit disappointed when Oliver Tobias arrived on set as he thought that he had gotten Oliver Reed for his film! Sadly, to this day this has only ever been released in Germany.
Sadly, the normally upbeat Cliff started suffering with depression, and began taking steroids to over-compensate for his now aging body, despite regularly working out and progressing naturally. This seemed to change his personality, making him less positive and less able to cope with life in general.
GBH 2: Lethal Impact followed as Cliff tried to replicate his earlier success, but they had to change the name of the film as there was a TV series called GBH being broadcast at that time, and some of the money needed to finish the film had to be borrowed from local gangsters; not Cliff’s smartest move!
Cliff was hoping to make GBH 3: Shades of Violence, but ran out of funds and bankrupted himself and ended up having to sell everything and was living in a small flat above some shops when he died of a heart attack, brought on by the steroids that were increasing the size of his heart, to 2.5 times its normal size!
Of course, there is a lot more to Cliff Twemlow’s life than just the material that I’ve scribbled here, so if you want to find out more about this amazing man then I suggest you seek out this excellent documentary and submerge yourself in his world for a couple of hours. And, even if you’re not particularly a fan of the sort of films that Cliff was making, anyone with even the slightest interest in filmmaking or indeed the ‘creative journey’, as a whole, will find lots to interest them here. Plus, although in places the film is quite sad, it’s also very funny, more often than not, as it’s a very real reflection on what low-budget filmmaking is often really like.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Cliff, which I think sums up his attitude, view on life and his tremendous work-ethic: “It is better to be a resident on the brink of Hell than spend a lifetime in a relentless pursuit of a mythical Heaven.”
Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow had its North American premiere at this Year’s Fantastic Fest and will be available to purchase through Severin, who are allegedly planning to release at least two of his films, G.B.H. and Eye of Satan. Hopefully they’ll also release all his films as a boxed set at some point in future.
The film gets its Manchester premiere on 12 November. Book tickets here.
