Director Norman J Warren was one of the stalwarts of the independent horror scene in Britain during the 1970s, and this science fiction/horror hybrid – shot in just ten days with a hand-held camera and the script being written as he went along – is one of his best.
Lesbian lovers Jo (Sally Faulkner) and Jessica (Glory Annen) – holed up in a remote house in the English countryside – find their already strained relationship stretched to breaking point by the arrival of Anders (Barry Stokes), a strange young man who occasionally shows his true colours as a shape-shifting dog-faced alien called Kator, who has come to Earth looking for a new food source for his people and has decided that humans are “high in protein and easy prey”.
Jo goes very noisily insane (she’s already murdered a previous male visitor) before Anders and Jessica fall into bed for a tryst that will end in a shockingly gruesome bloodbath.
An excruciating slow-motion sequence in a nearby pond is the sort of thing the fast-forward button was made for, but that aside this is a nicely claustrophobic melodrama that remains one of Warren’s best pieces.
Glory Annen died in April 2017 in London, aged 64.
Anders/Kator
Barry Stokes
Josephine
Sally Faulkner
Jessica
Glory Annen
Sandy
Sandy Chinney
Director
Norman J Warren