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Lindsay Shonteff came to Britain from Canada in the early ’60s, following his friend Sidney J. Furie. His modest experience got him control of horror second features such as Devil Doll (1963) and Curse of Simba (1964). Unremarkable fodder, they probably made their money back from people sheltering from the rain. Shonteff's next film that began his idiosyncratic exploitation career in earnest. Licensed to Kill (1965) (note the d) was a James Bond cash-in so crudely high-spirited that it is hard not to find at least some enjoyment from it. Drenched in cheap ’60s sexism and undercranked pussyfoot violence, it plays like a rough take on Matt Helm, laying on the spoofing with a general lack of sophistication or apparent concern. Still, Licensed to Kill did enough business to be released in the US, where Joseph Levine retitled it The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World.

Shonteff's career at this point looked like it might go somewhere. He was apparently offered a deal with Twentieth-Century Fox, but he claims to have walked away from it because it didn't offer him enough independence (if one thing characterizes the headstrong spirit of British filmmakers like Shonteff, it’s an unerring capacity to foul up a good thing). Despite such pretensions, Shonteff continued to be drawn into the fast-expanding world of the grimy British sex pic: Permissive (1970), The Yes Girls (1971), etc. Presumably this activity allowed him to fund his own, more "personal" projects, which were almost exclusively jokey "adult" spy thrillers; in effect Shonteff was trying to remake his own Licensed To Kill with varying degrees of sex and violence. The Fast Kill (1972) and Big Zapper (1973) were bargain basement, sub-Avengers-style capers with lots of tits and ass and the usual travelogue London footage thrown in. Spy Story (1976) differed, being a slow-moving Len Deighton adaptation. This almost brought Shonteff credibility, had he not decimated it in the following years with two more Licensed to Kill revamps: No. 1 of the Secret Service (1977) and Licensed to Love and Kill (1979), which were limply adventurous curio pieces that are almost impossible to find in the UK now — not because of any censorship difficulties but because no one can be bothered to release them. They play like cheap jokey coffee commercials, and, more often than not, feature cheap jokey coffee commercial actors, trussed up in wide-lapelled dinner jackets and delivering third-rate bon mots.

Still, Shonteff’s self-image as the Kubrick of exploitation can be seen in his attempt to re-create the Vietnam war in Berkshire, England (!), with a host of obscure British actors, in his would-be epic How Sleep the Brave (1981). This film does exist! I've seen it, courtesy of a now long-defunct VHS label. How Sleep the Brave is an almost hypnotically unlikely experience. While Kubrick later had all the resources to re-create Vietnam in South London (and even he failed to make it convincing), Shonteff definitely did not. But only Shonteff and, say, the Carry On team would ever try to pass the woodlands around Gerrard's Cross off as Vietnam! And only the Carry On team could get away with it. Shonteff was, however, deadly serious. Consequently, How Sleep the Brave remains one of the true staggering oddities of British Poverty Row cinema. Hats off to the filmmaker for making it, though - who else would have had the audacity to put this together in Britain, with no budget, at a time when Vietnam films were anathema to the box office?

Not surprisingly, How Sleep… didn't make Shonteff's fortune. He dabbled in video throughout the 1980s and in 1990 was back yet again to his Licensed to Kill shenanigans with Number One Gun. I haven't seen it. Nor, apparently, have many others. But Shonteff must be championed for still managing to get films off the ground ten years after his contemporaries had all given up.

Pete Walker was a contemporary of Shonteff's whose career was more steadily prolific and, for a time, modestly successful. Again, Walker began with cheesy sex loops, first producing 8mm glamour reels for discreet gentleman who liked to jerk off to pasty-faced, fat-assed English girls in unerotic poses, before graduating to substandard, feature-length skin flicks such as I Like Birds (1967) and School for Sex (1969). Walker was a more coolly efficient film packager than Shonteff, however, and his style quickly improved when he recruited professional scriptwriters, even if they were knocking out scripts for just "two hundred quid a time." Cool It Carol (1970), scripted by Murray Smith, was a mildly subversive sex drama that holds some historical interest. But Walker was content to slip back into the most crass forms of novelty exploitation now and then - The Four Dimensions of Greta (1972), for example, a rare British 3-D sex film, has to be seen to be believed.

Again like Shonteff, Walker had ambitions to branch out into genre pictures, principally Psycho-like thrillers and Guignolesque horror. To this end, he worked prolifically in the early seventies: Die Screaming, Marianne (1972), The Flesh and Blood Show (1973), Tiffany Jones (1973). He then made a slight impression with the hysterical House of Whipcord (1974), about a senile judge setting up a "house of correction" for permissive girls. The film is audaciously dedicated to people who want to see the reintroduction of capital and corporal punishment in Britain! Frightmare (1974) was a grisly proto-cannibal film, which, like Whipcord, featured the redoubtable matronly harridan and Walker regular Sheila Keith.

Neither Whipcord nor Frightmare made any money (Walker screenwriter David McGillivray remembers that in one West End London cinema on Christmas Eve, admittedly not the best time to look at box office returns, Frightmare took £23), but in the seventies this didn't really matter. At that time, the Eady Levy, a government tax on general film exhibition that provided funds for low-budget domestic product, was still thriving and substantially bankrolling most of the films discussed in this article. Even so, Walker managed to attract Columbia-Warner UK to distribute his next pictures. House of Mortal Sin (1975; US title: The Confessional) is probably his best horror film; it features Anthony Sharp as a corrupt priest with his own sick moral agenda. Schizo (1976) starred a pre-Peter Sellers Lynne Frederick (the schizo of the title, somewhat disturbingly prophetic) and a vaguely uncomfortable Stephanie Beacham, and was mildly distinguished by some cheap visual flourishes. But like most of Walker's work, these films have dated badly.

Walker's next film, The Comeback (1978), was a derivative body-count shocker memorable only for the crazy casting of Las Vegas crooner Jack Jones in the lead. By now, Walker was feeling the pinch that affected all independent British filmmakers in the late ’70s. Eady Levy money was still available, but it never covered an entire budget. And the distribution circuit was becoming more apathetic; loss-making provincial cinemas were closing up and down the country. The ones that stayed open were more often than not rank places just short of condemnation. Walker made another film, an ugly, tabloid sex drama, Home Before Midnight (1978), before running into more severe fundraising difficulties.

That Walker had difficulty setting up projects at this time was particularly indicative of the poor state of British cinema. If this shrewd small businessman couldn't do it, no one could. He kicked around some unrealized projects for five years before being drafted in (his first time as a hired hand) by Cannon Films to direct House of the Long Shadows (1983). But this was a tedious and unfunny horror parody, the umpteenth reworking of The Seven Days to Baldpate, and it also managed to waste the only screen teaming of four horror icons: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, and John Carradine. After this debacle, Walker wisely retired and moved into property development.

Stanley Long was a one-man film industry also having his last successes at the end of the ’70s. Long had been involved in the exploitation film industry since the early ’60s, as a writer, cinematographer, editor, and, eventually, producer-director. His filmography includes such gems as Nudes of the World (1961), West End Jungle (1963), The Wife Swappers (1970), and Naughty! (1971). But, where other skid row directors made the transfer to horror and thriller, Long remained active as a producer of sex films, and his greatest "success," if we can so label these desperately unerotic films, was the Adventures series, three films between 1975 and 78.