Mancunian low-budget Movie Mogul

One of last year’s real big surprises in the world of Blu-ray box sets was Bloody Legend: The Complete Twemlow Collection, as it was a wholly entertaining, fascinating, and at times heart-warming set. The Severin released boxset brought together the work of one of the UK’s unlikeliest movie moguls- Cliff Twemlow, a Mancunian bouncer/ body builder, who went on to write/star in/produce a series of low-budget/ largely SOV films in the early 80s to early 90s- these moved between action, thriller, sci-fi, and horror. His most notable/notorious film was 1983’s G.B.H., which landed on the video nasty list, though he was connected to other ten feature films, many of which got their first real full/proper release on the boxset. Opening up the set was the excellent 2023 documentary Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow, which really pulls you into the set. I caught up with Severn’s David Gregory and Jake West, director of Mancunian Man, to discuss the boxset and all things cliff.

M[m]: When did you each first become aware of Mr Tremlow’s film work? And did either of you get a chance to meet him before he passed in the late 1990s?

Jake: For me, it was in the '80s video nasty era when Cliff’s Mancunian shot-on-video epic ‘GBH’ was labelled one of the video nasties. There were hardly any British nasties (the other one is Exposé aka House on Straw Hill), so that made it required viewing and, like most video nasties, it was hard to understand why it had been branded as such – as it’s hilarious – but getting that Nasty reputation on that cemented Cliff as part of that fascinating era! And he certainly is a fascinating character!

Alas, I never did get to meet Cliff, but I know David did and has a fantastic story relating to that!

David: The only religious sanctuaries I recall that had any sort of impact on the formation of my world view in Nottingham, as far as I was concerned, were the video shops we were members of. I say this in the plural because I bitched and moaned until my prayers were heard by the higher power in our house (my Dad) that the video shop we’d recently been frequenting had outlived its usefulness in that I’d seen everything they had to offer to this single minded parishioner of horror and exploitation and that another such temple come across locally and studied every cover on every shelf that was remotely gory or horror-related and concluded that there were multiple new treasures to rent so we had to join that one too. And I believe the cover of G.B.H. leaped off the shelf into my hands at our first ever video shop, Grays in Arnold — I occasionally still recall the unique heavenly aroma in there, though that memory is sadly fading, which was a pungent mix of new, cheap plastic and cigarette smoke — as that image of Cliff in white tuxedo, splattered in blood, wielding an axe was precisely the kind of cinematic entertainment this 10 year old needed punching into his eye holes, sending ecstasy directly to his brain. I was confused by the “more brutal than The Long Good Friday” tag line because The Long Good Friday was hardly Bloody Moon or Cannibal Holocaust so not quite the pulsing flex that sent my imagination into overdrive it was meant to be, but the “Not For The Squeamish” starburst overruled that suspicion enough to shove the box into Dad’s hands and transform it into that night’s rental. In the early days of Grays you could only rent one film at a time, so one had to choose wisely. The rest of the family, bless ‘em, rarely got involved in this selection process because they had not even a fraction of the interest/obsession or, if the powers that be were to be believed soon after that bounty-filled first couple of years of the video era, thirst for an education in how to maim and kill everyone in my street, that I did… so apart from Dad, who had far more interest in football and socializing and that sort of thing than in films and who had to be there in order to do the deal with the dodgy owners of the video shop as I hadn’t even reached my teens yet, no one else in the family would attend these glorious, life affirming ceremonies that were the regular visit to the video shop. So I was the self-appointed preacher and altar boy and more often than not, the only one who watched ‘em. All that’s a long way of saying G.B.H. was the one and only Twem film I saw or even heard of until we started embarking on this several years in the making endeavor that became the Bloody Legend box set and Jake’s wonderful Mancunian Man documentary.

As far as meeting Cliff, yes! But I don’t remember it in any sort of detail. My old boss, whom I will talk about in more detail below, and I were in Cannes in the 90s, and this great, big, muscle-y unforgettable lion of a man was walking along the croisette and my boss stopped him to have a chat. He recently reminded me at a screening of Mancunian Man we had in Nottingham that that was Cliff and I had indeed met him, shaken his hand and witnessed a brief bit of business chat between the two of them.

M[m]: You mentioned briefly meeting Cliff. What was your impression of him?

David: As I was just standing there while Andrew was making business-based small talk with him, it really didn't make much of an impression, I'm afraid

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M[m]: Please talk about how your 2023 doc Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow, came about and developed

Jake: David had filmed a few interviews with Twemlow collaborators and originally asked me to edit that material for a much simpler piece. He really liked what I had done with that edit, and we both felt there was a much bigger and interesting story to tell about Cliff now that he’d scratched the surface. He asked me if I’d be interested in coming on board and taking it on as a feature-length piece, which I was delighted to do!

M[m]: How easy was it to track down those who had worked with Cliff?. Am I guessing his old gym buddy/ collaborator was one of the first you got in contact with?

Jake: David Gregory had already established contact with Brian Sterling Vete when he initiated the idea of doing the set. A lot of the Twemlow friend group were still very close, so fortunately, a lot of them had stayed in contact, and many of them (not all) still lived in the Manchester area, and he initially got the word out to everyone who was still around.

M[m]: Who were some of the more difficult people to contact, and was there anyone you’d wish you’d included?

Jake: Brett Sinclair had unfortunately passed away a few years before we started the project, but we managed to track down his partner Annie (who worked with Cliff at the Millionaire Nightclub) & daughter Chloe (who also appeared in a couple of Cliff's movies). Fortunately, we tracked down another filmmaker, Stephen Crompton, who had started his own Cliff documentary about 10 years earlier, but never finished, and he had interviewed Brett, so we got lucky. We would have loved to have interviewed Joan Collins, but her agent wanted a ridiculous amount of money!

The key person who was missing was Cliff himself, who had died in 1993, and there was surprisingly very little archive interview material of him. Marc Morris, with whom I run Nucleus Films, is the Sherlock Holmes of video material detection, and he unearthed so much amazing archive material, including sourcing the best material for many of Cliff's films & shorts, which were thought lost to time. Marc did an incredible job.

M[m]: Though the doc runs at just over the two-hour mark, it remains lively and interesting throughout. How much material was filmed for the project, and was it easy to shape into the documentary we now have?

Jake: Like any documentary that covers its subject's entire life (not just a specific work), we ended up with 100s of hours of material. It was a huge edit job and was continuously refined and shaped over a 3-year period. Fortunately, David wasn’t trying to rush the release, so with him we managed to craft and shape the piece into a documentary we’re both very proud of.

M[m]: Were there any scenes/ elements you cut out, and wish you hadn’t after seeing the finished project?

Jake: Well, in a way I got to have my cake & eat it, too, on that front. You can see all of that material! There’s a great extra on the box set release, which features an hour of additional material that was removed, that is still absolutely fascinating but pace-wise it really wasn’t going to work for the final cut as a 3-hour doc was just far too long. So I was happy to remove it and streamline. But it’s great for people who want to dive further down the Twemlow rabbit hole.

M[m]: What do you feel is the general appeal/ interest in Cliff’s work?. And which film is your favourite from his filmography, giving us a few reasons for your choice?

Jake: I think Cliff is inspirational and shows that anyone who is determined enough can make their own movie! Personally, GBH is still my favourite as it’s so fun and captures the time of Cliff and his team bursting with enthusiasm despite clearly not quite knowing what they were doing as filmmakers! It’s also such a great time capsule of '80s Britain, specifically Manchester and shows us how much the world has changed both in social attitudes and technology from what now feels like a far simpler analogue era! One thing about all of Cliff's work is that you very much get a sense of how a group of friends created a ‘film family’ to make many of these films, and it’s fun to experience that journey now, seeing them all collected together after so many years of many of these films being unreleased. Even people who worked on them and acted in them are seeing many of them for the first time! It’s just heartwarming to see that group of friends continually getting together over a decade having so many crazy adventures.

Ultimately, It’s a shame Cliff could never get proper financing, and in an alternative universe, I think we’d all love to have seen 'The Pike’ as a finished movie where the robot fish worked, and he had Joan Collins starring as planned!

David: For us at Severin Cliff embodies exactly the kind of filmmaker we champion and whose work we will treat with the kind of care and fastidiousness that the suits at the studios would only afford to the likes of Hitchcock and Kubrick (do they even do it for Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger or Nicolas Ray these days? I’m thinking not as the bottom line isn’t substantial enough) and even then, while they will present the movies within in the most sterling condition they’ve ever been seen — and that is the number one reason to do such a collection without a doubt — but they certainly won’t go to the lengths we at Severin and Jake and Marc Morris at Nucleus did to get all the other elements into this one collection: the hours of quality extras produced, the lost pieces of films assembled, the nude massage video (don’t see Alfred and Stanley’s nude massage videos in their masterpiece collections, do you?)… We might be considered commercially questionable for this kind of indulgence in the life and work of such a niche personality, but it’s really an extension of the obsession or madness of that filmmaker. We understand this madness and we will indulge it to the point of absurdity. And as there seems to be enough of us afflicted with this particular strain of madness in one way or another, hopefully it sells enough copies to be worthwhile. While we can’t be doing comprehensive box sets on every filmmaker whose work we champion for a number of reasons, we still give similar treatment and love to the individual editions of films we put out. Because if it’s a film we’re getting for our library, then it’s a film that deserves it… there are a few exceptions to this bold generalized declaration I have to hastily add but we won’t get into specifics there.

My favorite Twem film is still G.B.H. Not only because it’s the one I saw back then, but because it is the purest example of his work. He was still full of the optimism of the possibility of his wild plan to make a filmmaking empire in Manchester. And you have to remember this was Manchester before it was culturally known far and wide with its music scene — yes Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall, The Smiths etc existed before G.B.H. came out but Manchester was not synonymous with a “scene” outside the city for quite some time — down south it was a working class city several hours away from fancy London with its dedicated following of fashion etc. G.B.H. already has many of the key members of his stock company of actors, stuntmen and fearless filmmaking comrades on board, it’s set and filmed among Cliff’s familiar world of nightclubs, bodybuilding and doing dodgy deals so there’s an authenticity to it yet still imbued with cinematic ambitions of stunts, fight scenes and tough dialog. And it’s a time capsule of that era, the likes of which you won’t find in any condescending BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary of that time nor in the professionally lit film studio backdrops of mainstream movies. It’s shot on beautiful videotape with that specific texture that you simply cannot replicate these days, even with a Jim Cameron budget. And it’s an absolute blast. It’s funny both intentionally and unintentionally, plus it’s action-packed. When people ask where to begin in Bloody Legend I say start with Mancunian Man which tells you everything you need to know about what you’re about to get yourself into in the most entertaining fashion and then G.B.H. You’ll either be hooked after that and want to take a taste of the whole lot — and some of them are a bit of a challenge so your commitment will be tested — or if not, then you may be better off switching over to the Criterion Channel.

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M[m]: At what point did the idea for The Bloody Legend box set come about? And had it always been covering the whole of his filmography?

David: I first met with Brian Sterling Vete something like ten years ago to discuss licensing some of Cliff’s films in the lobby of a hotel at the side of a freeway at something like 7AM on a Monday morning as my partner and I drove back to LA after a weekend away. He handed me a thumb drive with what he told me was his best HD master of Moonstalker. I told him I was mostly interested in G.B.H. because we’d been having some success with shot-on-video horror films like The Burning Moon and Sledgehammer on our sub-label Intervision and wanted to build that particular corner of the Severin library. I had told the youngsters at Severin — who were the ones who really championed these SOV movies to me. I couldn’t really see any long term appeal but there was no doubting they were cheap to license and master, no film transfer or restoration needed as the video master we received was the one that would be used for the disc — about my first introduction to SOV films being G.B.H., a soft-core picture masquerading as a horror film called DEATH SHOCK and the legendary SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN — a perfectly fun time splatter effort by a local youth theater school impressively pulling off a zero budget feature which became yet another moral judgment uproar in the way only our silly busy body society was seemingly obsessed with, sticking their noses in other peoples’ business, mouthing off about child-corrupting perverts who need to be publicly shamed and punished. Well, of course, now are the proud worldwide rights owners of SUFFER. Anyway, that morning meeting with Brian would wind up sowing the first seeds of BLOODY LEGEND. The frustrating thing about the Twemlow catalogue was that no one knew what became of the masters of these movies. And at the point I met with Brian, I had no clue they’d made as many movies as they had. Once we started talking, though Brian was as keen to pay tribute to the legend that was his dear friend Cliff as he was to make a bit of money off the movies — thankfully, as is often the case with producers who have been out of the business for a while, he did not have an unrealistic idea of their value. Once we started talking about interviewing his old collaborators and telling his story, the whole thing started snowballing. Brian got excited and started bringing up more and more names of people to get involved in revisiting this exciting and unique chapter of their lives. Jake came on board after the first round of interviews had been shot by David Flint and Severin partner Carl Daft. Jake put those early interviews together in a very rough timeline, and though great chunks of the story were missing, I could tell that there was a bigger story here that needed telling properly. I’d known Jake for years as a friend and colleague, and of course, I know he’s made narrative features, but also his docs, which have a sense of fun and energy about them that would really suit this story. So I asked Jake if he was up for getting more involved in turning this into a movie, and when he agreed, that’s where the project really started to snowball. It seemed that with every new person he met and interviewed, they had a new lead on some tape that was better than what we already had for one film or another. And this is where Jake’s nucleus partner Marc Morris became indispensable to the whole project — and I’ve known Marc even longer than I’ve known Jake. I was getting tapes off Marc from his legendary collection of then-illegal VHS since I was about 14 or 15. He became the true detective of the endeavor, searching far and wide and finding leads to anyone who may have had some involvement in the post production or completion of these films. No easy feat, seeing as many of them were never released or completed in some cases! It was Marc who ultimately was the collector of all these pieces which would become the 9 disc set, Bloody Legend (except the music CD, we mostly got that material from De Wolfe the library music company, although Marc was the one to get a couple of tracks off someone who worked on scoring one of the films so yeh he was involved in that too actually). As happened with Al Adamson and Black Emanuelle and others in our now notorious collection of comprehensive box sets, what started out as a much smaller proposition just kept getting bigger and bigger. There’s always a point we get to when we’re neck deep in building these collections, where we realize that we’ve come too far down the road now, and we have to just go for it and try and make it as comprehensive as possible. A box set of the complete works of Cliff Twemlow — well, as many of his friends and co-conspirators have said, if you believe in such things, Cliff will be looking down on us now and be so proud. That’s pretty cool.

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M[m]: Did you ever consider releasing the boxset in the UK?

David: Absolutely. But BBFC laws and their associated costs make it financially impossible to release such a niche collection there, particularly with the physical media market being what it is. Most of the films are available on digital platforms, as BBFC certs aren't legally required there. The VRA (implemented in 1984, I think) is finally succeeding in what it was originally set up for: to squeeze the independents out of the business and make it a big studio-only business in the UK. But the sad irony is that the big studios are also abandoning physical media, so it effectively is killing physical media off entirely

M[m]: Which of the eleven feature films on the set was the most difficult to source? And which films had to have the most work done on them?

David: That’s a question for Marc, really. But I know Eye of Satan was very difficult. We were distracted by the fact that there’s a British video cover of it, complete with BBFC certificate blob sullying the nice artwork, which made us think it had had a release in the 90s, but we never found a copy. And there are both Twem collectors (not many, but they are out there) and VHS tape collectors (of which there are plenty and we’re in touch in one way or another, or at least Marc is, with a huge amount of the most hardcore). None of them had seen a copy of this UK Eye of Satan release in the flesh. Can’t recall what was ultimately used, but I think actress Tanya James had a copy of it in some state of completion, and one or two other people may have had it as distributed by director David Kent Watson from his website in the early 2000s. DKW by the way, was nearing the end of his life when all this was happening, had been living in France and not staying in touch with any of the Twem team because he’d pretty much fallen out with them all over monies or something, so we never ended up getting anything off him, despite many efforts. And all Twem’s physical assets were chucked away after he died. Even G.B.H., despite being the most widely distributed of his movies, was not as easy to find a master on as you might expect. That pre-cert release by David Hamilton Grant’s World of Video 2000 was in the early days of video, and was yanked off shelves because of the new laws that came in mid-80s and never came out again. DHG disappeared off the face of the planet after going to prison for distributing a slightly less censored version of Nightmares in a Damaged Brain than the BBFC-approved, so all those WOV2000 master tapes disappeared, never to surface again, so we were reliant on commercially released VHS and Beta copies in the collections of us pre-cert tape collectors. Marc digitized several and pieced them together from the best ones, all of which had different spots of digital interference here and there. As luck would have it, my old boss pre-Lustig, who I worked for while still in secondary school through college in summers and Xmas holidays and during my 5 years purgatory in the UK between college and moving to LA to work for Lustig, was a distributor of budget video tapes. He never threw anything away. And he had met Twemlow because he came to his place of business in Nottingham to pitch him on a new movie idea. At the end of that meeting, for one reason or another, he gave my boss — Andrew Clarke, who I’m still friends with to this day — a 3/4” master of “The Mancunian” likely with a view to releasing it on the then thriving budget market, during that time when you could get shitty post-cert releases with bizarrely painted covers, often re-titled and cut pre-cert films, for a few quid in bargain bins at everywhere from petrol stations to off-licenses. Andrew had banks of VHS for duplication of these kinds of releases, so did a lot of business duplicating films and distributing them for these bargain bins up and down the land. Andrew gave us that tape of ‘The Mancunian’ which turned out to be a different cut of G.B.H. so that’s one of the alt cuts of the film on the disc. Marc also got some copy from South Africa which was yet a third cut of it. So as you can see, it was quite the archaeological undertaking.

M[m]: touching on the design of the set- who came up with the wonderful mock VHS look of the set?. And who did the excellent come-to-life menus that feature on each of the films?

David: That was my idea, but with the design supervised by our head of creative packaging Amy Vorhees Searles. I sent her a bunch of the video magazine ads of Twem’s films, principally GBH and Tuxedo Warrior as they’d had decent releases, but also a ton of general trade ads around 82, so we could fill it with those authentic, period-accurate graphics and ads. Also, Charles Wyatt, the designer of The Pike and painter of several Twem key arts for many of the films, painted us a new pic of Cliff, that’s in the booklet as well.

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M[m]: What made you decide that this was going to be the first official box set on InterVision? And are there any other SOV/ low budget film makers you’d like to the box for on the label?

David: It’s the epitome of what the Intervision sub-label is all about. And what better filmmaker embodies that style of filmmakeing than Cliff Twemlow through an entire filmography, start to finish? Made perfect sense.

M[m]: connected to the set you released three of Cliffs' books with Encyclopocalypse Publications- any more thoughts on future titles you’d like to release?

David: We have more in the works there too. Just keep your eyes on our website www.severinfilms.com or even better our socials Severin Films on Facebook and instagram. All the announcements drop first there, and all the special offers and info on our massive bi-annual sales, limited edition listings and public events like the super shock festival can be learned about there. Lots and lots coming.

M[m]: With Severin, you’ve released quite a few titles now. How does the UK market differ from the US? And what other titles do you have lined up next for Uk releases?

David: We've tried a few titles in the UK -- and some of them even make financial sense, like WILD GEESE and the forthcoming ZULU DAWN 4k because they're those rare examples of films that have a bigger market there than here -- but overall it's too risky financially for the kinds of films we do.

M[m]: What’s coming in early mid-2026 from both Severin and InterVision? And thoughts of the resurrection of Severin Kids?

David: There’s more Kids, there are more Intervision, but mainly, there seem to be more box sets taking over from individual Severin releases. It’s a plague. Whenever we now propose a title to get, all of a sudden someone says, “may as well get this and that to release alongside it” and all of a sudden it’s a box! Like the Margheriti Indiana Jones-ploitation box we just announced. Well, we got Hunters of the Golden Cobra, why not add his other two similarly themed efforts? The amount of ‘sploitation trios we have in the pipeline is mind-bending. But there’s so much more. Too many to list or give away at this point. Let’s just say that, as 2026 is Severin’s big 20th anniversary year, we have a slate planned that is by far our most ambitious to date. I’m sure my team, one day the Sev team will revolt and throw me off a bridge in a crate containing as many of my VHS collection as they can stuff in with me. But… that’s probably the way I’d want to go so… but, anyway, keep your eyes on Severin Films’ social media pages for regular updates and info on new releases, limited editions etc.

M[m]: Congratulations on your 20th anniversary ?….can you hint at what we can expect release-wise for the year?

David: All I'll say it'll be a record number of releases including a lot of not on disc before films, as well as upgrades of some top titles, and no shortage of box sets. You'll notice we announced Antonio Margheriti & the Jungles of Doom 3 movie set? Well, there's several 3 or 4 movie sets -- like Sangster Directs Hammer... that one we've gone crazy on the extras and accompanying book, seeing as Hammer themselves have raised the game on the kind of treatment you can give one of their films. So what if theirs are top tier like CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN? We can make a case for super special edition-ing HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN and LUST FOR A VAMPIRE over here -- and one really big one which will rival EXORCISMO, BLACK EMANUELLE and ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS.

Big thanks to both David and Jake for their time. Here’s our in-depth review of the set: Our review of the box set can be found here. Here’s the direct link to buy the boxset