Review: 'Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser'

Tigon Films-founder Tony Tenser didn't produce exploitation movies to satisfy a fetish, like Russ Meyer. He was simply a businessman, more like Roger Corman. So despite some of his dubious accomplishments, like opening a member's only movie theater/men's club and coining the term "sex kitten", Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser is only lurid when describing the plots of some of his movies. And along with bringing such smutty stuff as Naked—As Nature Intended and Not Now, Darling into being, he also produced some genuine genre classics, such as Repulsion, Witchfinder General, Frightmare, and The Blood on Satan's Claw. 

Considering that most of his films were less than classics, John Hamilton's survey of Tenser's career is unusually thorough and sober. Hamilton not only deals with the business side of things, which is really the producer's playground, but also gets into the makings of Tenser's most important productions, slowing down to get into the nuts and bolts when a film deserves such attention, such as Repulsion, easily the best thing Tenser had his hands in. For exploitation freaks with an aversion to sobriety, there are plenty of dirty-minded images from the films to accompany the historically minded text.

Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser was originally published in 2005. For its twentieth anniversary reprint, Hamilton has provided a new introduction. While such things are often merely an extra page or two of verbage to justify slapping "Expanded!" across the front cover, the new intro provides some valuable extra information about both the author's relationship with his subject and that subject's gregarious and somewhat controlling personality.