Review: Mancunian Man – The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow
You may well be thinking “who is Cliff Twemlow?”
I know I certainly was when we were offered this for review, but thanks to this fantastic documentary I’m now not only a hell of a lot wiser to who he was, I also want to watch as many of his movies as I can now too.
Cliff was a Bouncer. Novelist. Composer. Screenwriter. Producer. Star. Stuntman…and a hell of a lot more through a life that was filled with more stories and adventures than you can possibly imagine.
Between 1982 and 1993, he gathered a devoted team, including local doormen, martial artists, variety performers, club DJs, models, girlfriends, gym friends, family members and B-listers and created his own cut-rate Hollywood empire and made (though not always finished) an impressive amount of movies across all genres; action, horror, spy thrillers and sci-fi epics, shot on the upcoming popular format of VHS.
Travelling the world, Cliff and his movie team crafted some amazing sequences that were also matched by the real life shenanigans that they got up to while filming, even making sure that a real life war breaking out on the island they were filming on wasn’t going to stop them…in fact they even got some soldiers to perform!
The story of Cliff isn’t just tied to those movie making years though and also encompasses the years before and afterwards where he was chasing other dreams too, all with the single-mindedness of a man on a mission who knew what he wanted and was going to let nothing and nobody stand in his way.
Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow is the kind of documentary I love…giving me an inside and detailed look into the life of someone I was previously unaware of, but after the end credits rolled, now starting me down a rabbit hole to find out even more about them, and in the case of Cliff, chasing up his movies to watch too.
The music side of his life threw up some big surprises too, none so more as finding out that he wrote one of the songs that appears in my all time favourite movie Dawn of the Dead…how the hell did that pass me by all these years!?
If you’re a regular listener of our podcasts and have heard myself and Thom (and now Ramrod too) chat about our love of low budget movies with a crazy plot where anything and everything has a tendency to happen, then you have to watch this ASAP…and for everyone else, you have to watch it too.
Will easily be in my top 5 documentaries of 2023 and I’ll be first in line to buy it when it hopefully gets a Blu-ray release…though it should also have a limited edition VHS release too…Cliff would have liked that.
Screens Sunday 27th August at 8.50 pm – Empire Main Screen, Frightfest, London.
Review by Dave from a screening link kindly supplied by Severin Films via Aim Publicity.
