TV Cream

Independent Producers

TIGON FILMS

Whizzkid publicist Tony Tenser went from small-time distributor Miracle Films (‘If it’s a good film, it’s a Miracle!’) to strip club-sponsored Compton Films (nudie efforts, often involving Derek and Donald Ford, as well as more respectable Polanski classics), to one-man film distributor Tony Tenser Films, to setting up his own studio in 1966, with the financial help of the Trocadero-founding Hyman brothers. Lurid mind control chiller The Sorcerers was an early hit, with Boris Karloff relishing a quintessential ‘evil prof’ role, and hotshot director Michael Reeves went on to make the brilliant Witchfinder General with Vincent Price before a tragically early death. Blood-draining serial kill-in Scream and Scream Again featured Price, Lee *and* Cushing (oh, and Peter Sallis). Less successful were The Blood Beast Terror, the rather tautological Haunted House of Horror (with Frankie Avalon!) and Zeta One (Charles Hawtrey and James Robertson Justice are terrorised by an invasion of topless women), a Somewhere in between were Blood on Satan’s Claw and Beryl Reid and Flora Robson’s teacakes-and-terror curio Beast in the Cellar. It wasn’t all horror – late period Norman Wisdom folly What’s Good for the Goose, Raquel Welch western Hannie Caulder, classic comedy portmanteau The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins and the Mark Lester Black Beauty all marched out of the studio’s doors. That said, it was still mostly horror – Tigon bowed out in the early ’70s with a tempting blend of Vicki Michelle horror-sauce Virgin Witch, a Doomwatch film and Cushing-Lee Victorian serum strangeness The Creeping Flesh.

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  1. Glenn A

    January 31, 2011 at 8:13 pm

    I’m sure Tigon used to do the Mary Millington porn films in the seventies.

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