“Stay the night… it could be fun.”

Lisa (Lea Dregorn) is living a solitary life, alone in a sprawling mansion and wandering around in a dreamlike state, with only the rainbows, birds and her own breasts for company. Speaking to an unseen person on the phone, she begs them to come home, but they refuse. “You’re always so boringly secretive about these trips abroad” she complains, to no avail.

She goes for a drive, and spots a young man (Peter Duncan) taking a splashy swim in a nearby pond. Deciding it is about time someone else had a squeeze of her boobs, she takes the young man, whose name is Richard, back to her home and seduces him.

Things get quite sexy very quickly, although any hint of eroticism is instantly dampened by the stilted dialogue. “I can smell something burning!” Lisa cries, mid-snog. “It’s only me,” replies her lover, somewhat obviously. “I’m full of fire!”

No you’re not, cry the audience. The waste paper bin has caught alight, see?

The pair continue to go at it, hammer-and-tongs, the beautifully-lit grappling punctuated by scenes of Richard exploring the house. The place is full of Japanese armour and weapons of all varieties, and he enjoys clumsily rooting through desk drawers and generally messing about… until he finds a photograph of the man we suppose is Lisa’s husband. He’s a high-raking army man, clearly a lot older than her.

“All that stuff about men in uniform… you fell for that!”

“Not at all, he was a very gentle man… he made me feel so… valuable.” She tells him.

After trying out for his Blue Peter badges in energetic bonking, running with swords and breaking things that don’t belong to him, his next rehearsal for his future career in children’s television involves showing us how to find and read other people’s diaries.

In his candid reminiscences, Lisa’s husband reveals that he’s exceptionally proud of the way he seduced Lisa when she was still an innocent child, and mentions, separately and rather ominously, “nothing could top the excitement of those 10 glorious months”.

Richard and Lisa continue their shenanigans, but it is becoming clear to us that they are shortly to be undone. The phone rings, unanswered, and then a car pulls up outside the house as they sleep. It’s Lisa’s husband James (not exactly a shock), who sees them in each others’ arms, cries a bit, then leaves without waking them.

The next day things take a turn for the playful – to the sound of some VERY LOUD calypso-ish music, Richard pops up at a variety of windows in the house, then rushes out and jumps in the swimming pool. It’s while he’s in there that James (Terence Morgan) returns, seemingly more bothered about the damage Richard’s terrible record is doing to the stylus of his stereo than why there’s a strange young man enjoying the company of his equally young wife.

Richard, who in the company of the older, more cultured man is shown to be an uneducated yob, makes to leave, but James won’t hear of it.

“Stay the night… it could be fun.”

There follows an escalating battle of wits between the two men, as James introduces Richard to grown-up pursuits like Russian roulette and Kendo. After James gives Richard a thrashing with a Kendo stick, things get even more uncomfortable, as much drink is quaffed, some clothes are shed, and James starts calling his wife’s lover a “wicked boy!” and tickling him.

Richard finds a hidden room which contains another diary – this one with more detail of what actually happened during those “10 glorious months”. Yup, it’s torture, murder and other assorted low-jinks in some unnamed country, the drunk Richard being sucked into the reminiscences and having to fight his way out of a pile of dead bodies, in a sudden reminder that we’re watching a horror film.

Realising he’s in deep doo-doo with a clearly psychotic madman, the young buck makes to leave (again), but is forcibly dragged back into the house and made to drink an entire bottle of Scotch. Leaving his young rival unconscious on the sofa, James goes upstairs to Lisa, shoots her while she sleeps, covers Richard in her blood and carefully removes all traces of his presence in the house.

Back at his office he finishes the framing by phoning a friend in the police and asking them to go and check on Lisa. But as he talks realises Richard has found out about his “10 glorious months” and can direct the police to his secret study. So he cancels the police and rushes home for a final confrontation.

The Lifetaker is an oddity – little seen (if at all) in the UK due to some concerns over its content, it doesn’t seem all that different to much of the sex and horror films that were doing the rounds in the mid 70s. In fact, it actually looks better than most of its ilk, with maker Michael Papas clearly having artistic pretensions. For us in its home country, its one claim to fame is the brief moment of notoriety it earned when star Peter Duncan became a children’s TV presenter and the tabloids went nuts about the “blue movie” in his past. Really a peculiar psychological thriller, it only qualifies as horror due to the two nasty deaths right at the end.