Scream Factory brings us a "love story from Hammer… with a twist" in the British mod psycho-thriller STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING.

Aspiring children's story writer Brenda (Rita Tushingham, UNDER THE SKIN) leaves home in Liverpool for London, telling her mother (Claire Kelly, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE?) that she is looking for a father for her unborn child. She finds a job in a mod clothing shop owned by lecherous Jimmy Lindsay (Tom Bell, THE L-SHAPED ROOM) and becomes the roommate of his shop girl lover Caroline (Katya Wyeth, TWINS OF EVIL). She tries and fails miserably to meet men on the street or at parties where she is a wallflower. She thinks she has met the perfect man in kind co-worker Joey (James Bolam, CRUCIBLE OF TERROR) until Caroline seduces him after a row with Jimmy. Running and crying into the night, she meets lost dog Tinker. When she sights handsome Peter (Shane Briant, CASSANDRA) looking for Tinker, she impulsively steals the dog, gives her a bath, and grooms her with the intention of meeting cute with Peter upon returning the dog. She introduces herself to him as Rosalba – the princess of her story-in-progress – but Peter sees through her act and she confesses that she wants a baby. Peter says he may possibly give her one if she moves in and looks after him, dubbing her Wendy to his Peter Pan. Brenda tells Caroline that she has to move back home because her mother has taken ill and move sin with Peter. Although Brenda falls in love with Peter and the world they build together in his London townhouse, Brenda wonders what Peter does for a living and where all of his money comes from. Little does she suspect that Peter is a gigolo who has murdered his previous lover (singer Annie Ross, BASKET CASE) and a string of women who have made him hate his own beauty and want to destroy things made beautiful. When Brenda's mother comes to London looking for her daughter, Caroline traces Brenda's whereabouts while Brenda is in the process of trying to make herself pretty for Peter.

Taking its title from a line in the J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan," Hammer's atypical psycho-thriller offering STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING weaves the story in and out of the narrative with just a pinch of "Bluebeard." Although well-cast, the film is essentially a two-hander. A plain young woman who lies about being pregnant as an excuse to leave home but is actually looking for a man to father her child, Brenda seeks escape from her humdrum existence through her fairy tales while androgynously-handsome and boyish Peter's stories recited to himself or aloud to Brenda are actually a grisly confessional in concert with director Peter Collinson's (THE ITALIAN JOB) jagged non-linear editing of film and sound effects. In spite of some pretty photography and the fairy tale structuring, the film is actually quite grim and brutal, horrifying the viewer with Peter's psychosis while compelling the viewer to stick around to witness Brenda's emotional devastation and physical terror as realized by Tushingham who was no stranger to playing innocents in the city in British film. As expected of British mainstream films of the period, the approach to the "swinging London" feels middle-aged, but in this case, one could partially interpret this not only to naïve Brenda's sheltered life but also the projections of her mother who appears in cutaways confiding to her neighbor her daughter's situation and her view that people her age now behave "like animals." The ending is dark and despairing but not unprecedented in light of Hammer's previous film with Briant DEMONS OF THE MIND which had a gothic setting but shed the studio's reliance on supernatural monsters in favor of hereditary madness. Co-stars Bolam, Bell, and Wyeth have little to do other than bare flesh (in the case of the latter two) but Wyeth at least has more to do here than as the shockingly underutilized Mircalla in TWINS OF EVIL.

Released theatrically by International Coproductions, the little-seen STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING skipped a Thorn/EMI or HBO Video VHS release unlike the other Hammer EMI titles but it was not hard to find for the eagle-eyed viewer with a Neon Video retitle TILL DAWN DO WE PART (which Hammer historian Jonathan Sothcott claims on the Tushingham commentary track is the American TV title) and from Academy Entertainment as DRESSED FOR DEATH (the latter more ubiquitous on rental shelves). The film was released on DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment when they had a deal with Studio Canal in a 1.66:1 transfer with the aforementioned commentary. That edition went out of print but a PAL alternative could be found cheaply in the UK from Optimum separately or as part of the twenty-one disc set THE HAMMER COLLECTION featuring all of Studio Canal's Hammer titles. The film debuted on Blu-ray in 2017 in the UK and Germany from Studio Canal with a new transfer but dropping the commentary in favor of a new featurette.

Scream Factory's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC Blu-ray is derived from Studio Canal's new master and offered in both 1.85:1 and 1.66:1 viewing options (the former with lossless English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono audio and the latter with lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 mono audio). Shot in overcast Liverpool and London locations, the film has a cool look spiked by saturated gel lighting, set dressing, and some eye-straining fashions that provide pop and contrast to Tushingham's pale features and muted wardrobe. The 1.66:1 option is preferable framing-wise although the production did allow for American matting. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided for both viewing options.

While the Studio Canal editions dropped the commentary, it has been included here, with Tushingham revealing that she has never been approached before for a Hammer film and that it came out of screenwriter John Peacock (THE SMASHING BIRD I USED TO KNOW) wanting to write a project for her and Hammer's Michael Carreras wanting to experiment more with the studio's output in contrast to his product-minded father Sir James who sold the company to his son without revealing its heavy debts. Although Sothcott discusses the ways in which the film is atypical of Hammer, Tushingham regards it as a suitably horrific tale and speaks warmly of Briant and the sometimes volatile Collinson (who taught her never to cut a blown take as it might contain something that could not be reproduced). They discuss the film's outdated depiction of swinging London as well as the work of Peacock who Sothcott describes as an "angry young man born five years too late" (incidentally, Peacock would subsequently write on of the better episodes of THE HAMMER HOUSE OF MYSTERY & SUSPENSE in "And the Wall Came Tumbling Down"), as well as how some of the film's effectiveness does come from audience recognition of Tushingham's earlier role in A TASTE OF HONEY.