“Frankly, Pigs is more peculiar than pleasing. Had it been about psycho sausage fodder chewing through the countryside, scarffing down civilians with applesauce abandon, we’d have a decent reminder of the whole Food of the Gods genre of drive-in delights. Instead, Troma’s tease hides a disturbed, deranged example of psychological incongruity that uses its logic-defying fundamentals to create a kind of existential horror hemorrhage”
DVD TALK
Who made it? Directed by Marc Lawrence | Written by Marc Lawrence| Director Of Photography Glenn Roland | Special Effects/make up Bruce Adams| Music Charles Berstein
Who’s in it? Toni Lawrence | Jesse Vint | Catherine Ross | Paul Hickey | Iris Korn | Walter Barnes | Erik Holland
If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…
Day Of The Jackal | Paper Moon | Soylent Green | Pat Garret & Billy The Kid
Production notes and whatnot
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070537/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigs_(1973_film)
What’s It All About?
Brace yourself. For despite the lurid, tusk-dripping snouty flesh-ripping you’ve been promised by the art director of the dusty VHS cover – I promise you – the cover is absolutely the best it’s going to get. Stare at the box. That’s it. Read the back. Stare at the box again. Done? Yep, me too. It’s downhill from here.
But to save you from the disappointment, may I present on my behalf (remember, I watch these so you don’t have to): “PIGS.” Sigh.
We start pretty well, with – for me – a decent scary soundtrack. Not thunderous Goldsmith Gregorian
choirs or scraping metal, but one of those hippy-ish, Woodstock, dusty, Doorsy Manson-Family style southern rock numbers. Always freak me out. A twangy beatnik jews harp gives us some backwoods Tobe Hooper grunge. “Somebody’s waiting for you…somewhere down the road…” Urgh. You can smell the draft-cards being burnt over the whiff of gingham.
Rather jarringly, we open then with an older lady climbing out of a car to head back to her little apartment in some dreary US suburb of gas stations and strip malls. As she does so, the night is pierced by some very low quality double glazing and the screams of a victim from a top window. Then we’re in the victims flat and its close ups and screams and teeth and tears as the young woman (Lynne – out hero) fights off a bed-based bouncy attack. From the street, the old woman tuts and sighs. This is clearly not the first midnight disruption she’s been subjected too by these violent neighbours. But then, in the far window, a booby silhouette! A woman, a knife, a stabbing plunging action. It appears Lynne has – at last – the upper hand.
What follows quickly is a rapid montage that makes a Rocky training sequence look like Lawrence Of Arabia. We get some quick cuts:
Cut to: A Dick Tracy style news van turns corner in 1940s “extra extra!” fashion, tossing a pile of the morning news to the pavement and we zoom on in – Rapist Father murdered by daughter.
Cut to: Some library footage straight out of William Dozier’s Batman TV show showing us office blocks and zooms and plaques – a psychiatric office. A doctor nods and smiles at the un-seen Lynne. She is clearly nuts, still asking for her father. Close up of the rubber stamp: COMMITTED, (which is a great deal more than the film makers are).
Cut to: flipped switches and turned dials and rubber plugs as Lynne has hundreds of volts shot through her in an institution. Yep, the old Cuckoo’s Nest technique. But, shockingly, this does not cure her of her murderous delusions.
Cut to: A flighty nurse – all starchy whites and flat shoes – is called from her post by a hunky doctor for some late-night snogging. Thus giving the quick hand of Lynne a chance to grab keys, hat and the discarded white uniform. Michael Myers style, Lynne is outta here.
So. It’s nut-job on the run territory. So far, no pigs. But hang on, we’ll get there.
Music wise, we shift tone (as we will continue to do, back and forth) to a Freddie-Kruegery “lah-lah-lah ghostly nursery rhyme, a standard trope when one is suggesting the twisted and misty-headed world of the lost-innocence. “Somebody tell me, what shall I dooooooo…”
Then back to the Mark Chapmany hippie rockin’ of “Somebody’s Waitin’ For You…”
With orangey flarey lenses, exposures on different days in different weather filmed across a number of months, Lynne is driving across country. The film jumps and jolts like it has whole frames missing, giving simultaneously an odd, hand-made found-footage feel, and also the aesthetic of a student film made at the weekend for $8. She drives and drives, arriving in a cactusy desert. The ole’ VW pulls up and Lynne hides the nurses outfit in a shrub. Hmmm. We will come back to this I’m sure…
At which point (and we’ll have fun later talking about why) the movie then sort of starts again. Yep. Titles in an odd “Western Saloon” Bonanza font introduce our players. And then it goes dark, as night falls. Which tends to happen. Although almost all of this movie seems to be shot at dusk. Which, while expensive if you’re Michael Chamino (see Heaven’s Gate for evidence of endless magic-hour twinkling) was probably, no offense to the crew, the time it was each day by the time they’d learned their lines and got the focus set up.
Among the obligatory chirping foley crickets somewhere in presumably southern California, an old battered Ford truck pulls up. An older man in green with a leather waistcoat heaves a hessian sack with clearly some kind of body in it, from the flat bed of the back and into the darkening woods. He approaches a barn. Is he on farmland? It’s not clear. But what is clear is the grunting and frantic squealing of pigs behind the flaky wooden clapboard door. He fusses with the lock, body thrown over his burly shoulders. Lamp light in the barn. Farm equipment silhouetted. Typical rusty psycho shed familiar to fans of Wolf Creek etc. We get a self muttered narration and explanation: “Always on a full moon the pigs get hungry. I gotta do it. The pigs got used to eatin’ human flesh.” The pale faced man (Zambrini) who has been around the block many times, craggy and weather worn, explains his actions to his now unwrapped corpse. Almost with sorrow, Zambrini strips the man. Pigs are whining and straining at the fence. Snuffling and thrusting their snouts against a flimsy wood pen. He apologises.
And, depending on the version you’re watching, we hit the titles! Again! Yep. Or we don’t! “The 13th Pig!” Or not! Or perhaps, depending on the time and date of the version you’re watching: Pigs/Daddy’s Deadly Darling/ Daddy’s Girl/Blood Pen/ Horror Farm/ Roadside Torture Chamber/ The Killer/ The Killers/ Lynn Hart/ The Strange Love Exorcist/ The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart / The Secret of Lynn Hart. For Chrissakes fellahs, make your mind up. But hey, we’ll talk about this later.
Back to more “Somebody’s Waiting For you…” as Lynne’s car pulls up in the inky darkness. Pig noises echo about her, causing her no small amount of distress. This is where Lynne will find bed and board. What could possibly go wrong?
Lynne, we assume, has never seen a horror movie.
All this porkine ruckus and backfiring rusty Beetle action disturbs a couple of busy body old ladies nearby, a fluttering fussy pair straight out of Fawlty Towers or, if you prefer, the music-hall shrieking of Hinge & Bracket). Meet Miss Macy and Miss Annette. They’ll be back, acting as the viewer, popping up from time to time to complain to the local sherrif about “goings on at the Zambrini farm…”
Lynne creeps down to dark empty café, where she meets the spooky Zambrini (which sounds like a cheap white wine, but is actually the owner of the café/barn/pigs set up). Lynne wants work. Cautious, and clearly not for the first time, Zambrini asks lots of tricky lawyery guilty questions. “Anyone after you?” Agreeing to provide Lynne with employment, he shows Lynne to the bare, damp back room which – vase of flowers and institutional iron bed, will be here new home. “Somebody tell me what shall I dooooooo.”
Lynne settles in as best she can, disturbed by the snuffly violent angry pig noises outside the net curtains I the milky moonlight. Investigating the room, she finds the obligatory medicine cupboard over the rust-streaked sink. A cut-throat razor in the bathroom cabinet gets fingered meneacingly and curiously, in a frying-pan-to-the-face piece of huge piece of subtle Chekovian foreshadowing.
Meanwhile, on request of Miss Macy and Miss Annette, the hunky town Sherrif (Dan) patrols the clapboard house in the darkness, torch flashing and patrolling. “He feeds the pigs dead people!” the women have claimed. “Then eats the pigs!” But Dan can find nothing amiss.
We are now back in the poor bedroom. Zambrini skulks in, looming over the sleeping body of Lynne. Leering, wide-eyed, the score ramps – an odd mix of stock nature sounds and delay pedal osscilation – Zambrini slashes out at Lynne’s face with the straight razor. Red flashes, blood, screams, head turns, left, right on the pillow. Pigs scream. She screams…
And then… bolt upright, Lynne awakes from the nightmare to the empty cool chill of the room.
“Somebody tell me what shall I dooooooo.”
Clearly freaked the fuck out by this dream/premonition, young Lynne goes looking around the grounds of the farm/café. She sees pigs snuffling and squealing in the moonlight. Horrible, grunting piggy screams. Zambrini catches her, again with the questions. “Just looking? Looking for WHAT?! There’s nuthin’ here!” Crows caw and pigs snuffle.
At which point, and it’s not clear when, the café gets what is probably its first actual paying ustomer in 30 years. It’s Ben. A good ole boy from up the dirt track (presumably, “yonder”) who works the oil rigs with his yukky-chuckly goon mates. Ben , munching a thin sandwich, urges Lynne to leave. Girls don’t last around here. And he spins the tale of her landlord. Zambrini. Used to be a circus performer. Fell from a platform 500ft up. Died. Was taken to morgue, at which point he woke up. Spooky, no?
Zambrini of course, overhears the talk, bursts in with lots more questions and threats. Wholesome Dan arrives, to warn Zambrini of letting his animals loose, letting him know of the complaints from the elderly ladies. Can’t he control his animals? Or sell them? “Only when they’re good and fat,” he says ominously, as we are only to aware of how he’s fattening his stock. Dan asks about Lynne, Zambrini cooking up a quick cover-story. Old friend, sick daughter, asthma, country air.
“Somebody’s waiting for you…”
Lynne arrives and Dan’s fancy is taken by this smouldering brunette who we know is mad as a box of Fox news anchors, but he is still charmed by. There is some talk of an out of date Tax Disc on the ole Beetle.
Oh, and a body is still missing from the morgue…
In the first of many calls, young Lynne is seen on the phone trying to contact her father. (Yep, she’s bonkers). We hear only one side of the conversation, and oddly she seems to be engaging with him, enough to actually argue about when she’s coming home.
“Crazy…toys in the attic, she’s crazy…” (Roger Waters, 1979)
Back to Ben – remember him, the sandwich chomping yokel – as he runs through the dusty fields after his trusty and loyal dog. The dog who comes across…a pile of nurse’s clothes. Hmn. Ben gathers it up and brings it to Lynne, suspecting there is more to this than nudie nurse crop action. As leverage, all knowing Ben uses this turn of events to secure a date. Well, to insist on a date. “Pick you up at 8,” he says. Lynne has little to say about this.
After the date (although details are left out) they are parked in his pickup. Ben is trying it on, she’s pushing him away. Lynne wants to be driven home. Ben gets a little rough. He can’t understand why she’d make it with Zambrini and not a young guy like him.
Thankfully tyheir struggles are interrupted by friendly Sheriff Dan (yay!) who drives up and shines his big ole cop torch into the front seat. He tells Ben off for “parking illegally” and Lynne escapes Ben’s rapey clutches to get a lift home with wholesome Dan, much to Ben’s fury.
Although, to be fair, it’s an element of “out of the frying pan, into a slightly cooler frying pan,” as Sheriff Dan tries on a li’l simple flirting on the drive home, all “mighty purty” and “ma’ams.” She seems to appreciate the honest attention. He drops her off, as in the night, the pigs are having a good old scream.
Next day, well Ben is being an utter, as we say in the UK, “wanker.” Laughing and rolling with his tales of his “date” with the new café hottie, he tells dumbass tales making his jock oil well chums guffaw and click beers together in a flagrant disregard for health, safety and not-being-a-cornball-dick-ness. Somewhow however, we are then at Ben’s second date?! Lynne has somehow, we assume, succumbed to Ben’s boorish denimy charms and now undresses for him ins sultry glimpse of stocking tops and heels, much to Ben’s panting, drooling “can’t believe my luck” horniness. He is more of a pig in this scene than any of the background swine cast. Perhaps this is the author’s message. I doubt it.
Lynne apologises for the previous night being cut-short and wanted to thank him for his kindness. Or something.
“Somebody tell me what shall I dooooooo.”
But with meaneacing predicatblility. As Ben strips off his stretchy polyester 70s t-shirt to reveal his hunky oil-worker torso, Lynne whimsically fetches the straight razor from the cabinet. Ooops.
A little bed-based soft canoodling resumes – Ben clearly not believing his luck – before crazy Lynne whipe out the blade and she’s at him – slashing and swiping away. Faces, arms, screams, blood, woozy POV shots. Ben is dead. I guess he reminded her of her father a little too much.
Lynne now, in an odd piece of meta cinema, starts to hum her theme tune. “Somebody tell me what shall I dooooooo.” Which is odd, kind of like Sean Connery mumbling “dun-daddle-ah dahh, dun dun, dun-daddle-ah dahhh,” as he drives his DB5 around a mountain. Hmn.
Anyhoo, Lynne leaves Ben bleeding out on the bed and drifts off into her dreamy world of whatnot.
Zambrini arrives of course, and with paternal love and care, uses wet towels to clean and bathe the idiot-staring Lynne. “I didn’t do anything,” she whimpers. Father-like, caring and tender, Zambrini washes her clean much like a parent or lover, tenderly, carefully, with warmth and soothing noises. “Daddy went away,” she whimpers. Shushes her. Cleans her up.
The production values then let us down a little, but we can assume in the gloom of bad lighting and cheap camera work, Zambrini cuts up Ben with a butcher’s knife, hacking and chopping with the heavy cleaver, tossing body parts to his starving squealing farm animals. They snort and squeal for the smell of meat and fresh flesh.
Fade to the odd, hand painted and credited Circus poster. The great Zambrini. Odd oils and knives and animals in cages. Gerry Cottle, this isn’t.
So Lynne awakes, all cleaned up. Haunted by memories and the screams of the pigs the VHS and poster promised you would actually feature in this porksploitation nonsense, Lynne heads out to the desert where – I presume accurately? – a phone box is clamped to a lonely telegraph pole Did this happen? I’m so devoted to my Samsung that it’s difficult to imagine. But let’s go with it. Pigs screams in her subconscious as she hurls herself pell mell through the dust and cacti of the desert.
She dials, calling home, to speak to her father. He’s not available (unsurprisingly to us, as we saw him knifed to death at her hand about 35 mins ago). But Lynne is not happy. She MUST speak with him!
“Somebody’s waiting for you…”
Lynne runs screaming from her inner visions and voices, back to the “safety” of the café and Zambrini’s paternal/creepy care.
Meanwhile of course, life goes on. At the oil rig, questions are askes about Ben’s disappearance. Nobody knows (aside from some well fed pigs) where Ben has suddenly gone. Miss Macy and Miss Annette tell Dan the cop they have heard his truck. Seen him about. They are convinced Zambrini has something to do with this occurrence.
Dan confronts Zambrini, natch, but he waves him off. Ben was drunk. He came. He left. Sadly this story collapses whe Ben’s dog is heard whimpering and barking at the fence. Would Ben have left without his faithful mutt? Hmn…
But reason, for a moment at least, resumes. A local GP doc type (they coudn’t afford Wilfred Brimley so they got the nearest the casting company could find for their $8 budget) reasuures Dan the cop that the ladies are hysterical. Just over active imaginations. Dan tells the ladies he’ll continue his investigations and catch Zambrini breaking the law if he can.
The an odd moment as talk turns to myth and legend. Pigs were once worshipped. It was believed that humans transformed into pigs after they died. This is why they were sacred and not eaten. Dan is naturally dubious, like a young Richard Dawkins, of such medieval fluff.
Dan catches up with Lynne. Has she heard anything? Missing men? Whimpering dogs? The illusive Zambrini perhaps? But Lynne, after all she’s gone through, is now pretty hopeless. Stoned, out of it, destracted, she can be little help to Dan’s investigation.
But not one to put major PTSD psychosis ahead of his loins, “nice guy” Dan suggests a date? TO “get away from it all, get out of town? Although if this is “town”, fuck knows what the countryside is? Daeth Valley? He’s planning a “grand weekend.” Lynne’s not interested. Lucky escape for Dan, we think. Her being, as we have now had confirmed a half dozen times, a total murdery weirdy head.
Now it’s night. Ben’s thick-headed gun-toting posse-like collagues and chums come a-huntin’ around the farm to see what they can find. They are convinced that crazy Zambrini and this new waitress must know something about their good ole’ boy’s disappearance. They confront Zambrini, taunting and teasing him.
A scuffle ensues. At which point, possiblty due to a personal issue with on-screen violence, the lighting crew of the movie go on strike so it’s very difficult to see what Zambrini gets up to on his land. But upshot is, Zambrini goes to his sink and washes himself and – lo and be-hound – Ben’s dog turns up dead with it’s mutt-throat sliced open with a straight razor.
Dan confronts the hoodlums and tells them to back off. This is a police matter now.
Cut to: a new chappie in our sketch. A medical official from “the big city” is sniffing about, looking for a missing patient. Lynne is her name. Petite, brunette. Any sign? He checks in with the locals, flashing a mugshot, noiry Arboghast style.
Unware of her hunter, Lynne continues to, as they say in psychological texts, “wig out, big time.” She dances and sways about the café to “Wanna be loved?” hippie toons on the jukebox-a-rolla. The music, once again for its time and place, a cod Monkees vs Manson twang fest.
From the doorway, unseen, the paternal figure of caring but twisted Zambrini watches. Dad? Brother? Lover? Carer? Doctor? He is all and none of these, but is clear he has odd affection – in some sort – for this lonely mad girl.
Check your watch. We have about 20mins left of this drivel.
Now our medical official arrives at the café. The locals have identified Lynne and sent him to where she is living.
Acting all friendly-like, the official explains frankly who he is. She has to come back to the hospital. She is not well. There are folk who care for her. She needs to return to safety. He plays nice, having a coffee and a “slice of that yellow pie.”
We don’t know what’s in the pie. “Yellow” is all we have. Let’s assume lemon or something. It’s not important. But for fuck’s sake, who orders dessert based on the colour?
“I’d like a brown and green meal, with a transparent drink please.” Nonsense.
For some reason, this softly-softly caring talk appears to get through to Lynne and she goes out back to pack. She’ll return to the safety of snogging nurses and electro-shock therapy. Mmm. Who wouldn’t.
Zambrini enquires. “What’s going on here?” At which point the medical man explains the truth. She’s crazy, killed her father, on the run etc.
But there is an odd bond now between Lynne and her landlord. Both oddballs, both unwanted, both killers? He wants her to stay. He can protect her? Care for her? Love her? Feed her to the pigs? We’re not sure – only that there is something there between them – more from Zambrinri than Lynne.
At the mirror, preparing to leave – we assume – Lynne takes her lipstick and begins to add odd tribal stripes and greasy red streaks on her cheeks and slathers what looks like cold cream/hand-crème on a long bladed knife. Ooopsie.
Meanwhile trusty Dan is at the oil well talking to the men. They are plotting something? Leave Zambrini alone! The dusty denimmed men argue they can’t kill someone who was already dead. They have, I suppose, a point.
Back at the café, as the medical official waits, Lynne fakes a phone-call to her home. He waits patiently as she talks to…someone. Lynne says they want to talk to him. He takes the phone but the line is dead…
A few dumb 40s clack-clacks on the phone cradle (did that ever work?) and hello hello operator?
When suddenly Lynne appears and stabs him violently in the back to some crazy zither toons. Down he goes.
Well that got rid of that problem.
Dan the cop arrives at the café, but Lynne bluffs that everything is fine. Dan wants to come in and check but she is all too aware of the body, back streaked with blood, on the carpet…
Thankfully, a bleepy Gerry Anderson/ “Calling Dick Tracy” beep from the radio in the jeep calls Dan away. Dan gets to the jeep, to be faced with the murderous posse who are all headed to the café to “deal” with their suspicions about Zambrini and his murderous killing of Ben and dogs and crazy pig nonsense. Dan does his best to talk them out of their vigilante vengeance and half baked suspicions.
Meanwhile, Zambrini finds the official’s body. What to do?
With his care and love for Lynne overriding sense, Zambrini drags the body to his whining, starving pigs and lets them munch through the evidence, just like theyhave all the corpses from the morgue he’s been supplying them with til now.
Back at the copshop, the hospital make a call, asking about the whereabouts of their official? Dan admits he hasn’t seen anyone. But talk moves to Lynne. The escaped killer. What does she look like..? OMG! In a flurry of panic and care, Dan phones Zambrini to warn him of the dangerous woman. Dan and tells him they’re on their way, and cops pile into the jeep for their race to the café.
But Zambrini’s paternal feelings override the law and he poignantly fights his urges to father and protect her, telling her to leave. To run. To hide. For her own safety. Zambrini urges her to pack and run as the cops are coming. He busily begins to pack her things.
Lynne is very confused. Conflicted. Troubled and scared. She screams out for her father, but Zambrini argues and yells and finally blurts out the unthinkable truth. “Your father is dead!”
Allof this is too much for Lynne and she collapses mentally, unable to deal with the truth. Desperate, she plunges a knife into Zambrini’s back, sending him collapsing and writhing to the floor.
Scared, tearful and desperate, Lynne makes her last crazed call to an empty payphone. We here the other end: “This is a recording…” crackles away as she pleads her love to her invisible father.
Somewhere pigs squeal and whine.
“Somebody tell me what shall I dooooooo.”
In the barn, Lynne drags Zambrini’s body and takes a cleaver, hacking and striking his bloodied corpes into chunky bits of pig food. Wrists, red wet sumps, limbs, body parts, the cleaver hacks away to the snorts and squeals of the famished slobbering swine.
In a way to cover her tracks, Lynne strips off and puts her own shirt and jewellery in with the pigs.
Dusk, as ever, falls. Dan arrives. He surveys the bloody mess.
Back at the police station, we see a Jaws-like typing of the death notice, clack-clack-clacking the details of everyone’s demise.
Next morning it’s all about the clean up. A local farmer comes to take the pigs away. “Get all twelve?” “Yep.” And the famer hands the necklace over.
The end…
Or is it? As in the closing moments we see Lynn on the road again in her trusty, rusty VW Beetle. She slows at the side of the highway. She picks up a hitchhiker. Older, a big fellah.
“You remind me of my daddy…” she says.
The car takes off up the highway.
END
Is it any good?
Well that’s a question. It very well maybe. By which I mean, there might be a terrific version of “Pigs” out there. But given the hatchet-like cutting, recutting, reshooting, extra-scenes, missing scenes and general Lego attitude to the whole endeavour, one is left with only thoughts on the version you saw.
Let’s find out why, shall we?
According to the terribly reliable folk at Wikipedia and IMBD, this movie has had something of a, shall we say, staggered release history.
In its original cut, which may or may be not lost to time, it was Detroit 1973 when “Pigs” hit the big screen, with attendees offered – in a slightly more questionable but just as queasily hokey promo as the previously discussed 1969 “Mad Doctor Of Blood Island’s” green enchanted foyer syrup – slices of bacon to “enjoy” during the flick. Hmn.
However, after a fairly non eventful release, it was felt that a more gratuitous “slasher-killer” feel might boost the box office in the wake of previous blood-splattered drive-in fodder (Blood Feast, Mark Of The Devil, Last House On The Left) so producer William Roland decided taking “pigs” out of the set-up and giving a more simple “victim” nomenclature would do it, so “The Secret Of Lynne Hart” hit the screens. This naturally, would allow the punters to imagine all sorts of “secrets,” and appeal to folk who didn’t like bacon with their murders. Rabbis, for example.
But it still didn’t grab the attention of the US audience (and, having watched it, I don’t think the title is the problem, frankly). So William Roland jumped on the band wagon (“Banned-wagon, shurely? Ed) and decided that what folk wanted was a sub-par Exorcist rip off, Blatty’s epic having stormed the box office later in the same year. So the director was shipped in and asked to film a “new opening scene” in which poor Lynne (like she hasn’t got enough worries) goes through an exorcism, giving literally, “the devil his due.”
Of course, it would have made sense then to add more “satanic demonic” scenes in the movie to add some logic to this opening act…however they either couldn’t be bothered or didn’t have the time or money. So no mention is made again of the satanic “Exorcist rip off” element from the opening. Producer Roland added a new title to draw in the Friedkin-hungry crowd “The Strange Love Exorcist.”
I mean for Chrissakes…
Then 4 years later, you may well have stumbled across “Pigs” under a different guise – “Daddy’s Girl” – when Donald Reynolds cut out all the exorcism nonsense and removed all the pig ideas and rereleased thr picture as a “woman gone nuts” slasher. Finally (we can only hope), “Daddy’s Deadly Darling” – the movie we have now, was back in cinemas in 1984.
All this nonsensical back and forth, hungry producers and distributors doing everything they could to try and get a fee-paying audience in to see their nasty little piece of backwoods crapola, is the explanation for something of the car crash of a movie we have looked at today.
That opening, for example, which has the title PIGS in big block red capitals, and starts with the incongruous rape-revenge images in the top window, has nothing whatsoever to do with the tale, and was added in one of many reiterations.
The counting of the pigs at the end, “Got all twelve?” only makes sense if the movie includes the scene where the farmer says, “nope! I got thirteen!” which suggests a supernatural “man-turns-into-pig” motif which many can’t be bothered with.
It’s a fucking mess is what it is.
To be honest, it’s difficult to view “Pigs” or whatever version you happen to accidentally stumble over, without taking into account its chequered distribution history. Scenes you expect aren’t there, scenes that don’t belong pepper the running time. What we have here is the proverbial “camel, a horse designed by a committee.”
The version I viewed has the 5 min opening of the rape revenge, the psychiatrist, the escape from the ward, the hidden nurses uniform that all belong in a completely different picture. When Lynne’s drive across the state starts throwing up the “western” title sequence, we already know we are leafing through a hasty, Pritt-sticked version of a movie cobbled out of whatever the current audience might find titillating.
Let’s look at the elements of this one.
Well the music is, as we said, a jumpy schizo-leap between the nasty (is it just me? I can’t hear this “Somebody’s coming for you…” stuff without picturing Manson murdering hippie dusty stabbings) and the floaty dreamy “nursery” chimes of children singing. It’s an effective pair of tunes, both of which are suitably unsettling in their own way. Often we don’t need the hypnotic synth pounding John Carpenter created for Hallowe’en or the chilling cathedral death of Goldsmith’s “Omen” to get us feeling uneasy. And both these tunes do a grand job in suggesting the evil and the uncanny.
The camera work is nothing but profunctory. Stock, tripod footage makes up most of the dialogue with shaky hand-held looking after the pig scenes. We get some “POV” work from Lynne’s world once in a while to break up the student-film monotony. But the camera-person is doing much more than capturing the performances.
And the performances? Well they’re solid. They are what you get when you’re on a budget. None of the work is going to bother the Academy Award committee, however everyone’s earning their SAG minimum. We in the world of the “actor/director” as Zambrini is performed by the capable TV stalwart Marc Lawrence. Modern-ish viewers might recognise Lawrence from Tarantino’s “Four Rooms” or “From Dusk Til Dawn,” but here’s a fellah that has done his time on stage and screen with hundreds of roles as bit part thugs and hoods. Blacklisted in the McCarthy era for Communist leanings, Lawrence only helmed 2 pictures as director: Nightmare In The Sun (1965) and this Piggsy effort.
Lawrence doesn’t break any moulds with his take on the “lonely backwoods kick nutter” but we must recognise his ability to convey a mix of paternal care, sexual interest, twisted mania and brotherly conflict in his portrayal of the broken Zambrini.
Lawrence has a challenge of course as his choice of lead role with Lynne Hart, he selected his own daughter Toni. As anyone who has tried to get their loved ones into a decent Christmas photo, we can relate to any struggles Lawrence Snr may have had trying to cagole his daughter into part victim, part murderess, part schizophrenic, part confused innocent. But Toni does a decent few weeks work, mixing her dreamy confusion with her rage and revenge-driven actions. One imagines the script may say little more than “Lynne is confused/surprised/upset/furious/tormented” but the young Lawrence bites off a hefty amount of scenery without chewing it unnecessarily.
The rest of the cat do their best – the elderly ladies fussing and flittering hysterically, the oil-well hicks chewin’ baccy and giving off leery redneck aggression.
The plot is daft as daft can be. Escaped killers, man-eating pigs (who despite lots of sound effects, never get to kill anyone at all, chomping dutifully as they do on pig feed wrapped in denim and dungaree cut-offs).
What we have really is a cheap, cobbled together tale of confused passions. A wirter director wanting one thing, a hungry producer wanting something else and a profit-starved distributor after something else entirely. A lonely and confused woman, driven to psychotic despair by years of abuse, faced with a lonesome farmer who sees within her a chance, perhaps, to do the right thing. Zambrini hates the life he has created – feeding corpses to ravenous swine – unloved and hated by his townfolk, who sees in Lynne perhaps a chance at redemption. All of which ending with drive-in slasher stabbings and a grim denouement.
Nasty?
Hahahahaha. No.
We have here one of the great examples of a movie for which the box is the most gruesome element. Everything the title, the stills, the poster and artwork promise are simply absent. At no point does any pig kill any human. Simple as that. Oh the sound effects are terrific and create a squealing soundscape of terror and trotters. But if you’re looking for a gory man-vs-pig snuffle truffle fest of gorging tusks and bloody carnage, boy oh boy you’re in the wrong place.
What “nastiness” there is, would be the murders. Lynne’s killing of the medical investigator, of hapless Ben in her bed and of poor, poor troubled Zambrini. But these are virtallu bloodless killings you might get in a episode of Tales Of The Unexpected. Knives plunged into backs, torn faces of screams, blood splattered walls and clawing fingernails. Honestly, there is nothing nasty about any of it. I mean it’s grubby, in a cheap, 8mm, ketchup and cine-camera way. But go elsewhere if you’re looking for gore or grue.
Ban worthy?
Well it’s on the much-coveted “Video Nasty” list, along with all sorts of more disreputable horrors we all know. But beyond a bloody VHS box and a nasty title, about as worth banning as…oh I dunno…Gremlins. Silly. Harmless. Grubby. Screamy. Dusty. Nothing you can’t get better elsewhere. There are hundreds of “animalsploitation” movies out there, of which this doesn’t get to even chomp at the same trough. Killer pigs? Try 1984’s Ozsploitation classic Razorback.
What does it remind me of?
Well nothing we’ve really seen so far, as these movies are getting more modern and better produced. But it’s a nasty piece of “raped woman gets revenge” plus “farming unpleasantness” plus “hicks” so I suppose you could try it on a triple bill with Last House On The Left and bung in Invasion Of The Blood Farmers.
Where can I see it?
Amazon Prime Video will show you the version I saw for about 3 quid.
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 