Author: richardasplin

“Let’s have a look at your bottom!”
“There’s nothing wrong with my bottom!”
“But how will I know if I don’t look?”

SCHOOLGIRLS IN CHAINS

Who made it? Directed by Don Jones | Written by Don Jones | Director Of Photography Ronald Victor Garcia | Special Effects/make up Ron Foreman| Music Josef Powell

Who’s in it? Gary Kent | John Parker | Stafford Morgan | Suzanne Lund | Cheryl Waters | Merrie Lynn Ross | TR Blackburn

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

Last Tango In Paris | The Poesiedon Adventure | Alice In Wonderland | The Getaway

Production notes and whatnot

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0197857/

https://letterboxd.com/film/schoolgirls-in-chains/

What’s it all about?

We open with some cheapie credits that puts us firmly in low-budget “made for TV” style territory. Think low-rent Hammer House Of Horror or a Roald Dahl short play. Yellow type, bit gothicky.

However we get – unusually for this sort of caper – a full proper list of credits (apparently this was pulled together with a full production crew). The camera prowls about an old Victorian home. You know the type. Dark wood, heavy furnishings, doilies, crockery and lace. Somewhere Mrs Bates or Annie Wilkes would feel right at home.

But it’s not so much the chintz and antiques we’re drawn to, but the dolls. Dozens and dozens of the type of freaky, shit-your-pants, dead-eyed porcelain Victoriana antiques that have been putting the willies up horror fans for a century. Bonnets, eyelashes, rosy cheeks, pale-skin, shiny bouffanty hair. We focus on dozens of these creepy silent witnesses that let us know the owner of this house is off her rocker, whoe’er she might be.

The score is a creepy ballad, “Triangles, circles and squares,” sung by Josef Powell in as sinister a manner as you might imagine. All lush strings and eeriness.

And now we meet a couple of the residents who are straight out of central casting in the traditional tired-old formula we’ve seen a hundred times: Thick headed older brother and twitchy special-needs young brother in tow.

Yep, it’s Of Mice & Men meets Rain Man meets all those other dramas where the idiot cousin in faded dungarees and beat-up Converse stammers and twitches while his fraternal guide says things like “he’s simple, he don’t mean nuthin’ by it…”

A couple of scenes of these cornball hicks: young Jon getting a haircut and playing in the driver’s seat of the old ’52 Packard, older Frank pushing him about and taking charge. Jon is doing that “chin jutting” simpleton act made popular by Mykelti Williamson’s Bubba in Forrest Gump and later by Ricky Gervais in Derek. We get it. They’re a couple of inbred lunk-heads from the wrong side of the tracks, living in momma’s old Victorian clapboard museum of a house, dolls an’ all.

But the music is jolly and upbeat with some squeaky Herb Alpert trumpet so it seems harmless enough. More “Chuckle Brothers” than Mickey n Mallory.

Now they’re out crusin’ in the beat-up old Packard (a lovely automobile, all white-wall tires and rusty chrome). But who should they pass on the dusty LA highway but a young girl – Sue – with a broken down car.

Now you don’t need to have seen many of these movies to know she is dressed to die horribly. Nobody gets to break down on a highway sporting corduroy, a tight sweater, boots and brandishing a hairbrush over her dead-straight centre-parted locks without ending up on the end of a machete –  ask Susan George, up there at Trencher’s Farm. (See Straw Dogs) before the first reel is done. But hey, y’never know. Let’s see what happens.

Yep. Frank and Jon spin the car around and creep up on her.

Frank, all broad shoulders, wide chin and Raybans is coming to her rescue. He checks under the hood. Yep, “Rotor’s gone,” he says. But he has a friend not so far away who owns a garage. Sue jumps in with gratitude. And Frank is off down the highway…

But the journey is taking longer than it should and the highway is narrowing to a dirt track and Sue is getting the heebeejeebies. “Just a little futher” Frank says. But Sue is having none of it. As they slow to stop at a level crossing, suddenly Jon appears leering and gurning from the back seat. Sue escapes the car and runs, but Jon is flapping after her, all flared dungarees and floppy shoes. At knife point, as the thunderous train clatters past in the dust, Sue is walked back to the car and forced back into the seat. And on they drive.

Pulling up at the homestead, with a terrified Sue being shoved and pushed, it is along to the storm cellar with her. Or the fruit cellar. Or possibly a coal cellar. Its one of those Americana 45 degree ones they have in Twister and Psycho. You know the type.

I checked. It’s a storm cellar. You don’t get much call for them in Surrey. In the surprisingly well-lit and ventilated depths of the brick cellar Sue finds herself making up a now trio of captured young women. Ginger, all lank hair and teary eyes is terrified and starved. She’s been there 2 weeks. And on the iron bed, barely holding it together, is Stevie. 2 months in, and she’s not well at all. The concrete cellar is bare, with just old tables, ropes and chains. Ginger tearfully explains they are trapped. There is no way out. They need keys to escape the cellar and it looks like mom has the keys. Mom? The lady upstairs. She’s been goading her sons to bring her young girls to chain and capture.

So hey, let’s meet mom! Jon scuttles up to her room, furnished by the Gothic Hitchcock and Company Drapery & Haberdashers. Man, you’ve never seen so many doilies and china figurines. Jon talks to mom. Mom is an oddball. Draped in her shawl, she sits on a rocking chair never shifting from her position staring out of the window, guarding her house and boys from trespassers and nosy neighbours.

Jon returns to the cellar to chain up young Sue along with the others. But soon enough it’s “playtime.” Which, if it sounds creepy, it is. Young Jon likes to play childhood games (hide and seek and ring-a-ring-a-roses) – or as they call it in the US “Hide and go seek” and “Ring A Rosie.”

Which as a pointless aside, is another example of what Michael McIntyre refers to as the American habit of over-explaining the obvious. Not glasses, but “eye glasses.” Not bin, but “waste paper bin.” Not horse-riding, but “horse back riding.” More here:

Anyhoo, back to Jon and Frank and “mom” and the gals.

I mean obviously you “go seek.” You can’t seek just by staying where you are. Sigh.

Eyeing a possible escape plan, Sue convinces simple Jon that they should go and play outside. He’s a little shaky and nervous about this, and we get some “momma wud’n like it…” quivers but she is blonde and has a tight sweater and Jon knows what sort of playmate he likes so he is soon convinced.

So now we’re in more familiar horror cliché territory, moving as we have from the scary car backseat to the scary cellar to the scary drawing room and now the ubiquitous scary cornfields. There is something for everyone in this movie, I’m sure you’d agree.

Jon and Sue stumble and lark through the corn and the woods in a scene not too far from poor abused Jenny in Forrest Gump,

or indeed another dungareed backwoods simpleton, young Bubba Ritter from The Dark Night Of The Scarecrow.

As they run and play awkwardly, Sue leading Jon further and further away from the house, we see his older brother coming to protect him. Or at least, manfully loading a goddam shotgun. The score gets hyper literal and young Josef Powell, having now abandoned circles, squares and triangles, sings a ditty that might as well be called “Run run! You’d better run for fuck’s sake!” as choirs insist and harmonise and urge Sue to get a goddam move on.

This is the least nuanced lyrical composition since Jez wrote a song for Honda:

Inevitably Frank catches up with the pair. He knows Sue doesn’t “Ring A Rosie” on her mind and isn’t going to let her get far. Desperate and tearful, Sue makes a run for the railroad and escape, however Frank is a dead-shot and, eyeing her in his shotgun sights, blows her away, sending her sprawling against the ratty chain-link fence where she hangs and dies for a moment while trains whistle past.

So we’re back with the homely hi-jinxs as Jon and Frank go about their business once again, this time horsing around in the gardens of the house with weeds and wheelbarrows.

But not for long, as we are now in horror cliché 5, the scary POV shot. In pure Carpenter Hallowe’en Steadicam, the camera is the eyes of someone outside the house of a college professor and his girlfriend. Spying through the shrubs, we see the young student – Bonnie – studying and canoodling with her prof. They fondle and snog, all under the eerie eyes of a watcher who creeps around outside. We see them head to the bedroom, strip off to undies and get down to it. And the viewer inches up the side of the house for a better look. We can’t help thinking someone has found their next playmate to replace the fence-blasted Sue…

But now we’re back in the cellar again and weirdy Jon is in the mood for games once again, his last round of “Hide And Go Seek” having ended up as “Run And Go Get Shot In The Back.”

He creeps about with Stevie – still bed-bound and sick as a dog – and focuses his attention on poor whimpering Ginger. Jon wants to play doctors. Ginger is not so keen. But given Jon and Frank’s penchant for punishing misbehaviour with chains and shotguns, she tearfully complies. Jon’s idea of Doctors is pretty much focused mainly on the examination and prep and we watch him pull open Ginger’s shirt revealing shadowy boobs. Getting more excited and violent, he mocks listening to her heart beat before insisting she strips down to her underwear. For reasons we assume are to highlight the “childlike” mind-set of the men, we are once again in jolly-score territory, this time with Three Blind Mice being trumpeted in the background. See how they run? And we all know what happens to blind mice who try and run.

Then Jon is brandishing a syringe to give Ginger her “treatment.” He waves the oozing needle as the trumpets give us “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Or “the ABC tune,” which is the same. And by Mozart, if you care about that sort of late 18^th Century chamber music trivia.

Next up, Jon fancies getting the nurse treatment and tries to bully Ginger into swapping roles. But Ginger is having none of it. And hey, isn’t that momma calling? Jon makes his exit leaving the two girls breathless and terrified in their brick dungeon.

The men are at breakfast. It’s not clear how much time has passed.

But its gingham-tastic in their chintzy farm home parlour, with just good ole apples and fresh milk like momma used to make (more of that revolting image later). There is talk of the girls in the cellar. Does Ginger like Frank? It seems unlikely of course, but to Jon and his brother, the world is a very twisted place. How twisted, we are about to discover as Jon leads a chained up and terrified Ginger out of the cellar and into the house, up to the front parlour for Frank’s…amusement.

Fearing for her safety, Ginger timidly tries to make friends with Frank, but he is beyond that. He has a mom-inspired hatred for women and is going to take it out on Ginger. Losing his temper, he flares up, grabbing and tearing at Ginger’s clothes.

Screaming for his momma, breasts fly and twisting wrestling forces her to the couch where his huge sweaty body overwhelms her. “Don’t you move!” Frank bellows, stripping a screaming Ginger and tying her back with rope. With what seems like punching, fisting violence he assaults her, violates her and rapes her against the over-stuffed Victorian couch in afternoon light of the parlour.

We fade. It has passed. There is silence. The two sit in the room. Frank is overcome with sorrow and regret, head in his hands. Slow. Tired.

Desperate, Ginger tries to save herself, to talk to Frank. Did he ever have a girl?

Frank slowly concedes. He did. Once. But … momma didn’t like her…

And now in an unexpected turn, we are in dreamy flashback as we meet a younger, more straight-laced Frank, bringing his fiancée to tea with mother. Some, perhaps, 8 months ago?

They sit in the garden of the old farm house, all iron furniture and parasols. The fiancée is introduced to mother. Mother, however, is a monster. Greta Gaylord plays her as an ageing matronly, vampy, over-made up, waspish sinister woman, over protective of her boys. All smeared lipstick and stuck-on beauty spots, she drinks and smokes and laughs a sneery laugh. While the fiancée is off getting tea, she cuddles up to her son and asks – clearly not for the first time – for a massage. Frank duly begins to rub his mother’s tits, causing motherly sexy groans of pleasure. Returning, the fiancée is horrified at this booby-fondle fest. And who can blame her.

Frank is sent off to play so the women can share “girl talk.”  She dismisses the fiancée with talk of Frank’s true love – his mother. She explains he is backward, simple, a bedwetter even at his age. Frank belongs to mommy. They make love! She will keep him for herself!

Horrified, the fiancée leaves, screaming “this is sick! This is incest!” A sorrowful Frank returns, momma clutching him to her busom.

“They should be caged for coming between a mother and her boy.”

Fade out…

Aaaand now we’re back.

And back in Hallowe’en territory no less, as Bonnie, our college student, heads home after class, watched by Jon. She spots him horsing about on a tree opposite and scuttles quickly to her car. He’s not someone you want to engage with.

Later that night Bonnie is at home with her lecturer/boyfriend once again. They tease and play about studying or snogging. Is Jon still watching the house? We cannot be sure.

But she leaves, looking out for the stranger. Only to SCREAM as Jon appears in her backseat. The score goes very “psycho” as piano chords stab stab stab on the soundtrack. Jon flees for his life.

But Back at home Jon talks with mom. She gives him permission to “collect” another victim, standing at the top of the stairs, much like the ominous Mother Superior in Landis’s The Blues Brothers.

So next night, the trap is set. After more chuckly canoodling and flimsy studying, Bonnie leaves her professor’s house and heads home in the car. Jon and Frank await her in the darkness of their rusted Packard. Californian tree crickets chirp in the night (or at least on the soundtrack).

BANG! Bonnie collides with a pedestrian on the dark street. Horrified and shaken, Bonnie is out of the car and rushing to the victim…only to find the victim is nothing but a tailors dummy flung into the road. Suddenly Frank is upon her with chloroform and a handkerchief as she is dragged to Jon and the waiting car.

Back at the family homestead, Bonnie puts up a “Fuck you!” fight, but the sons are too much for her. Pulled across the lawn she is dumped in the cellar to join a frightened Ginger and sickly Stevie. The girls explain the workings to their new room mate. The mum has her sons capture young girls. They keep us for their “playmates” or as their “toys.” They try and plot an escape.

Meanwhile Bonnie’s lecturer boyfriend is driving to college when he spots Bonnie’s abandoned car. Odd? All talk on campus is the missing girl. No, nobody has seen her. Not since yesterday? Anxious, the lecturer – Robert – drives back home, only to see the car still there. And…waitk what’s this? A medical bracelet discarded on the blacktop. A name. Jon Barrows. The address? A local sanatorium…

While Robert is playing detective, Jon is back in the cellar having the time of his life with Bonnie, his new captive. Once again, in perverted twists of boyhood games, he is grabbing her wrists and forcing her to jog around the basement playing choo-choo.

Bonnie suggests they derail the train and try some hide-and-go-seek (I know don’t get me started again). Jon closes his eyes, begins to count…when one of the girls CLONKS him hard on the skull with a bit of 2×4. Jon goes down, the girls scrambling now for the cellar door and freedom!

Now we’re in cliché 6 as around the Victorian house they chase, Jon lumbering and looming and shrieking as the flappy girls scatter and scream, limply haring from chintzy room to chintzy room to escape this crazy man-child loon.

Bonnie bursts into the mom’s room to plead with her. Only to find…

Yep, no prizes here. Cliché 7 – a rotting corpse of “momma” laid on the ironwork bed. Screams abound and the audience all, as one, lean over to each other and say “oh, it’s Psycho. Thought it might be.”

The chase heats up and we are back in the 8ft corn fields once again.

Frank follows, loading up his rifle once more, while Robert pulls up in his Porsche. I didn’t mention the Porsche before. It’s a nice one. Think the nice 356 Model Michael Murphy blows his savings on in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Not that he got a hard time about doing so…

Robert calls out to the top window. Is Jon there? Mom tells him no. Jon hasn’t been there for years. Dejected, Robert drives away.

As he does, in the leafy forest Jon is playing with Bonnie, or trying his best in his crazy infant way. “You play too hard!” she struggles.

But Jon has more games on his mind. It’s time for round two of “Doctors.” He pulls Bonnie down and pulls out his knife, forcing her to strip topless on the leafy dirt for her “examination.” Which brings us to the best exchange of the picture:

“Let’s have a look at your bottom.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my bottom.”

“How will I know if I don’t look?”

Meanwhile, the trumpet is now giving is some more Three Blind Mice to add to the mindfuck chaos. Bonnie hasn’t long to live, with drooling simple Jon tearing at her frantically and Frank not far behind with his shotgun.

Robert meanwhile is gassing up the old Porsche at a local station, typical of this sort of movie. We’ve seen “crazy Franks” in these sorts of oily, dusty joints before, all coveralls and beat up trucker-caps. But now we have, in the first original move of the motion picture, “helpful Frank.” As he wipes the windshield and spits on the floor, he lets Robert know that, hell…there’s no mother up at the house? Mother? She dies about months ago. It’s just the boys up there on their own now. Is he sure? Hell, he went to her funeral.

Ooops…

So now it’s a race against time in the final 10 mins. Back in the woods, Bonnie has been stripped and forced to bend over, crouching, as Jon plays “leap frog” (or, “jump over your bent back pretending to be a frog” as I imagine it’s called in the literal USA). Bonnie screams as Jon gets more and more wild.

The score twangs more “Twinkle Twinkle” to fully complete the obtuse horrors.

At home, Frank lies in bed cuddling the corpse of his mother. It’s clearly all too much for the poor bloke.

Robert’s Porsche crawls back up the drive, Robert now much more wary of what he might find at the house. He pulls up next to the beat-up Packard. Like a detective in a cheap TV show, Robert begins to prowl and search the spooky house. A cat watches as he moves amongst the chintz, the lace and the odd crockery.

He stumbles over Frank and the corpse. A crazy exchange of TV punches follows, like the Dukes Of Hazard in a redneck bar. Pow. Punch. Thwack, the men stumble and reel amongst the antiques. “What the hell is going on around here?!” he screams as Jon returns and the fight continues.

Robert finds the rifle and escaping the brothers, runs to the storm cellar.

He bursts in. Steve lies dead in the cellar. The hell?! Robert scrambles the surviving Ginger into his Porsche to escape the madness. But can’t leave without checking the house one more time for Bonnie.

He hunts the house, room to room, only to be surprised by…Bonnie! Hysterical but alive. Back to the top room, they rediscover “mom” lying rotting on the bedspread. On the veranda, in the sunshine, Frank’s legs dangle. He has hanged himself.

In the dusty corner of the room, in the shadows, crouches young Jon. Sobbing. Rocking. Crying for his momma.

Fade out. End.

Is it any good?

No. No it isn’t. For all its production values and decent camerawork and care, what we have here is a thoroughly grimy piece of exploitation nastiness. I mean the clues were there. You should see the cover of the box. In fact here it is.

Yet again as we discover on our journey through the list, the title promises more than the poor renter will get, as there are no schoolgirls (the female cast clearly being in their late twenties) and there are very few actual chains.

What’s wrong with it? Well where to begin.

As mentioned in the plot summary, we are in that tired cliché world of the hick duo. The older, slightly smarter hick (who can pass for normal when he needs to) and the “special needs” sibling he is forced to play daddy to. I mean we’ve seen this done many times. Of Mice & Men, of course – the Steinbeck classic – which has been brought to celluloid numerous times. First in 1939 directed by Lewis Milestone, with none other than the Penguin going cross country with The Wolfman (Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr).

We have since had George Segal & Nicol Williamson in the 1968 version, Randy Quaid and Robert Blake in a 1981 TV Movie and then of course a play-to-screen version directed by and starring Gary (Ransom) Senise and John (Being) Malkovich, both reprising their stage roles.

Rain Man, as we said – an Oscar-grab of the genre allowing Cruise to go from “mean spirited selfish salesman” to “caring family man” as Hoffman twitches and stutters and stares at his shoes. Sweet and misunderstood of course. What was it the cast of Tropic Thunder warned us? “Never go full retard.” Leave that for your Day Lewises.

Jon, as played by John Parker is essentially Cletus from The Simpsons, played with little subtlety. Even down to the missing tooth and the unbuttoned dungarees. Brother Frank (Gary Kent) is your typecast thug, Raybans, tight Wranglers and a cap sleeved tee.

The shooting is flat and emotionless. Just camera, tripod, action, go. Director Don Jones hasn’t done much to lift this from the TV Movie format. It’s grainy, grotty, dusty and cheap. Plain, drab, plodding and surprisingly empty of extras or crowds. Yes, the “camera as stalker eyes” precedes Carpenter’s Halloween by 6 years, but it’s been done before and done in a more scary manner.

The flashback is nice, although it can’t escape it’s unneccesariness. Which isn’t really a word. But it brings us to the movies main selling point/twist/origins.

It’s Psycho. Thirteen years after the record-breaking movie and fourteen years after the novel, it’s a re-run of Psycho. And they haven’t even put Robert Bloch as an executive producer. The overbearing mom in the Victoriana house who controls the son(s) with a weird, psycho-sexual clingy incestuous obsessiveness. The son(s) who cannot cope with momma’s death and continue to live in her terrifying, overbearing shadow. Keeping her stuffed and embalmed in the top bedroom where they speak in her voice, obey her commands and do her bidding. Her hatred and anger at the women who will steal her sons’ love away? All very familiar, almost to the point of being a remake, a re-imagining or “homage.”

I’m not certain at what point in the movie the penny drops, and we the audience start smelling a Hitchcock-shaped rat. But it’s pretty much the moment we meet the mother – still, in a rocking chair, staring from a top window, creaky croaky voice and no actual movement? And of course, any horror fans who’ve seen Psycho (which is all of them) will be asking why we don’t see momma’s lips move, her full face or indeed anything that makes her look remotely alive.

Once we twig of course, the movie – what there is of it – loses any momentum it has. Clearly playing for the “shock ending,” once we figure out that the boys are plain nuts and living in the crazy shadow of their dead mother, it only leaves us to sit back and wait for the movie to catch up with the audience.

But we were talking about the flashback. It’s probably both the highlight, and the least necessary scene in the movie. The jury is out over the psychiatrist “explanation” scene which takes up the last 5 minutes of Psycho – many viewers feeling it put a neat explanatory bow on the top of the drama, some feeling it spoonfed the obvious to an audience already way ahead. Ohhh, he was obsessed with his mom! Ohhhh, he spoke in her voice! Ohhhh, he dressed in her clothes. Ohhhh, we all figured this out the moment we saw the preserved eyeless corpse in the rocking-chair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSGdXDli5A&t=63s

So we could look at “Schoolgirls in Chains” flashback moment – the jarring soft focus bit where we see the momma/son relationship as either “sealing the deal” on the set up or over egging the pudding. But it’s a nice scene and Greta Gaylord has heaps of fun playing the twisted shrieking mother, all breasty massage and lipstick.

All in all, there is little in this caper to titillate, excite, scare or horrify the viewer and based on the boobs, chains and honeys on the VHS box, one obvious rip-off twist isn’t going to keep anybody happy.

But I mean what did you expect. “Schoolgirls in Chains.” I mean for heaven’s sake.

Nasty?

I would say “seedy,” is better. Perhaps “grimy.” It leaves a thin film of unpleasant tannins or grease on the viewer. With little in it, beyond the panto performances and Vegas-sized Signpost of an ending, we are left with the reason one might rent it. Which is to see, presumably, the sight of school-girls being chained up. And yes, to a certain softcore level, it delivers. The three female victims (Suzanne und, Cherly Waters, Merrie Lynn Ross and TR Blackburn) are all manhandled, rough-housed and at turns, slapped, stripped, beaten, chained, raped and generally made to act like helpless whimpering waifs. So it has that, if that’s what you want. But given there is nothing “interesting, clever, controversial, surprising or insightful” about any of these grotty antics, it leaves the viewer with a needs for some fresh air, a shower, a glass of cold water, a vacuuming of the lounge and to give the TV a bit of an old wipe down, as it to remove the scent of the foul thing.

Ban worthy?

If, as we’ve discussed, the “banning” of a movie suddenly was to give it credibility and a “must-see” cache, then the box and title alone will have done the job. The movie actually made it onto Mary Whitehouse’s fabled Nasties “Banned 72” movies, but one has to assume it got stirred in by the frenzy of “better” horrors with genuine scares and thrills. It’s a tasteless affair, a wanna-be titillating piece of nasty men-on-female violence and assault with a cod “psychological” explanation as justification and some cornball hick work. No reason whatsoever to ban it as it’s too daft and unpleasant to corrupt anybody not already corrupted. A masterpiece of marketing over meaning, motive or movie-quality.

What does it remind me of?

Well as we said, its got plenty in there that will look familiar. Pyscho, of course. It has a brave stab at the ind of road-trip mis-matched buddy movie of Rain Man and Of Mice & Men. The nasty hicks against the simple city folk is a cheapy version of the fine work done in Straw Dogs. Hell, with the victims in a whole being taunted by the naïve/crazy simpletons isn’t a million miles away from Demme’s Silence Of The Lambs. And the whole thing has the cornball, wide Alabama skies, dusty denim and picket-fences of Dark Night Of The Scarecrow or Forrest Gump.

So my advice, it watch literally ANY of those instead.

Where can I see it?

I hunted this one down with no difficulty at all by a simple search on my Premium YouTube subscription.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0pWdp_g7l8

And to own, a sparkly Blu-Ray is available, but I really don’t feel it’s something you’d want to rewatch or own. Especially for $99.00. Blimey.

“My objection to The Last House on the Left is not an objection to the graphic representations of violence per se, but to the fact that the movie celebrates violent acts, particularly adult male abuse of young women … I felt a professional obligation to stick around to see if there was any socially redeeming value in the remainder of the movie and found none.”

GENE SISKEL

Who made it? Directed by Wes Craven| Written by Wes Craven | Director Of Photography Vicyor Hurwitz | Special Effects/make up Anne Paul| Music David Alexander Hess

Who’s in it? Sandra Peabody | Lucy Grantham | David A. Hess | Fred Lincoln | Jeramie Rain | Marc Sheffler

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

Night Of The Lepus | Blacula | Chloe In The Afternoon | The Italian Connection

Production notes and whatnot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_House_on_the_Left

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068833/

What’s it all about?

We open with a terrifying caption: “The events you are about to witness are true. Names and locations have been changed to protect those still living.” We should then cut to a pinch of salt the size of Utah. But we don’t. More accurate would have been: “The events you are about to witness are a gratuitous “bloodied gore fest and sex up” of an Oscar wining 1960 Bergman movie which itself was based on a medieval Swedish ballad. Names have been entirely made up and the locations were anywhere the film-makers could find a socket to plug the lights in before the cops turned up.” But it isn’t. Heigh-ho. Let’s crack on.

A serene pastoral scene. Dark lakes, ducks and birdsong. We are in nature, which threatens to be more red-in-tooth-and-claw than anyone has any right to expect for 3 bucks and a bucket of popcorn.

On a placid East coast road in northern New York State, a simple postman drives up to a house. The home of the local doctor, his humble highly-strung wife and their nubile hippy 17 year old daughter Marie. Which she spells “Mari.” Tells you all you need to know about how ditzy and irritating she’s going to be. Postie dumps armfuls of birthday cards into their old school Charlie Brown mailbox.

The aforementioned Mari, meanwhile, is getting all soapy and self-involved behind dimpled glass as she showers and flashes boobs and gets herself all dolled up for her birthday night out. She is a clean and innocent young girl. Scrupulously clean it would appear. We are wondering if this is setting her up for a fall. It obviously is. I’ve seen the poster.

The home is a well-to-do Scandinavian looking set up, all dark wood, oak and velvet. Mustard and taupe and burgundy and rustic. Cellars, pots and pans, dim lighting and chintzy bedspreads. But hey, let’s meet the parents. Mum is your standard 70’s mum. A bit prissy, a little fragile. But capable and stoic and no-nonsense. Her husband, the local MD, is a different kettle of stethoscopes. Grumpy behind his newspaper, muttering about the news and the usual “murder and mayhem”, he is a mixture of Judd Hirsch via Richard Burton, on the way to meet Donald Sinden and Jerry Orbach at a Rex Harrison lookalike contest. The daddest of movie dads.

Mari dances into the lounge, all keen and clean and smiles, ready for her night out. Some fusty parent-kid banter about her outfit: “No bra? You can see your nipples!” Oh mum! Oh dad! Such fuddy-duddies with their old-fashioned values and their clumsy foreshadowing.

See, Mari is off to a rock concert with her best pal Phyllis, a pal from the wrong side of the tracks, which leads to a nice line. “My parents are in iron and steel. She irons, he steals…”

They’re off to see Bloodlust, which is as crappy a made-up name for a “controversial” rock band as you can get. “They dismember chickens in their act!” Dad says. This is the first of many chicken references. “You were meant to be the love generation!”

On this clumsy bit of ironic foreshadowing, dad is reminded of Mari’s birthday gift and presents her with a l’il green Tiffany box. Inside? Dawww, a silver CND symbol on a necklace. Sweet. Big zoom in. We will be seeing this again.

But parental concerns, news of murder and mayhem, disembowelled chickens and visible nipples aside, all is well. Mari and Phyllis are off to the big city. We see them gambol and laugh as they frolic, carefree, like a couple of teens from The Brady Bunch, all teeth and tits, through the dappled forest. Necking hooch and talking about boys and boobs. The music is twangy and a bit John Denver, all leaves and waterfalls and rainbows. “I feel like a woman for the first time in my life!” Mari shouts. And we know this isn’t going to end well for either of them.

Looming dread aside – no-one this wholesome is getting out of a Wes Craven movie without some kind of comeuppance – they take their family station-wagon, all wood panelling and Chevy Chase vacation feel, off to the concert.

But uh-oh. In efficient screenwriting 101 style, they tune into the local radio station to get the news. Oh and what news it is. Police are still on the hunt after a prison break, looking for 4 nasty characters. The broadcast reels off an absurd list of crimes like a round of Scattegories: A triple slaying, bunch of dope-peddling peeping-tommy rapists, responsible for murders (2 nuns, a priest and a kicked-to-death Alsatian dog). As we hear the rap sheet in voice-over, we cut to the crew at their den:

Let’s meet them! In charge, we have a chap called Fred. We know he’s in charge, he’s got a silvery quiff and a natty blazer. Casting wise he’s a nasty Peter Capaldi. Not so much Doctor Who, but more Doctor Who-da-fuck-you-lookin’-at?

His side-kick in crime is Krug. The thicker of the two, much more of the muscle. For the look, imagine (if you can possibly bring yourself to) Richard Keil via Frank Stallone, stirring in a little DNA of John Travolta and the 70s songwriter BA Robertson.

Tagging along, strung out on heroin, is Krug’s baby brother ‘Jnr.’ Sleepy eyed, shaggy haired with a Kermit The Frog countenance.

Finally, the dame in the sketch is Sadie – a punky, filthy mouthed, lipstick-smeared moll in the angry Rizzo via Toyah Wilcox model.

They’re hairy, nasty, greasy thuggish types, kicking around their grotty flat, beer-cans and spilling ashtrays aplenty. Dirty bathwater, stringy vests, bare-feet, yelling and cheap cigars.

But then! With a sledgehammer-like juxtaposition, we are back with lovely Mari and Phyllis as they giggle and play in the ice-cream parlour. Presumably ordering “Lambs To The Slaughter” flavoured cones. The music is la-la-lah folk. When these two groups meet, it’s going to get nasty.

In their New York flat, the gang fight, squabble, wrestle, curse and polish their handguns. Sadie won’t “put out” with her “male chauvinist dog” compadres. At least not until they get another couple of chicks to join the party.

Cue a couple of chicks to join the party. Brace yourself.

Because out on the stoop Jnr stands, wasted and stoned. Clacking along in their heels, flares, crop tops and nipples, Mari and Phyllis think this oddball might be someone who could score them some dope. Hell, who’d want to watch Bloodlust disembowel a chicken without a little toot on some of that there Columbian? Jnr invites them up to score $20 of grass. They arrive. The gang pep up a bit. This is more like a party. The door is locked behind them. They scream.

And all hell breaks loose.

But as we will see, this movie is very much one for the cut-between scenes of domesticity and debauchery, so we are suddenly back with mom and pop. Against some jarringly jolly jaunty pub-piano, they laugh and fuss with birthday banners and balloons like a sitcom. She’s icing a cake, he’s smiling paternally and trying to feel up his missus. All is well at home.

Meanwhile of course, things could not be going worse in grimy New York. The girls are terrified, the men are waving flick-knives, drooling and panting. No one is getting out of here any time soon. The girls struggle and writhe in the gorilla grips of these violent men. It’s getting very, very nasty. The gang want to party and it seems “consent” is not a word they’re troubling themselves with. Trembling and terrified, Phyllis has her shirt cut off, revealing pale breasts. Fred is all over them, sucking and pulling. Sadie cops a feel. “Get your hands away you bitch!” Frozen in fear of what is to come, Mari stands tearfully by. Phyllis is punched. Hard. Down she goes. Frozen faces. We know this is just the beginning.

But as the jaunty roller pub piano jangles, mom and dad have a canoodle on their couch, blissful of what goes on in the darkness of the New York flat.

NOTE: We are only 15mins in to the movie. Efficient, this is. Economic. But relentless, this is going to get.

Caption: Very early next morning.

So it’s day two. Once again Craven is having “fun” with his juxtaposition of wholly inappropriate score mixed with horrifying visuals. We’ll talk more about this later. But here the gang are, bright and early, hefting the lifeless unconscious bodies of our two victims down a fire escape and into their convertible sedan. Lively ragtime bluegrass jollies along like it were some family caper comedy, as we are invited, presumably to half chuckle at this Laurel & Hardy knockabout antics (honestly, they may as well be trying to move a piano up some stairs) as we witness the further degradation of the females. How we feel about this will very much colour how we respond to the rest of the movie, continuing as it will to mix camp hillbilly banjo and kazoo with scene of horrific torture and death.

Mari and Phyllis are bundled like laundry into the trunk.

At the homestead meanwhile, mom is frantic and panicky about her missing daughter while dad plays the stiff upper lip stalwart, certain she’s just out “rebelling” and will be home soon. Give it another hour and they’ll contact the authorities.

Another hour is not much more than these girls have.

We are back in the wild with lakes and rivers and flutes as the gang high-tail it out of the city, laughing, bickering and dry humping in the back of the car as it bounces along the leafy roads. We get some idle chatter about sex crimes and what presumably passes for insight as Sadie talks “Sigmund Frood,” missing as she does the days when a telegraph pole was just a telegraph pole.

But an hour passes, hence we now have the local sheriff at the parents’ house. A fat balding man with a jocular Eric Morcambe/Phil Silvers countenance, he chuckles and eats creamy slices of birthday cake in the lounge, reassuring mom and pop this is nothing to worry about. Kids being kids. They get a lot of these types of calls.

Yum yum, pass the biscuits, is there more cake?

Back on the road, the convertible grinds to a halt. Much bickering and thwacking and cursing as they realise the car isn’t going any further. The goons heave the girls from the trunk, one of them lashing out and biting her attacker. Much yelling and struggling ensues. They’re gonna have to do something with these girls. One can only imagine what. Flailing and struggling we see them led into the woods, just past…but wait…what’s this by the car? A mailbox? A Charlie Brown mailbox? With Mari’s name on the side? Awww crap. They have broken down at the end of the drive of Mari’s house. The last house on the left. Her parents sit only a few yards away in their home, through the trees. So near. But so, so far.

Inside, the cops are heading off. “The girls are just letting off steam,” they say, waving it all off, and they are back in the patrol car. As they leave, they pass the mailbox. And the broken down convertible. Should they check it out..?

Nahhh.

So we join the gang and the writhing, desperate girls as they are lead at knife point further into the dapply autumn wood. The killers laugh, drink, play with guns and shove the terrified girls onward, deeper into the trees.

They halt at a clearing. Pushing the sobbing girls about, knives are brandished against throats. They demand that Phyllis “pisses her pants” otherwise Mari gets the knife. Bullying laughter follows as Phyllis jeans darken.

We viewers wonder what we’re watching here.

Next they are forced together, all to the buffoonish idiot chuckling of the others. Forced to hit each other, there are desperate tears and whimpers. A soft acoustic guitar plucks. Shirts are torn off, pale flesh exposed. A blur of struggles, underwear and terror. Stripped down and begging for freedom, the gang leer and laugh, forcing the girls to get on-top of each other for some kind of show.

But enough of that! We haven’t had any goofy cop-comedy for a while, so let’s drop in on our cops. Eric Morcambe and his dopey assistant (who if you think resembles a sort of dumb Martin Kove from Karate Kid, it’s because it’s a young Martin Kove from The Karate Kid), in the classic brown bomber jackets and tan pants of the bumbling hick cops, horse about in the police station. Dumb talk, eye-rolls and daftness. Idiots.

Back in the forest, one killer leaves to find a weapon. Something to make “firewood” with. So they can “hot things up.” Trembling, Phyllis begs to be allowed to dress herself again. As she does, some hurried whispers between them and, leaving Mari behind, she makes a desperate, shrieking run for it. Sadie and Fred make chase. Long, long shots of a petrified Phyllis scrambling to freedom through brush and woods, as her pursuers yell and tear after her.

Left alone for a desperate moment, Mari tries to placate Jnr. Handing over her CND necklace as a peace-offering, she promises she can get him out of here. Get him free. Her dad is a doctor! He has methadone! They live just over the way!

Awww shucks! Some Homer Simpson style head-slapping meanwhile as the police radio tells Kove and Morcambe to be on the lookout for the convertible car. Doh! What are they like? They head off hastily in their patrol car back to where they saw it.

Meanwhile, Sadie catches up with Phyllis. They struggle and fight, Phyllis taking up a rock and pounding it on Sadie’s head. As she collapses, Phyllis runs. She hears a road. Freedom! Help!

But as in such things, her relief is painfully short-lived as, from within the bushes, leap Fred and Krug – now armed with a machete.

No holes barred, twisting and grabbing her, the machete is buried deep into her spine. They kick her. Once, twice, again and again as she tries helplessly to crawl free through wet leaves.

But hey! Let’s have some more twangy hillbilly comedy banjo! Because who should sputter and run out of gas in the old cop car but our two comedy cops. Wah-wah-wahhhhhh.

They clamber out and start the long walk to the house, sighing and shrugging like a couple of silent-movie twerps.

Banjos and kazoos are disbanded, thankfully, for a moment as it all goes rather John Carpenter and someone whips their synth out. Long, stabbing, droning chords accompany Phyllis’s further stabbing. In last hateful breaths, she spits on her attacker. We drift into slow-motion and it all gets woozy and disturbing. He lifts her. She screams. There is underwear, flesh, naked limbs, screaming, blood and it all drifts into madness.

Still safe, but for how long, Mari convinces Jnr Frog Features to escape with her, desperate that he is to calm his addiction. Through the forest they run, leaves underfoot…straight into the arms of the killers. Where is Phyllis? Where is she? Well here’s her hand. And the rest of her arm.

Severed at the elbow, they toss the machete hacked limb to the floor. Screaming, Mari collapses but the killers are far from done.

(By the way, this is relentlessly tiring to type. It’s relentlessly tiring to read too, I imagine. Just imagine having to watch it).

So knife to the throat, they carve as blood splashes and spurts from her neck. Jeans torn off, fumbling at her gusset, they clamber aboard and Krug violently rapes her, licking and sweating as he does.

Ho-ho! It’s a laugh, in’ it! Apparently so, as across town our bumbling silent movie Keystone Kops are trying to hitch a ride with some “punks.” Their car slows enough for Morcambe and Kove to go chasing it down the road…only for it to pull away with a squeal and a roar of laughter. The sheriff at this point actually takes his hat off and throws it to the ground in frustration. Like Yosemite Sam. Dangnabit, those rapey varmints etc.

Finally, barely able to walk, Mari staggers away, pulling on her clothes. Throwing up, her killer stand idly by. There is an almost calm moment. They watch Mari walk, mute and numb, towards the lake where she wades in. Taking aim with his glinting handgun. Krug pops off two flat BANGS and Mari collapses, lying face up in the dark lake.

We’re not even an hour in, by the way.

But ho-ho! Before the mood can darken, we welcome in one of the oddest scenes in, not only horror movie history, but cinema history. Still waddling down the leafy lane, our cops stop. Kove rests his ear to the blacktop, Tonto style. “You lamebrain!” He hears an approaching truck. And chickens.

At which point we go full Mr Bean meets Laurel & Hardy meets Harold Lloyd via Hanna Barbera as a toothless crone guffaws and cackles from the seat of her chicken truck and Morcambe and Kove do their best to scramble up onto the roof of the truck, feathers flying, skwarking coops, tumbling down, dusting their pants, hands on hips while crazy banjos accompany blue-grass whistling. Dawww, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten’ me into! We ain;t never gonna nab ourselves no violent rapists now! Cue virtual “looks to camera” and shaking fists.

So just as we relax and sigh in the presence of these bumbling buffoons, Craven hauls us back to the killers. No smiles. No banjo. They strip to the waist and wash the blood of the girls from their hands and faces in the dark lake. Perfunctorily. Plainly. Grim business as usual. 

There is some kind of jarring time jump here – as I say, the script is nothing if not efficient – and we are back with the parents. Dad sleeps the sleep of the man, resigned to whatever has befallen his missing girl. Hopeful for her return. He is awoken by his fussing wife. They have late visitors. Some people by the side of the road need help. Dad fusses and dresses sleepily.

We are in act three. Who should be standing in the parent’s lounge, totally unaware of to whom they speak, but our killers. Fred, Krug, Jnr and Sadie. Cleaned up a bit certainly. On their best behaviour. Looking for somewhere to lay their heads for the night.

Innocent, knowing nothing of who stands among the wood and tapestries of their home, mom and dad make them welcome. Poor travellers. Stranded. Of course they can offer them a bed. Good neighbours, what else could they do?

Polite, well spoken, Frank apologises and thanks them for a place to rest. Mom takes them to the rooms upstairs. As mom heads back down to her husband, the killers gather in one of the rooms. Shoes off, ties loosened, they smoke cigars and make themselves at home, sprawling on the little bed.

Frank cases the room. Something to drink? Something to steal?

When he sees it. He is wide eyed. Smirking. He beckons Krug over to the dressing table. Tucked around the mirror? Photographs. Young girls. Mari and Phyllis. Well here’s a turn up…

But our stomachs turn at the coming consequences. This is going to get messy.

Later the odd sextet sit around a dark dinner table. Mom and dad have made their visitors spaghetti. They watch, a little disturbed at how these young folk slurp and guzzle, chugging wine, talking loud, lighting cigars from the table candles. Something isn’t right. We see dad notice the visitors’ scars, puncture wounds, sticking plasters and…are those teeth marks?

But nobody says a word.

They need to excuse Jnr, who is unwell. Clearly pangs of heroin withdrawal are too much and he retreats, groaning, to the bathroom. Sadie and Frank talk loudly, contradicting each other’s alibis. “Insurance.” “Plumbing.” “Er…insurance for plumbing…”

Dad is cautious as they all head to bed.

Mom find Jnr on the bathroom floor, retching and sweating. She does her best to help her poor guest, only to see…horrified…a silver CND necklace about his neck.

Dumbstruck she shifts to the guest room. The music tells us things are not good. As the score goes very Led Zeppelin, a pastoral, folksy faerie feel, she unzips the suitcases. Clothes. Stained with blood.

Mom’s worst fears are realised and we see her world collapse.

And we have about twenty minutes to go.

How much more do we want of this? I mean, spoilers? I guess we’ve come this far. Sigh.

Mom and dad run, run, RUN to the woods in the blue of the autumn night. Somehow, because it’s a movie, the body of the shot and drowned Mari lies in the bushes for them to fall over. There is sobbing and hugging and renting of garments and gnashing of whatnot. This is all too much. With no working phone, it is going to be down to them to meet out the justice their innocent daughter deserves.

Fred awakes in the spare room. Standing over him are mom and pop, dressed in full surgical scrubs. He is bewildered and panicky but the parents are steadfast. They hold him down. Hammer. Chisel. Peling back his lips dad places the blade against Fred’s teeth. He raises the hammer. Surely he’s not going to..? Down comes the hammer, hard, fast and

WOAH! Fred sits up, sweaty from his nightmare. All is calm. Juts a dream. But a portence of what awaits them.

Down in the basement, dad is rifling through what tools he has, to find makeshift weapons with which to destroy the killers. He lifts hammers, tools, at one point holding up a bin-lid a la Captain America’s shield.

Fred dresses in the dark, heading downstairs to see what the noise is. Who is there, in her nightgown, sipping whisky, but mom. Knowing she has to keep him distracted ad busy, she feigns a flirty come-on. Fred can’t believe his pervy luck and tries to get her to the couch for some rough sex. But mom knows Mari’s rescued corpse lies on the couch so she leads him outside. Fred follows.

Dad meanwhile is going full SAW and setting up booby traps all over the house to contain and capture the killers. Thin trip wire is laced across the lower door-frame; bare electric wires are wrapped around copper door knobs and carpet is soaked with water; shaving foam is squirted and spread over wooden floors. It’s MacGuyver meets The A Team. It’s, for want of a better image, The Last Home Alone On The Left.

Outside, Fred and mom flirt. She’s never had a man like Fred, she says. He could fuck her with both hands behind his back, he says. So true to his word, he lets mom tie his hands together, leaving him helpless. There is some careful and “ouchy” unzipping as mom prepares to fellate him. She kneels, begins. Fred is loving it…

Until an animal SCREAM as mom takes his cock in her mouth and bites down hard, hard, hard. She wrenches, he writhes, she snaps away (cock in mouth? Not so sure) and Fred collapses screaming to the floor.

The screams awake Krug, Jnr and Sadie. Dad appears with his rifle at the bedside. Krug jumps for the lamp cable, plunging the room into darkness. There are screams and yells and a BANG as the rifle goes off. Dad runs from the room to the lounge. In persuit Krug comes running, slipping as he does on the shaving foam, and down he goes. The dad scurries about the lounge, braced for a fight. Through the door to the lounge, Krug stumbles over the trip wire and falls face first to the floor. But it’s going to take more than a couple of falls to stop this monster. Toe to toe, dad and Krug hurl punches, each one glancing from Krug’s chin like nothing. He goads dad to hit him harder! Harder! But dad’s aging frame is no match for Krugs vicious bloodthirsty power. Krug sees the body of Mari dead on the couch. He taunts and teases her father, making him rain down even harder blows, but he cannot stop the huge killer.

BANG! A gunshot. They turn and see Jnr. Sweaty, strung out, quivering, he holds the gun to Krug, shaky. Fearless Krug has had enough and begins to yell at Jnr to shoot himself. “Blow your brains out!” he yells and calls over and over. Poor Jnr, baffled and bewildred by the nightmare, collapses in fear, turns the gun on himself and fires. Against a red spattered wall, Jnr collapses.

Krug turns back to face dad. But he has fled.

But what is that sound? A roar? A whine? A growl? Up the stairs of the basement dad climbs, a chainsaw held infront of him buzzing wildly.

Krug grabs up the rifle, fires. But CLICK. The gun is empty.

In the final moments, mom appears with a knife, swiping and slashing desperately at Krug as he falls and stumbles behind furniture to escape the roaring blade. Krug makes a break for it, lunging for the door, but grabbing the copper knob completes the circuit sending volts shuddering through him. Screaming in pain, Krug collapses and dad approaches slowly, chainsaw screaming.

Bursting from the house, the mom runs, followed by a wild Sadie. Screaming ansd tearing they fall, rolling in the leaves, fighting and scratching. They edge to the pool and a final blow sends Sadie splashing to the water.

As dad finally inches closer to Krug, chainsaw roaring and outstretched, he steps off screen and we hear Krug screaming.

At last the cops arrive. Morcambe yells in the doorway but can only watch, blood splashing his spectacles as dad tears Krug apart with the fierce machine, thundering away.

Breathing deep, the saw whines to silence and Morcambe surveys the carnage and debris. Kove steps up to the shaking couple, eases the chainsaw away from them, leaving mom and dad sat, breathing deep, among the remnants of broken wood and bodies.

They sit in silence for a moment as we all breathe out.

Cut to…Yes! Let’s have a hoe-down as the crazy upbeat jaunty comedy hillbilly bluegrass banjos and kazoos burst back to life! We are treated to cheery still shots, sitcom style, of the performers in the credits, a la “you have been watching…” like it was the end of Are You Being Served.

End.

Is it any good?

Where to begin? At the beginning I suppose, with the origins of this tale of family, attack and revenge. To find the source of the tale we are going to have to go back 350 years, so make sure you’ve plenty of Plutonium in your DeLorean.

In Medieval Sweden, tale was told, a ballad was sung, that spoke of Pehr Tyrsson and his daughters. It is typical of the period, I am lead to believe. I am not a scholar of Swedish 17thCentury Ballads. However the wondrous internet helps us out. The ballad is associated with a number of regions of Sweden as well as being told and retold in other Scandinavian countries. It tells a sad tale that, while we’re here and have nuthin’ much else to do, we might as well retell. Enjoy this clumsy translation:

“Pehr Tyrsson’s daughters in Vänge, the forest was so cold.

They slept a sleep too long, while the forest came into leaf.

The youngest one woke up first. The forest…

And so she woke up the others. While the forest…

Then they sat up on their beds, so they braided each other’s locks.

So they put on their silken clothes, so they went to the church.

But when they came to the Vänge hill, they met three highwaymen

“You either be highwaymen’s wives, or would you lose your young lives?”

“We do not wish to be highwaymen’s wives, we’d rather lose our young lives.”

They cut their heads off on a log of birch.

There soon three wells sprung up, the bodies buried in the mud, the clothes taken to the village.

When they came to Vänge farm, Lady Karin met them in the yard.

“And would you buy silken shifts, by nine maidens knitted and stitched?”

“Untie your sacks and let me see, perhaps I know all three.”

Lady Karin beat her chest in pain, and went to find Pehr Tyresson.

“There are three highwaymen in our yard, who have our daughters slain.”

Pehr Tyrsson grasped his sword, he slew the eldest two.

The third he left alive and then he asked him thus:

“What is your father’s name? What is your mother’s name?”

“Our father is Pehr Tyrsson in Vänge. Our mother is Lady Karin in Stränge.”

Pehr Tyrson then went to the smithy, and had iron crafted ’round his waist.

“What shall we do for our sins?”

“We shall build a church of lime and stone.

That church will be named Kerna, And we will willingly build it.”

Catchy, no? An even more gruesome tale as, in this traditional ballad, the highwaymen who murder the daughters are discovered to be the lost outcast sons of the father. Talk about your awkward conversation. And don’t get me started on the amount of Tippex needed for the family tree.

It was this sad tale, retold across the generations, which caught the eye of legendary film-maker Ingmar Bergman. You’ll know Bergman, if not for his oeuvre, then from popular culture.

Bergman is the director that Woody Allen constantly carped on about, influencing as they did Allen’s mid-period “dull” movies (Another Woman, September and Interiors). Lots of staring, lots of silence, lots of woodland, lots of symbolism.

You’ll probably know Bergman for his direction of The Seventh Seal back in 1957, a gloomy black and white movie made famous for the scenes where Max Von Sydow plays chess for his life against a cowled figure of death. You know the one.

This image crops up again in comic tributes in everything from Bill & Ted, where the titular pair battle death at Battleships, Twister, Cluedo and table football.

When death shows up to greet the Monty Python crew in The Meaning Of Life, it owes a heavy debt to Bergman’s imagery.

And, my personal fave, Sir Ian McKellan doing his best ghostly face in John McTiernan’s “Last Action Hero”

So, that’s who three time Oscar winner Ingmar Bergman is.

In 1959, in search of new inspiration, Bergman read the legend of Per Töre. Starting as an idea for a play or ballet, he eventually brought in realist novelist Ulla Isaksson to create a screenplay. Their aims in taking this tale and dramatizing it for the screen were to “explore conflicts between Christianity and paganism” and dissect the idea of guilt. The movie, starring a thunderous Max Von Sydow as the tormented father, was released to huge acclaim in 1960, picking up the Best Foreign Film Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards.

In order to best understand Craven’s Last House On The Left, I cued up The Virgin Spring last week (available here).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbRRTa8ZBeY&t=1530s

And what a motion picture it is. I never went to film school, however class and quality and intent and belief and passion and commitment flicker on every beautifully framed shot. The black and white cinematography is sharp and startling, making every scene a masterpiece and worthy of mounting and framing.

The performances are stunning. Staid and stoic when necessary, flowery and girlish at one turn and bleak and desolate at the next. Bergman sticks pretty closely to the ballad and there are horses and flowers and streams and cottages and the whole nine yards of Swedish medieval settings. The darkness is oppressive, the sunlight glorious. Blood on the hands of the killers, transferred in rage to the trembling father when he realises his sin of revenge; Innocence in the flower-like face of the daughter; Ugly truth of the killers who know no better. All done in stern stagey majesty while Odin silently watches and judges. Fact is, it’s terrific. A simple tale put together by masters of their craft at the top of their game.

Which one hopes is the reason a young Wes Craven – aged just 33 – stumbled over it in his search for a new cheapie film project. The story, after all, has everything an exploitation flick needs: Teenage girls, violence, rape, murder, killers, shock, twists and bloody, bloody revenge. It’s not many movie plots that can be neatly summarized in a 24 line poem. And Craven has clearly grabbed the premise and decided to make one of the most controversial motion pictures of all time. Or has he?

Last House On The Left divides a hell of a lot of people. When established movie critics such as Roger Ebert and horror aficionado Mark Kermode cannot agree, then one could argue you have a film of tastes. One man’s meat, another man’s poison, and so forth. Kermode himself tells an entertaining story of being asked to speak on behalf of the video release of Last House’ only to find that his court-room pleas for integrity, merit, historical importance and value actually incited the censors to make MORE cuts.  Oopsie.

A Google search on “Last House On The Left Reviews” gets you over 36 million hits. This is a movie that divided people. It’s a close 62% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Hardly a landslide. It’s divided the public, the censors, the critics. Even the cast, some of whom have in retrospect, distanced themselves from the art they were part of creating. Every part of the movie someone will champion will be exactly the same scene that had others turning off, turning the channel, turning their backs or indeed, their stomachs. So all it leaves me to do, in this little project of mine, is to throw my thoughts into the mix.

Let’s take a look at the production.

Well, certainly it’s competently made. It’s got consistent colour, focus and sound. Despite the hand-held, cinema verite docu’ found-footage feel, it doesn’t suffer from a cheapie “amateurish” feel that we have seen up until now. We are in the hands of a skilled film-maker (on a budget, certainly) who knows his framing, his panning, his focus depth and has a decent tripod.

Craven has hired decent actors. When asked to play “peeping-tom murdering Alsation-kicking rapist jail-breakers” the cast are not hamming it up. There are no snickering panto villains. The cast uniformly play the violence as dull, humdrum, plodding and matter-of-fact, the mark of true psychopaths. The victims have the boobs and smiles of the innocent and we believe every scream and whimper. Dad is a sitcom stalwart, greying temples and pipe/slippers combo. Exactly the normal sort of chap things like this don’t happen to. Much, perhaps, like young America. And this was what Craven was trying to show us. Fresh, innocent, god fearing and well meaning. America is not the sort of place things like this happen. It is America herself that is the prey, the family being as Brady-Bunch as you might picture. It is wholesome values under the knife, it is innocence, it is simplicity.

The music is deliberate. Off putting, jarring, inconsistent and irritating certainly. But the lurch between the silly slapstick and the violent rapes is disconcerting. When the knockabout laughter is still ringing in the ears as women scream and men stab, it leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths. A silly art-school project, a la Oliver Stone? (See the cartoon antics in Natural Born Killers). “Clever clever” but not much more? Or a way of making the slap in the face all that more painful?

The setting is Bergmanesque, all dark lakes and birdsong. Nature bald and beautiful – a million miles away from the neon, hookers, pimps and cabs of the gritty New York that we are more used to seeing as settings for this sort of stalk and slash. Death among the leaves and shrubs is somehow more palatable. Predators and prey. The circle (twisted Mobius like into self-reference) of life, if you like.

 So. The message of all this. The context. Sigh. “Context.” How much drivel has been put in front of a paying public with the film-makers braying about message and context and subtext. Who was it who said, or at least had it attributed to him, “All I Want Is a Story. If You Have a Message, Send It by Western Union.” Samuel Goldwyn, they say. Hmn.

But give the devil his due. Wes Craven was trying to tell us something, when he pulled together his small cast and trekked out into the woods to carve them up. To make us think. Make us reflect. Make us ponder, reconsider. But about what? Blood squibs? Boobs? Chickens? What was he trying to tell us?

Background writing on Last House ’ reveals Wes Craven had an agenda. Violence on screen in the 60s and 70s was sanitised, cleaned up and cleansed for the family viewer. Reports of “shootings” or “rapes” had no detail, no lurid close-ups, no in-your-face guerrilla film-maker reportage. It was reported tidily, by the numbers, matter of fact, so as not to “upset the viewer.” Your average American could read about “three killed” or “two attacked” or “group slain,”, mutter about “murder and mayhem” (as Mari’s father does) and then settle back for Leave It To Beaver and Jeopardy.

Reports from Vietnam, delivered by the department who put the “stats” into war – headed by Fred McNamara – gave daily body counts to the families waiting at home. “300 killed,” “3 villages destroyed,” “nine wounded,” and so on. Americans, in fact the rest of the Western World, could read these statistics, add them up on their “Vietnam Wallchart” and count the success and failures, like so many kids with Panini football stickers and Sun Newspaper World Cup pull out posters on the fridge.

What did it mean that “10 were killed.” Harmlessly? Painlessly? By gunfire? By gas? By fire? Hollywood and television had taught America that wartime death was painless – aside from some manly grunts and strains during the final trench cigarette when troops remembered their moms at home and sent messages to their “gals” – wartime death was heroic, glorious and patriotic. Who wants the “gory details?”

Well allegedly Wes Craven did. Sickened by the sanitised versions of murder and warfare, softened and cosied by Stars, Stripes and Statistics, he aimed to take the simple tale told in The Virgin Spring and bring it slap-bang right up into the face of an un-expecting America. Death? This is what actually happens. Stabbing? This is how it looks. Rape? This is how it occurs. Gun fire? It hurts. It hurts a lot. There are monsters out there – be they New York thugs or Vietcong soldiers – and when someone who hates you wants to do you harm, it should shock you. Frighten you. Upset you. If you can watch while a woman is knifed, while a man is punched, while a girl is shot? Then you need to know what you’re watching. This stuff is real. This stuff happens. And it’s not pretty. It upset you? Made you look away? It’s about fuckin’ time.

So. The question we are faced with is this: Given we buy this goal (and we don’t wave it away as so much revisionist crap that a horny thirty-something conjoured up in an interview to explain his gratuitous porny stabby exploitation crap), how well does Last House On The Left deliver on its goal?

Well lines like “you were meant to be the love generation!” hammer home the difficulty of a society’s good intentions. It doesn’t really matter what you’re trying to do. It’s what you actually do that matters. A CND necklace is a symbol of peace, it isn’t actually peace. And smiling and dancing behind a picket fence will never, ever protect you from the wolves outside.

Behind the mask of suburbia, Craven seems to be telling us, we are all animals. Tooth and claw. We have our tribes, our packs, our herds. And woe betide the stray who wanders from the candyfloss glow of the ice-cream parlour into the lion’s den.

Is Last House On The Left just a cautionary tale? Perhaps that’s where this sits?

Do as your mom and pop tell you. Stay on the path, beware the moon. After all, Craven cannot resist the girls “breaking the rules” before they are punished. Had they been attacked without getting drunk, lying to their parents and scoring dope? Perhaps this would have been too much even for America to take. Even Bergman’s victim is painted so sickly sweet and cloying to be more manipulative and catty. Not “deserving,” by any means. But certainly not innocent. (We are not ready for truly innocent victims. Teenage Amercians may not have wanted to go to war, but there you are, in someone else’s rice field, someone else’s village, and you are lighting them up with napalm). Marion Crane in Psycho, remember, was an adulterous lying thief. The victims in the Cannibal movies we have seen were all trespassers. So Craven can add this tale to the fables of “do unto others.”

Perhaps a wake up call?

Horrors are real. Outside, where things are dark and unknown, monsters lurk. In wartime jungles or lounging on Inner City stoops. Murders are more than statistics. Bodies are there for more than counting. Death awaits us all and we can build all the houses and fences we like and surround ourselves with money but it comes. Sometimes in a cowl. Sometimes with a chessboard. Sometimes with a machete. Sometimes with a political gain. But we can never hide from it.

Or merely a well made but ultimately nasty little exploitation flick?

Movie criticism aside, what does your average Saturday Night drive in viewer get from Last House On The Left? Knives, tits, screams, tears, blood, chainsaws and chickens. Has Craven created an artsy mythology about his piece of sleaze, to snicker behind his copy of Sight & Sound at pulling a fast one on his critics? Did ANYONE sitting through this movie come away with the messages he was peddling? Or did we all sigh and shower and feel a bit grossed out before idly tuning back to Fox News or Netflix’s 100 Best Serial Killers?

You’ll get from Last House On The Left what you bring to it, horror cinema very much being a mirror. En splatto veritas, as we used to say at school. You will find in Last House whatever you wish to find. There is method in the madness. There is a message in the mess. Cautionary tale, exploitations flick, war metaphor, wake up call for a slumbering 70s America or some grotty rape to the accompaniament of banjos. It’s all of this. And less. And more.

But ultimately, it’s over to you.

Nasty?

Yes. Thoroughly. I made the mistake of not checking the running time when I first watched an online cut of the movie, and I was immediately jolted by some very odd cuts, some jarring jumps and a lack of any of the scenes I had been promised (chainsaws, pant pissing, stabbing). After sitting through this somewhat “cleaned-up” cut, I checked by run times and it appeared I had wasted 70 minutes. A closer hut found the original 84min version. I had no choice but to rewatch the whole damned thing. But nasty it certainly is. Close ups, punches, blood, stabs, rapes, grabbing, fighting – it’s all there in grimy and grainy colour and Wes Craven, as discussed above, never cuts away or pulls away from any of the violence. It’s all up there on the screen, forcing a reaction.

Ban worthy?

What good would it do? As we’ve talked about, Craven is talking about America, he’s talking about attitudes, he’s talking about reportage, censorship, values – subjects that are always worth putting front and centre. Take it for its message, be shocked by its gratuity, be numbed by its relentlessness and made queasy by its jarring comedy. Don’t ban it. Debate it.

What does it remind me of?

The quality is reminiscent of early films in this project, so if you are happy with the textures, style and form of Cannibal Man or Headless eyes, you’ll be fine with this one. It has the relentlessness of Straw Dogs, but not the quality. It has the blood of Bay Of Blood but with more realism. It has the forests of Sacrifice. However there is nothing quite like it and it lives on in infamy as a piece of extraordinary and provocative film-making

Where to find it?

YouTube only has the edited 70min version, but DailyMotion should be able to help you.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x85cjkj

“An extremely well-made Euro thriller with welcome social commentary and subtext. Suspenseful, disturbing and graphically violent, the film succeeds in its depictions of both physical and psychological horror…”

DVD VERDICT

Who made it? Directed by Eloy de la Iglesia| Written by Eloy de la Iglesia & Antonio Fos| Director Of Photography Raúl Artigot| Special Effects Manuel Baquero| Music Fernando García Morcillo

Who’s in it? Vicente Parra | Emma Cohen | Eusebio Poncela

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

Unclear release date. Top ten 1972 movies include Diamonds Are Forever / The Godfather / Fiddler On the Roof / The Devils / Steptoe & Son / The French Connection

Production notes and whatnot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cannibal_Man

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067732/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm

What’s it all about?

And we begin! To the accompaniment of some blasting Mariachi horns and some glorious latiny strings, there is no doubt where we are. Well, I mean we could, to be fair, be anywhere in South America. Possibly Spain. In fact, there are certain parts of West London that ring to the Latin beat. So forget I said that.

Because here we are in a very dusty, poor, cheap café and shanty-town world of Franco’s early 70s Madrid.

The credits pan, full of Spanish names, one losing track of all the Pedros, Juans, Martinez’s and Andreas. So we are in dubbed territory, which we’re gonna have fun with. It gives the whole movie a cheap, daytime US soap feel. But don’t let that put you off. There is much broody, chest-hair and gory fun to be had before we hit the Fin.

So the director wants us to know we are in the world Spain’s of the haves and have-nots. Cameras pan across the rich and the poor. Cheap, stone built whitewashed homes skulk and crumble in the shadow of new luxury apartment blocks. Barefoot urchins kick a ball about the building sites while well-to-dos peer from their luscious high-rise balconies.

So let’s join one of the poorer residents. Alone in his crumbling home, he mooches. There really is no other word for his listless pacing, smoking, feet-up idleness.

But he is troubled. The faded bikinied pin-ups tacked to the stone wall are a mild distraction, but nothing more. He is swarthy, open-shirted, five o’clock shadow and tight pants. He has much on his mind, it is clear. And he is being played by, what appears to be Ian Ogilvy auditioning for Wolverine. If you can imagine that.

Then…we spy him from the view of a high-rise balcony. A clean cut chap, the dead spit of the comedy writer Robert Popper, scans the derelict town with some snazzy binoculars. (Btw, if you’re not familiar with Robert Popper, you’re a twit. Stop reading this and watch Look Around You).

The director wants to show off his film-school training so each shot of the listless Ogilvy is clever, abstract, tilted, artsy and thoroughly unnecessary. But heigh-ho.

Ogilvy, bored by his introspection perhaps, finally summons up the tired energy for a meal and heads for soup in a local café. Why soup? Well Ogilvy is something of a soup “connoisseur” working as he does at a local “beef soup factory” where he cleans meaty sluices and sweeps bovine blood from the concrete floor. As Peter Cook once remarked: “It’s not much of a life, is it?”

Ogilvy flirts a little with a waitress of a similar age. She clearly likes him, and what’s not to like? Stubble, sideburns, Farah slacks and a brooding Heathcliffy scowl. That’s Bronte’s Heathcliff. Not this irritating sub-Garfield twat.

She teases him about settling down. To stop running around with young girls. Now we don’t know “how young” the girls are he’s running around with, so we’re not sure if she’s a lusty, frustrated busybody or someone from the Spanish Child Protection Agency. But I don’t think it’s that sort of picture. She gives him some cheap soup – not his favourite luxury brand – and he sips away listlessly.

But hell! Now we get a look-see at his young bit of skirt and it’s clear she’s no toddler (thank the lord) but also certainly someone who could pass for a niece, rather than a partner. Miniskirts, heels, polyester, all very “girly” compared to his flares sideburns and greasy denim. Picture Dennis Waterman going out with Baby Spice.

We join them in a l’il montage on their date, which appears to be the lacklustre-side of romance. Snogging on the subway, whining at each other about marriage plans. He wants to wait ‘til he gets a better job at the factory. Head sluice scrubber, perhaps. Chief carcass disposal executive? It’s not clear what trajectory he is on. There’s not a lot of love lost between these two we sense. If one of her girlfriends should slip her a copy of “He’s Just Not That Into You,” they’d be doing them both a favour.

They’re on their way home and here’s where poor Ogilvy’s trouble begins. Back of a taxicab, they are face-sucking and snogging and feeling up and fingering like nobody’s business. The cab-driver, clearly a sensitive fellow tired of washing spunk off his leatherette, is having none of it. “This is a taxi! Not a bordello!” Much rowing and yelling ensues. Ogilvy wants to snog in peace, his gal doesn’t want a fuss but Mr Cabbie is adamant. Out you go!

Well they’ll leave, among much huffing and complaining and re-zipping of polyester mini-dresses. But the cabbie wants his fare! Fare’s fair, after all. Nope. You throw us out? We no pay! Now the scuffle gets physical and there’s shoving and grabbing on the street. Ogilvy, in a panic, grabs a nearby heavy rocks and K-POW! Right on his noggin. Down the cabbie goes, in a pool of moans and grue. Oopsie. A little heavy-handed p’raps? But they ain’t stickin’ around for the cops so the coital couple hightail it outta dodge.

Death #1.

And now we get our first caption, for time has passed, the moon has revolved, the earth has turned at it is the next day. Or LUNES, as it’s known in Spain. Monday.

Now I’m no prude (giddy hieghts aside, which make my palms go cold and wet and make we want to vomit my bowels out of my nose e.g stuff like this. Jesus…

Daredevil’s incredible stunts on high-rise building

But we are at Ogilvy’s place of work, and what a world of carnage it is. Who knew so much cow went into so much beef soup? Well of course, I should have. But being a sheltered little snowflake, I have managed to keep my thoughts free of how Daisy gets to the Campbells tin, gaps in my knowledge this movie has plenty of gusto filling in. Horrendous sights of necks, knives, mooing, splattered white coats, struggling and bloodletting as we tour the killing floor of the local “beef soup” factory. Washings of blood, sluice gates, carving knives, big dead eyes and enough horror to inspire a Morrissey album, a follow up and a 24  night run at Caesar’s Palace.

Ogilvy, clearly fairly junior in this outfit, wheelbarrows cuts and slabs and carvings and raw flesh about the sticky concrete rooms with little enthusiasm. What a place to work. He is clearly distracted in his role as junior “dead cow repositioner,” his mood broken when we get a very odd scene of him summoned to see the “chief” in the office upstairs. What is this about? Is he about to be uncovered as a taxi-driver murderer?

Well no. In a huge anti-climax, poor Ogilvy is merely about to be bored to death by his boss, who is all excited about a new contraption he has leased, to take the stress out of mincing meat. The boss is thrilled by this new doo-hickey and keen that Ogilvy, with all his wheel-barrow pushing experience, is put in charge of this gleaming piece of machinery. Oddly, Ogilvy spends most of the meeting trying to give sly sideways glances at the secretary’s thighs. I suppose he may be frustrated from the night before’s taxi-cab hand-jobbus interruptus.

Oh, and the boss adds, sorry about your burned mum. Which is a very odd non sequitur that is referenced once more and then never again. There might be a “motivation” here for Ogilvy’s aspect and mood, but it’s not getting psychoanalysed by us. We are soon heading back to his white stone house and his irritating pleady fiancée.

On the way home Ogilvy bumps into a spindly posh chap walking his dog. Do we know his face? He looks familiar. Hey! This is the Robert Popper lookalike with the binoculars from the opening credits! Do we sense some homoerotic flirting from Popper, interested as he is in greasy desolate Ogilvy and his beef-soaked denim? Hmm. Could be…

But enough of that (we’ll meet more of him later) because the news is out! Spanish newspaper headlines scream “CAB DRIVER MURDERED!” Or possibly “SLAIN!” That seems to be a more tabloid word. People are always SLAIN in tabloids.

But this is bad news for Ogilvy. He’s in the frame for the murder if the cops investigate. He chooses to debate “what to do” with his youthful fiancée. Sadly for him however, she’s the honest and sweet type whose first suggestion is to go to the cops and confess. Ogilvy wants none of this, knowing as he does it’ll be 20 years in a Madridian slammer. They fight. They argue! They debate! Confess! Hide! Confess! Run away! Confess! And so on. They escape coming to blows physically by coming to blows metaphorically as they end up having sex instead. And what odd, almost silent, motionless sex it is. A clock ticks throughout, incredibly loudly. I didn’t go to film school so I don’t know what this means. But tick tock, dick cock, on it goes.

When they awake, sadly Ogilvy’s fiancée has not changed her mind about confessing all to the cops. Ogilvy is still having none of it, more desperate now. “Police only listen to the rich!” he says. Which seems harsh, but still. He calms her down. He puts his hands around her…neck. Oopsie. Much squirming and gurgling as Ogilvy strangles his fiancée. Her eyes bug out, she strains and writhes. But to no good. He ain’t going to choky for no dame, goddamit. She falls to the floor.

Death number #2. You’re gonna need to keep count here.

Now. A conundrum. One dead cabbie being scoured for fingerprints in a morgue is one thing. But a dead fiancée on the kitchen tiles? Not great. Ogilvy picks her up and, with a careless “donk” on the head as they brush past a spanner hanging on the wall, he shoves her lifeless corpse in the bedroom. Phew. Hopefully, that’ll be that. A hahahahaha etc.

MARTES. Or “Tuesday” to you and me.

Ogilvy is back at work. An older chap is joining him on a slow, West Wingy walk-and-talk, sharing stories about life in the beef soup business. But it wouldn’t be a chat without mentioning the stinking stench of Ogilvy’s charred dead mother during her recent “accident.” Hmn. Tact is clearly not a skill prized in the abattoir as much as hacking a cow’s neck open.

But here, here! Look, it’s the new machine the boss promised. Now this looks as little like a modern beef-mincer as you could imagine. A huge grey box with beeps and lights and knobs, it would be more at home in the laboratory of Scotty from Star Trek. Or perhaps Obadiah Blank.

The older chap gives Ogilvy a once over on the machine he is now in charge of integrating into the business. It’s not tricky, to be frank. Open a door, shove in bits of dead cow, close door. Press “auto mince-o-matic” and off it goes, grinding and churning like Beyoncé at a butter farm. We see clear tubes fill with “gravy.” It’s a technological marvel, sure. But sigh. Even less for Ogilvy to do, now he doesn’t even need a wheelbarrow. But that’s progress. (See England in 1760 and the sudden rise in unemployment).

Home, and Ogilvy is bothered by the corpse of his fiancée taking up half the divan. So he shoves her under the bed. That’s better. What could go wrong?

But knock-knock? Who’s this? It’s his flatmate. And brother. He scuttles him out of “Corpseville” and hurries him to the café where they share a drink. But something is up with Ogilvy, and all the flirting from the waitress is not going to snap him out of his troubled mood.

Well you can’t keep a secret like a double murder for long, so Ogilvy pours his heart out to his brother. Maybe he will understand?

Nope, of course not. He’s not a nut-job. Another big fight, as older brother pleads with Ogilvy to turn himself in. This is becoming something of a theme, and Ogilvy has no time for it. Grabbing up the spanner from the rack, still tangled with his dead fiancée’s hair,

Ogilvy decides to really “explain” himself to his brother and BOOM. BASH. BONK. SQUIRT. SCREAM. THUD. The brother goes down in a heap, spanner sticking out of his face.

Death #3.

Wednesday. Or rather, MIERLOLAS.

Back from another day in the cow-slicing trade, Ogilvy (now with 2 stinking corpses getting warm and maggoty in his boudoir) bumps once again into the sexiest dog walker in town. The flirting is heavier now, Popper clearly wanting some stubbly denim action from his neighbour. But hey again, Ogilvy is keen to get home to mop up the leaking innards. But…knock-knock? Oh who is it now? It’s getting more tiresome than Noel’s House Party. It’s his sister in law. She’s looking for her brother. Has Ogilvy seen him? There are some sweaty errrms and uhhms… What can he say? She wants to check the bedroom for him but Ogilvy distracts her. She asks for an aspirin and some water, taking advantage of the fussing about in the kitchen to burst into the bedroom, hoping to find his brother with a surprise wedding gift perhaps?! No. Just a dead body.

I’ll give you a quid if you can tell me what happens next?

Correct! Ogilvy grabs up a cleaver and it’s a huge juicy slice across the poor woman’s neck. Very leaky, very sloppy, very “blood all over the place.” Blimey, he’s only gawn and done it again.

Death #4. Sigh. Surely there can be no more?

After rearranging the corpses on the bed so they aren’t quite so stare-y, Ogilvy needs some well- deserved air and to get his thoughts together. Outside he goes, only to find – yep, you guessed it –  the creepy dog walker once again. This time he appears to be turning from Robert Popper to a Buffalo Bill type from Silence Of The Lambs, played memorably by Ted Levine. Flirting still, he convinces Ogilvy to join him for a drink at a nearby bar. Some passing cops don’t like the look of these two shifty so-and-sos (and who can blame them), so they get hassled by the pigs, as we used to say in the 80s. Popper is left alone as he is clearly wealthy (remember? Police only listen to the rich) but Ogilvy is made to present his “papers.” Tch, one rule for camp dog walkers, a whole other rule for quadruple murderers.

JUEVES (That’s, I think Thursday. Keep up).

We’ll do the next one quickly as you’re getting the idea.

The only startling thing about this 5^th repetitious carve-up is that, for reasons passing understanding, suddenly the dubbing vanishes and we get subtitles instead. This rather comically demonstrates the huge difference between the actor’s voices and their dubbers. Proposterous nonsense.

Anyhoo, it’s his fiancee’s dad. He’s looking for her. Is that her purse? Oh for fuck’s sake…and it’s a delicious Cleaver to the face, a la Bay Of Blood, and down he goes. Delicious.

Death #5.

Surely that’s the lot? Well let’s keep going and see what happens…

Well now all the slaughter-house beef-soup preamble comes into play for our Ogilvy has an idea. He begins to use his daily jobbing skills to start chopping up the body parts. In the dead of night, a very suspicious Ogilvy arrives with a small sports holdall. To the gleaming machine he scuttles and then starts loading the dead body parts into the mincer. Mmm. Nice. Disposed of successfully, and now with a plan of sorts, home he goes to continue the chopping. Few more trips to the mincer and he should be home free. What this will do to the flavour of the soup does not appear to be a big concern to our hero. 

VIERNES (That’s Friday to you people).

Morning once more at the café. Popper is back, asking probing questions that are unsettling our hero. (Hero? Ed). Plus the meaty offal in his holdall is causing Popper’s dog to get a bit jumpy and sniffy. Ogilvy brushes him off as he’s late to fork a load more Father In Law into the mincer.

On his way home, Ogilvy realises that his house is going to be whiffing like Fred West’s greenhouse if he’s not careful, so we get a delightfully comic scene as he turns up at the local Pharmacy.

In a not at all suspicious manner, he orders – in a scene reminiscent of The Two Ronnies – 4 bottles of cooking-odour spray. Oh and 10 bottles of “whatever cologne” the pharmacist has.

Believe me, the pharmacist is not off loading any Calvin Klien or Chanel. This stuff looks rank and cheap and stinky. But of course, exactly the sort of old-lady over-powering scent Ogilvy needs if he is to fumigate his apartment.

Wild dogs greet Ogilvy as he returns to his door, whiffing as they clearly are the rotting maggoty stench of rotting fiancée.

He sprays the house, he scents the furniture, the whole stink clearly being too much for his delicate nostrils. Time to head out while the smell settles. And where better than back to flirting in the café.

And what flirting it is! Rosa – clearly with a pash on our hero – is all too keen to cook him up some supper, resulting in a rather stirring moment when she splashes milk and eggs on his jeans and then proceeds to slowly wipe his thigh in a manner Emmanuel would have considered “a bit much.” But Ogilvy can’t been jumping into bed with Rosa, as much as he might want to. He has a good 1.5 dead bodies left to chop up and mince. Focus, man! Focus!

The movie has now fallen into a predictable pattern of café/soup/interruption/murder/mince-meat and dog-walker flirting. So it’s time for some more dog walker flirting. Now Popper appears to be making progress as an offer of “coming back to my apartment for a swim” goes down famously. As famously in fact as Rosa was promising to do about 2 scenes ago. 

So off in Popper’s Porsche and to his luxury apartment when the whole sketch goes rather soft gay porn. Lots of bare chests and frolicking and swimming trunks and manly showering and flesh and lustful gazes. Hell, they even toss a beach ball back and forth at each other for fuck’s sake.

Which brings us. Inevitably, to SABADO. Sabado night being all right for fighting. Or murdering café staff (spoilers).

So Ogilvy, for the last time we hope as this motion picture is asking the audience to deal with a hell of lot of repetition, is heading back to work with another holdall full of body parts. Regretfully however he stumbles across the Spanish touring cast of West Side Story: Leather jackets, finger clicks, sleeveless t-shirts and greasy quiffs, they ain’t happy that Ogilvy has gone all “up in the world” from his humble roots.

Now. This I missed. Are these other soup-factory workers? Irritated and betrayed that “one of their own” should be in charge of the magical mincing machine? I don’t know. But there’s some of that tiresome bully “throw the bag to one another” antics that – having been bullied at school – I recall simply having to stand and wait out until the idiots got bored. You’re meant to chase the bag from thug to thug as they laugh and toss it between them. But Christ, who can be bothered. A little suspense as they pull at the zip – maybe half a fiancée and a third of a father-in-law might spill out all over the dock (as the Mayor of Amity Island once said)? But no. Ogilvy grabs his bag and he’s off. Back to work to feed his family into the great contraption.

We have about 30mins left. Where the hell is this going?

This time, as Ogilvy scoops loved ones into the machine, his colleagues start questioning his behaviour, his odd hours, his holdall and his general suspicious as all get out behaviour. They check his bag. Is he stealing meat? Well, I mean LITERALLY the opposite. But they let him go. Despite the machine owners reporting “odd substances” in the mixture. Hmn.

And now, at LAST! We get the feeble explanation of the movie title. For what should Ogilvy rather predictably do but turn up AGAIN at the local café and ask for a bowl of beef soup. “This one you will like!” Rosa reassures him. As, it urns out in the most predictable twist in the world, he is now chowing-down on his own manufactured soup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-gTZDHRJec

Yep. He’s spooning in mouthfuls of delicious brother, aromatic spoonfuls of fiancée, chunky bits of father-in-law and delicious slivers of sister-in-law. Yum. Overcome with disgust, understandably, he spits it all out and runs from the café, all queasy and sweating.

So if you were hoping for a movie about cannibalism…that was it. That was the bit. Rubbish.

But we have a few more minutes to wrap up this nonsense so, hell, why not have…yep! Popper the dog-walker turn up one more time! Oh do fuck off mate.

DOMINGO. Sunday.

Given this movie is also known as “Week Of The Killer,” SURELY we must be in the last gasps of this silly flick. Well, we are.

There isn’t much more to wrap up. We need another murder – obviously, it’s been minutes since the last one – and we need some kind of redemption perhaps. Or maybe a dark 1970s ending where Ogilvy goes on to another town to murder more innocent family members? (See Michael Winner’s “Death Wish”)

Well it’s Sunday. Rosa is all dressed up for church. She makes excuses with her café boss. With a lot of Spanishy arm waving she says she’ll be back after mass. Hmn. We don’t know much Rosa, but with all the dairy thigh massaging, we are not picturing her as the nun type.

Nope. Here she is at Ogilvy’s house. She has turned up for a quicky. Clearly the eggs and milk moment has got her pulse racing and she fancies a bit more of that swarthy Dennis Waterman action.

Which would be fine…but what’s that smell? Kitchen cleaner mixed with Estee Lauder Youth Dew? Something’s not right.

But that’s not going to stop her so she and Ogilvy get it on and there is some on-the-couch sexy time, afternoon-delight whatnot. They have sex, in other words. They smoke. She dresses. She wants to “air” the spare bedroom (oopsie!) and wants to open all the doors and windows. Ogilvy is having none of it and tries to distract her. (Can you see where this might be going?)

As she gazes around the grotty stone home, she spots knives, blood spots, machetes, holdalls, spanners… Something is rotten in the state of Madrid. She tries to leave. Ogilvy knows she has seen too much. He pleads with her to stay. She struggles. And…

Well yep, we’ve death #5.

Banging her head against the wall, her eyes go a bit crossed and down she goes. Blimey, this mincer is going to need extra batteries.

Now Ogilvy is finally losing it. Five deaths? He only wanted to make a decent beef soup, goddamit! Out he goes into the city, prowling, walking, funky music, angles, off focus. We’re in twisted Saturday Night Fever territory: Rock, jazz, Hammond, wah wah guitar. He stumbles about. Lost. Desperate. Alone. And responsible for 5 murders and at least half a main starter course.

We end, as expected, with the dog walker once more. His guiding light, his guardian angel, his potential gay-lover. Whatevs.

Back to mine? And off they go to his palatial high-rise flat. It’s lush, it’s rich, it’s swanky. It’s exactly how the “other half” live. They drink. They lounge. Ogilvy spots a fancy pair of binoculars. What’s this..?

Oops. He gazes out, focusing and re-focusing on the street below…only to find that his house is in direct view of the apartment. Popper has seen it ALL! Oh shit.

Are we about to face murder #6? “You can’t get away with it!” Popper cries. Ogilvy smashes a glass, lunges at Popper! Another murder? No…NO!

Ogilvy collapses in tears about his actions. Popper understands. He wants to help. How much does he know? We can’t be sure. But he won’t report him. Ogilvy must take this in his own hands…

It’s all a bit cryptic and poetic. What now? Guilty? Innocent? Only Ogilvy can choose.

And the movie ends as a tearful Ogilvy departs, wanting to confess, wanting to rid his conscience of the torment. Stumbling and wracked with regret and remorse, Ogilvy stops only to call the police at a pay-phone and admit his crimes.

Popper watches from his heights as Ogilvy walks a lonely resigned walk to his crumbling house and slumps outside, awaiting the wail of sirens.

A trumpet, for no reason, appears to play – from nowhere – “Nowhere Man” by The Beatles.

Which one assumes is meaningful. Or something.

Fin.

Is it any good?

Well there’s a question. Sold-a-pup title aside (this movie has less cannibalism than an episode of Midsommer Murders) it’s not at all bad. I mean sure, screamingly repetitive, tediously samey, plodding and tortuous in its round-and-round cycle of soup, visitor, argument, murder, café, dog walker, soup visitor murder…and so on and bloody so on. However it is not without its charms and the company who have put it together have done their best to make it as engaging and suspenseful as they can.

The scene setting is terrific and we get a genuine sense of the time and place, the crumbling lives of the poor and the luxury spa weekends of the rich. Although to be fair the whole “us vs them” motif is a little laboured. Is he really an innocent man tortured by the authorities for his lack of status? Is this an indictment of Franco’s 1970s Spanish politics and economics? A rich tapestry highlighting the meaningful struggles in 1970s Europe? Well it tries…but no it isn’t. He’s a horny cab-driver-pummelling murderer. So it’s difficult for us to see this as a rich-vs-poor parable. The alleged “satire of Spain under Franco,” I’m “franco-ly” not seeing. Perhaps, like many projects the writer set out to make a valuable point about political oppression? But given the big bucks being raked in by Craven’s Last House On The Left shocker and Deep River Savages, bottled it and shoved in as much pre-Friday The 13^th gore-hound splurge and gore as the censors could handle and left the post-modern reading to el cine-students

Maybe there is much of Ogilvy’s troubled childhood about his horribly burnt mother and the inevitable trauma, but given this is all left on the cutting room floor and we just get some gruesome asides from his co-workers, it’s hardly set up as a motive, or even an explanation.

The DoP (director of photography), guided one assumes by the director, is showing off his Movie School chops with as many varieties of artsy zooms and odd-angle shots as he can, however if this is an attempt to show us a mind off-kilter, it misses the mark. It looks, to be honest, more like a sign of a camera off tripod. However one commends the effort to lens this flick in a creative way, rather than the stock, fixed, mid-shot soap-opera it could have been. So hats-off for the effort.

The overall look is lovely if we’re using The Cannibal Man as a time-capsule of the era. All the denim, the grime, the medallions, the sports cars and sideburns firmly place it in the early seventies and it’s all captured with a nasty realism. You’ll want to fling open your windows after watching to get rid of the smell of roll-ups and Hai Karate.

As we’ve covered, director Eloy de la Iglesia takes great relish to go with his beef. Or perhaps it’s barbeque sauce. But there is no holding back as we see the jusxtaposition of the gruesome murders of Ogilvy’s close family mirrored by the hacking and sawing of the abbetoir. A lesson or message here, one presumes. We are happy with seeing some macabre slaughtering for a bowl of mid-priced soup, but balk at the same treatment of innocent humans? There’ll be some vegetarians wandering about Spain who will have had their ideology twisted by the relentless slaughter-house sluice shots of the killing floor. Or at least, one hopes, some omnivores like myself hesitating before we tuck into our Sunday roast, which is just as it should be.

One imagines the sudden cuts out of dubbing into Spanish are a production error or perhaps a problem with the transfer from celluloid to MP4. It’s hard to picture the jarring cut between dubs and language to have been in the final print. Unless this grotty art-house 42^nd street drive-in slasher is even cheaper than it appears.

Style wise, we are definitely in the odd cross-over world of the day-time Euro-soap opera and the gay softcore porno. The sets, the outdoor shots, the lighting and even the performances have that one-take woody-ness. But it’s all forgiven as the whole piece has a certain earnest charm. This has not been knocked together over a weekend for a fast buck. We are in the company of a writer/director with a message beyond “look how nasty this is,” and even if the message is a little lost among the soup and sluice, this is far from a waste of your time.

Nasty?

Hoo boy! What did we count? See, told you to pay attention. I think it was 5 deaths in total. We had a a rock to the skull, a throat slit, a cleaver to the face, a battering against the wall and a spanner to the head. And each are delivered with everything the horror fan wants. The cuts and slashes and poundings are slow and deliberate, the claret gushes far too bright and red and there are plenty of stomach-turning close-ups of corpses and mashed up faces with cleavers sticking out of them. Honestly, we are on Episode 15 of “Getting The Banned Back Together” and it’s fair to say that the cleaver-to-the-head attack of Cannibal Man is right up there with Bava’s Bay Of Blood for “ewwwww!”

So gore, yes. Bloodlust, yes. Creepy solo-male murders yes. But there’s nothing “nasty” in tone or mood. As we said before about the western “Enter The Devil”, none of this is gratuitous, porny, lascivious or pervy. It’d be very difficult to get any twisted, drity-raincoat turn-ons from the this plodding and depressing spiral of one lonely man’s descent into self-preserving murder as he seems as disgusted by the whole lot as we are.

Ban Worthy?

Well let’s look at the numbers: A quick review of the movies on my list show 8, count ‘em EIGHT, movies with a Cannibal in the title. As we’ve discussed, when the National Viewers & Listeners Association got together and roped in a queasy and vote-chasing Department Of Public Prosecutions, there was something of a moral panic and the department was keen to be seen to be “banning this sick filth.” As an inevitable consequence, having “Cannibal” in the title was likely to see the VHS grabbed and shoved in a bin-bag by a copper on time-and-a-half.

Research doesn’t help me here but given the movie was also known as a much more relevant title “Week Of The Killer” (and the ludicrous “Apartment on the 13^th Floor”) it could be said that a rental-hungry distributor re-titled it to get a bit of publicity. I mean, the guy has a mouthful of beef soup for Chrissakes. I’ve had more of a “Green Inferno” in a spinach and broccoli smoothie.” The murders are bloody however and the cameraman lingers so it’s far from family fare. But banned? Oh give over.

What Does It Remind Me Of?

Well there’s a bit of everything here. We have the cleaver-heavy pounding of Bava’s “Bay Of Blood;” we have the creepy stranger with binoculars which – at a big push – could put is in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” territory. As said, it reeks of a 1970s men’s fragrance commercial with a heavy Spanish Daytime soap aesthetic. The plodding poe-faced mundanity would appease fans of Michael Rooker’s performance in “Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer.”

Oh and finally, there is as much beach-ball tossing, swimming trunk wearing and swimming pool splashing as a Cliff Richard beach movie. There’s a combination for you.

Where Can I See it?

Trailers and such are all over YouTube but for a decent print, head over to AmazonPrime and for a £2.49 slice of your wages, you can download the flick for a night.

“Enter the Devil is a diamond in the rough of cheap and greasy drive-in flicks.  It is to be experienced and marveled at as a stunning example of effective and shocking regional thrillers.  And it still works.”

REELREVIEWS.COM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjOczG3eDSg

Who made it? Directed by Frank Q Dobbs | Written by David S Cass Snr / Frank Q Dobbs | Director Of Photography Michael F Cusack | Special Effects JAcl ennet / Ed Geldart | Music Beau Eurell /AJ Smutt

Who’s in it? Norman Kelley | Tanna Hunter | Bruce Detrick | Jack Beubeck | Paul Craig Jennings

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

Unclear release date. Top ten 1972 movies include Diamonds Are Forever / The Godfather / Fiddler On the Roof / The Devils / Steptoe & Son / The French Connection

Production notes and whatnot

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068540/

What’s it all about?

Well once again we are on a dusty cactus laden track. The score is frankly more up to date and we are in the realm of Ultravox or perhaps the great Gary Newman.

Our hapless driver (they’re always hapless before the credits roll. I wonder why they all set off for these distant cowboy towns without checking the boot for all their hap? But they do. Our driver is framed in the sights of a distant sniper and POW! Out goes his tyre. Oh this isn’t going to be good. Out he clambers, all plaid hunter’s cap and fwoofy hick moustache. His crackly radio tells us we are in deep Texas territory, where our tale is to be told. Up comes a pick-up truck to give him a lift. And off they go into the dust of a sunny afternoon. And we won’t be seeing him much again we can sense…

And now we’re in business!

Over the credits we are in druidy sacrifice country, once again. We get the obligatory credits while, eerie silhouetted figures cross the horizon, each hooded and cowled and holding a blazing torch. There are robes, there is chanting of the mystic Gregorian/latiny type, there are candles and wind across the fields as the sun sets. You’ll know by now I’m a sucker for a bit of “Sanctus” so I’m feeling good about this one. Oh yes, we’re in for some fun.

Especially as, just prior to the movie starting proper, we in in cavey dungeon territory and there are juicy Pacer Mint stripes of lashings and carvings on some poor souls’ flesh. Hoo boy.

A quick change of tone however….because the rest of movie pretty much turns – in a good way – into an X Rated episode of one of those TV cowboy shows. Bonanza, The High Chaparral. Hey even thrown in a little Dukes Of Hazard while we’re here. We are with real men drinking real beer and drivin’ dusty old pick-ups, knives in back pockets and battered working gloves hangin’ on the belt.

A cop – the David Arquette type (we’ll call him Arquette) – is busying himself fixin’ up a jeep. The standard central-casting portly sheriff comes a’waddlin’ out. It’s the old “up for re-election” staple so Sheriff doesn’t want any open cases on the books. And there’s talk of a missing person. Why doesn’t Arquette “haul-ass” (or whatever) and go a-lookin’ for this missin’ fellah?

And off he goes.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a cave or cavern, a poor victim is being attached to a cross Jesus style. Barbed wire.  Drippy blood. If this is the chap Arquette is hunting for…he’s going to be able to bring the remains home with a sponge.

Arquette gets directions from a very non-crazy “Crazy Ralph” type (see Friday The 13^th for details) and he’s driving through dust and canyons to near the Tex-Mex border.

Arquette arrives to find an old pal Glenn. A drinkin’ buddy. Neckin’ a cold tin of Pearl lahger (more on that later), there is manly good-old-boy back slappin’. His pal runs a hunting lodge. Horses, dust, logs. A place where locals can spend the weekend on rough beds polishing their rifles and intimidating Mexican teenage girls. As you do.

Glen tells Arquette that one of his maids – Juanita – still holds a candle. So it looks like Arquette has a reason to stick around some.

Cue the arrival of the hunters. They’re all sippin’ more Pearl beer and ready for a weekend blasting shot at terrified deer. There’ll be some boisterous and manly carousing to be had before Monday morning and they’re all back at the power plant. Or something.

But what is this?! On their trip out in the back of a pick-up, they spread out to find their prey. But stumble across a burnt out car at the bottom of a ravine. Ooooh, nasty. The car’s all charred and busted up, blackened and burnt…as is the driver, little of whom remains that doesn’t look like charcoal.

But the sheriff will be damned if this “accident” is going to cost him his re-election so it’s “hushed up” all round. You can’t dust for charcoal so it’s written off as an accident. We, dear viewer, of course know different. Especially when the local Doc (played by a young Steve Martin lookalike) claims the driver was stabbed to death, rather than burnt alive. Hmmm.

This doctor is one of the good guys though, so he’s interested in what might have gone on, his interest piqued further as he flips through a handy copy of “20^th Century Primitives” by Professor Leslie Suchandsuch. A quick phone call to the El Paso University…maybe this Prof Leslie can shed some light on stabbed men who die in burnt cars on Mexican borders? Well…you never know…

Meanwhile, back on the ranch (honestly, how often can you write that?) the hunters are misbehaving. Over plates of steak and corn and whatever the fuck “grits” is – and a whole barrel of good old Pearl beer – there is some loud drunky flirting with Juanita and Maria. The ladies are having none of it and a rapey-scuffle by some chap we’ll call “Tachy McDick” is interrupted by the Mexican man of the house.

But let’s not stand about while Tachy licks his wounds, let’s meet Prof Leslie! For tis she! She has arrived with Doc Martin. She’s all sass and sunglasses and Glen is definitely partial to a visit from the PhD for an all over exam.

I’m suddenly reminded of a scene in a sitcom when a woman says “can the doctor see me now!” in a brassy sexy manner. Friends? Yes. I think its fatted-up Monica. Anyhoo, back on the ranch…

We get a nice bit of, what one could attempt to brand “satire” at this point, given we are in the world of crazy religions and cults. They ask the snr Mexican if he’s religious? He laughs. He’s a Christian. But hey, one day you can eat meat on a Friday, next the church says you can’t? Then you’ve got a St Christopher’s medal for luck? But he ain’t going to save you?

They all give a wry chuckle. Religion, eh?  Tch, whassit all about?! They’re all the same!

The screen doesn’t flash “author’s message” at the bottom, a la Woody Allen’s “What’s New Pussycat.” But it might as well.

Brilliant.

So where were we? You’ll have noticed not much blood and/or guts so far. In fact it’s fair to say this is far far too well made a rural Tex-Mexsploitation drama, full of rounded characters and dramatic beats to waste time flinging offal about. Which is a shame. But more of that later. Back to the plot.

In fact, I spoke too soon, for what should happen next but rapey old Tachey McDick is out on the prairie, burping up a weekend’s worth of Pearl bubbles, when he gets jumped by some hooded cowl type. Boom! They’re all over him. That’ll serve him right, the randy old Quaid.

His fellow hunters go looking for him, but alas it’s too late as we witness him being trussed up, flaming torches in his face, surrounded by snakes. By jingo, there’s somethin’ weird going on in those mountain caves, I can tell you.

Eventually he is found. But worse for wear. Dead. A snake bite? Round these parts? Hmmmn. Chalk up suspicious death number #2.

Now this will hardly be good for business, as Glen watches all his guests pile out of their dorms and into their trucks. Hell, this was meant to be a simple huntin’ trip! 2 dead? Let’s get outta here! So off they roar in their beaten up pick up, leaving just Glenn, Arquette, Doc Martin, sexy Professor Leslie and the Mexican staff. Bugger. That’s fucked the season worse than Brexit.

Well if you’ve no guests to cook up grits for, you might as well make a pass at the only skirt in the village. Some chit chat about the resurrection of obscure cults and religions on the Mexican border. Hmm, a clue? Or at least…some plot? Well enough of that hokum. Glen comes a-knockin’ with wine (presumably from the vineyard at Pearl Breweries) and bread and cheese and conversation and a massive hard-on in his Wranglers, we assume. And good luck to them both. (Frankly, it’s nice, now we’re on Episode 14 of this project, to get some actual consensual sex. I’ve had it up to here with slappy Nazis and bum-smackin’ oafs. But then that’s my liberal post-Marxist Westminster bubble softy softy PC Corbynista-ness coming out I suppose. Pass the Kale smoothie…)

So, next morning after he’s picked the bits of dry tissues off his bits and she’s taken the morning after-pill, they’re all up early to visit a local mine to hunt for clues. Cue dusty mine carts and pick-axes as local Mexicans chip and hack into the stone. But wait! Who is this! Is it a chap with three slashes on his back?! B-b-b-but hold on! We saw him being tortured in the opening scene! Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

For about 5 minutes, the director realises nothing has happened, so we get an entirely pointless “stunt,” as a rusty min-cart comes loose of its rusty-mine-cart-lock and knock Arquette off a cliff. No-one hurt. No harm done. But it’ll look good in the trailer.

So back to the hunting lodge. Let’s relax on the porch with yet another can of good old refreshing Pearl beer. Arquette arranges and cheeky “don’t tell your pop” liaison with Juanita for that night. What could go wrong?

Well we’re in the last 15 mins so Juanita has had it.

Off for her midnight tryst, she is grappled and manhandled away by Druidy chap#4 and whisked off for some kind of sacrificial whatnot. Arquette spots the flaming torches ‘cross yonder (sorry, the Westerny feel is making me write like Elmer Kelton. (Look him up).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Kelton Juanita is ready for sacrificing! Barbed wire, wooden crosses, people in cowly druidy robes, incantations and Gregorian whatnot! Wicker set alight! Hammers and nails! The music goes very Omen II (great score).

with a healthy bit of Wendy Carlos’s discordant thunder from The Shining

Arquette gathers to watch from a high, distant viewpoint, a la Temple Of Doom, as the sacrifice and rituals commence. But as always, you can’t hide for long and now its Druids vs Cowpokes ahoy!

Attack! Gun fire! Run! Run! Our hero scarpers sharpish and high-tails it outta Dodge. But to no avail as whoever fixed his jeep (wait a second…wasn’t it him? About 90mins ago?) comes from the A-Team school of wiring, so as the jeep (no brakes!) careers off the ravine it, for no reason known to engineering or physics, bursts into flames. Well it’ll look good in the trailer…

So we’re I the last gasp of the movie. Professor Leslie clambers onto a train to head back to El Paso, leaving the “men” behind to sort out the problems. (See how I put “men” in commas there? Christ, what a wokey snowflake I have become). They’re men. That’s not inherently a bad thing. Sigh.

But sass! Prof Leslie waits for the train to slow down and off she jumps, doubling back!

Sheriff and Doc Martin meet Mentally-Stable Ralph. He’s seen weird things! “Women! Lights!” Something ain’t right up there in those mountains. So we are all set for a final confrontation. Which, with seven short minutes to go, we’re about to get.

Up to the hills they go… Down, down, down into the caves. They hear singing and chanting. Which, to be honest, is not clear if is the cast or the soundtrack, as it does seem to be backed up by some nifty synth work. It’s not clear if one of the druids has a Moog up his cassock.

A Moog Up His Cassock. I love my job sometimes.

Down the rickety ladder they descend, “Watch that first step…it’s a big one.”

Oopsie! We’re back in Indy territory, as some loose rocks draw attention to them and they are nabbed. Cut to our helpless PhD on the stone altar! It’s all got very Roger Corman and baroque.

She is to be sacrificed! And slowly the hoods and cowls are removed to find…

Shock! The cast! It’s the Mexicans from the lodge! And it’s Glen! Dan Dan Dahhh!

Well there’s nothing more to do now than have the Calvary arrive, Deux Ex Machine Gunner. It all goes Sam Penkinpah as the townsfolk, Sheriff and Uncle Tom Cobly turn up –hopped up on Pearl Export Extra Strength – with what appear to be sub-machine guns and start ratatatatting the place down! Screams! Yells! Blood! Havoc! Rock falls! Robes!

And more and more gunning…

And you don’t get a last line like:  “Maybe dynamite will put an end to all this foolishness?” very often, so savour it.

Ka-boom.

Burp.

Credits

All brought to you, sponsored by the nice people “Pearl” beer.

Is it any good?

Oh it’s a treat. Production values are clearly something that is growing as the months and years tick by in the Nasty genre.

But what we have is a finely performed and solidly directed Mexican/Texan thriller with just the right amount of shocks and thrills to pass an idle 2 hours or so.

Inspiration for “Enter The Devil” is clearly based on the legends and lore of the Penitentes, aka ‘The Brothers of the Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene‘, aka Los Hermanos, the Brotherhood of our Father Jesus of Nazareth or indeed The Penitente Brotherhood. As of course I’m sure you already knew (yawn). This bunch, according to limited research I could be bothered to do, are a lay confraternity of Spanish-American Catholic men, mainly busying themselves around Northern and Central New Mexico and southern Colorado. You can read all about them here should this sort of thing blow your cassock up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penitentes_(New_Mexico)

So the mystical lore around these cowls and candles chaps makes fine fodder for a flick about cave dwelling druidy types and plenty of excuses for heaps o’ Gregorian chant, flaming torches, sacrifices and chalices. All sexed up for the movie of course.

Off the back of this movie, dusty desert based thrills became something of a trend, mixing as they do the horror stalwarts of covens and caves, death and dust, Catholicism and cacti. This was, after all, just 3 years after the horrific “cults” of Manson et al were all over the US headlines filling small-town folk with a fear and distrust of secret societies out in the West. A couple of other movies in what I am now calling Texploitation are Jack Starrat’s Race With The Devil (starring king of the desert track, Peter Fonda) and Robert Fuest’s The Devil’s Rain (watchable for a young William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino and the debut of John Travolta).

The clichés we know are all present and correct however all played straight by decent TV actors so they ring truer than they might in a cheaper version: Our chubby sheriff, up for re-election; our yokel with suspicions about what’s goin’ on up in them there hills; our sassy Sociologist Professor on the case. All present and correct but giving it all they’ve got.

The hunters up from the city for a day’s shootin’ are straight out of Jaws: Laughing and carousing. All that’s missing is a snarky Richard Dreyfuss to tell them “you’ve over loading that truck.”

The druids themselves are part Tatooine Tusken Raiders/Sand-people in their aspect, with a healthy dose of an elongated Jawa, an image not helped by the dusty mountainous terrain.

The relationship between our two leads is easy to buy, resembling as they both do, Sam and Diane from the sitcom Cheers. She’s a blousy egg-head he’s the rough talkin’, denim wearing, suede-jacketed stud who likes his gals clean and his beer from the fine Pearl brewery.

Which reminds me: An over-riding image or message one takes from this high class bit of dusty death is to drink “Pearl Beer.” Now, as an Englishman, I have no idea what Pearl Beer is. I can only surmise, from the thin crumple-ease tins that it’s a generic weak, pale, slightly fizzy lager that Americans “chug” at a ball-game. Weaker than lemonade, filthier than piss, it goes well with a lynching, curly fries or the Superbowl.

Here in London we have…well, we have actual beer. Stout, lager, bitter, mild. Each as thick and chewy as ya momma’s best grits. That’s a drink. Sunday lunch in a glass.

Oh. Oh! And by the way. By the fucking way, let me take this opportunity to call something out that’s bothered me for YEARS.

There is a scene in the sitcom “Friends.” I’m sure you know the show. The gang have been to London (Cue cameos from Hugh Laurie, Sarah Ferguson and Richard Branson) and are reminiscing about their time in the capital. Someone mentions “Boddingtons” as a classic UK beer. “What I wouldn’t give for another frosty glass of that bad boy!” Joey says.

Frosty glass of Boddingtons? Frosty? A straw-golden hoppy bitter served at ROOM TEMPERATURE? Ffs. Idiot. You may as well pine for a freezing glass of Yorkshire Pudding

Sorry. Needed to get that off my chest.

But Pearl is a major sponsor of the movie and gets a huge thanks in the credits and blimey they get their money’s worth of product placement. Hic.

Some of the cavern and cave scenes are a little murky on the Mexican border. Or as Speedy Gonzales would have said, “under-lit! Under-lit!” But the gore is red and sloshy and there is genuine peril to grip the peril-hungry viewer.

So crack open a Pearl, light a torch, sharpen your barbed-wire and settle in for a genuine treat.

Nasty?

Not unpleasantly so, which is a nice change. As we’re discovering on this journey (and it IS a journey) often the violence, the attacks, the bludgeoning and slicing up is done with a spiteful, vicious, twisted-minded prowly ugliness. So the turn-off is as much the “attitude” to the leering acts as it is the claret and lasagne itself. But the blood-letting and bashing on screen here is, if it doesn’t sound contradictory, “harmless” enough, wrapped as it is in cowls and gloom with plenty of good “Sanctus Dominus!” on the soundtrack. So not one for the squeamish – far from it – but the gore and whatnot is more likely to raise “urghs!” and “giggles” than distaste.

Ban worthy?

Not in the slightest.

Yes, we have carvings into flesh, the red gluey drip of stage-blood, charred skulls and crucifixes, but nothing at all to bother the weak-minded or lily-livered. This particular Druids vs Cowboys saga appeared on the dreaded “Video Nasty – Big 72” list, back when VHS was being seized willy-nilly, thus making it something of a must-see for the completists and purists and fans of Pearl beer. But one must attribute its inclusion on the list, as is becoming common, to a lurid title: “Devils” are right up there with “Cannibals” and “Last’s” to get the Public Prosecutors trembling. Plus of course a box that promises much more gore than we actually get.

What Does It Remind Me Of?

Well there’s a little Saturday early-evening fun with the Western theme that has a touch of the Dukes Of Hazzard. The aesthetic of the men (hats, boots, suede jackets, battered gloves and pick-ups) isn’t too from a cheap Brokeback Mountain spin-off. As mentioned, the attacks and jumps in the desert are straight out of Star Wars A New Hope. “I don’t recall owning any Druids?” You have the lumpen locals from Jaws. But I’ll tell you what it most reminds me of. And it’s this sketch by the legendary British comedy double act Fry & Laurie. Or to international readers, the voice of Harry Potter Audio books and Gregory House. Honestly. This is what I thought about the whole damned picture. Cut this sketch with an episode of Bonanza and you have Enter The Devil.

Where Can I See it?

Copyright being what it is, there’s a decent print kicking about for free on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tah2YrUfLgk&t=247s

“First and only time director Ed Adlum made “Blood Farmers” over three weekends in 1972, on a budget of $24,000, with amateur actors paid in cans of beer. The result is a sub-Ed Wood “horror” film that isn’t scary, is unintentionally funny in places but tedious in others, and a chore to watch.”

IRONCURATOR. One star. AMAZON.CO.UK

Who made it? Directed by Ed Adlum| Written by Ed Adlum / Ed Kelleher  | Director Of Photography Roberta Findlay | Special Effects Rod Griswold | Music Sam Douglas

Who’s in it? Joshua Bryant | Irene Kelly | David S Cass Sr | John Martin | Carle Bensen

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

Unclear release date. Top ten 1972 movies include Diamonds Are Forever / The Godfather / Fiddler On the Roof / The Devils / Steptoe & Son / The French Connection

Production notes and whatnot

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068540/

What’s it all about?

Well to be fair, we are digging into the bottom of the barrels on beach at last resort. That scraping sound is me trying to summon up the energy to tell you the plot of Ed Adlum’s “Invasion Of The Blood Farmers.” I can tell you’re humming and hawing over maybe investing the Blu-Ray, so let me guide you through what to expect. Brace yourself.

Once again the music, this time by a new name to us, Sam Douglas, is not holding back on its thundering score as we get a whole lotta dan-dan-dahhhh which is now pretty de rigur for this sort of effort. Lots of oboe, though, which is nice.

A menacing voice over – who may not actually be James Mason but is having a bloody good go to be “Masonic” (as is this whole movie, now I realise the pun) – explains to us the history of druids, of sacrifices, of rituals and ancient lost customs. All very portentous.

And cliché number four, the movie begins proper as we are now presented with the old stalwart of the bloodied “victim” stumbling up the dusty country road, streaked with beetrooty blood and staggering and moaning. It’s all very Wes Craven. What has happened to this poor fellah? And is this hick small town of coffee-shops, gas stations and pool-bars gonna be any assistance?

Well it would appear not. The man, (we’ll call him Jim as the rest of the cast seem intent on doing so) bumbles in, interrupting a collection of denimed, lite-beer sippin’ good ole’ boys, all oil smeared t-shirts and trucker caps.

The yee-haas are talking, in amateur dramatic plodding tones, about Helen who’s be “gawn an’ missin’ these last 2 weeks.” Barely is there time to reach for a spittoon or another refreshing tin of beer, when Jim smashes through the door and starts screaming and yowling. Or at least his dubbing mixer does. Clearly all put in in post-production, Jim mouths and slavers and some other actor bellows and yells. The mouth and sound don’t match. Don’t be surprised by this drop in quality – we’re already in “shot over a weekend with my mates with a borrowed 16mm camera while our wives were playing golf” aesthetic.

And down Jim goes. Very, very dead and very, very covered in beetroot juice passing for the purplest blood you’ve seen outside the Texas Ribena Massacre.

Meanwhile! Hooray! We meet the heroes of our drama. Two of the preppiest, clean-cut, apple-pie college types you’ve ever seen. Alice bands, knee socks, loafers, khakis, blonde hair and big Kennedy-esque clean-livin’ smiles.

He is a dead spit of the old Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan (later of “Duncan Dares” {BBC 1985-87}) or if you are of an American persuasion, someone who could pass for Larry “CHiPs” Wilcox’s cousin. As young lovers will, they talk of life and the fact that Duncan (as we will call him) is learning at the elbow of her father to become a pathologist.

Cut to a very sudden and non-NHS blood transfusion, deep in a deserted shack, as our druids (remember them) are chaining a poor female victim by the neck, much screaming and tortuous whatnot going on. A man in a black hooded robes unties her. Is this the missing Helen? I mean, probably yes. But let’s not spoil it.

Next? We are with the dad-in-law in his rustic laboratory. (It’s a shed with some test tubes in it). He is testing the blood from poor dead Jim.

Apparently, he explains to Duncan, the blood he gathered from the scene…reproduces! And we see it doing so, bubbling away and growing in a beaker. Blood growing? That can’t be right.

But growing it is, very much in the manner of the spongey dessert Woody Allen’s robot attempts to control in one of the best scenes in 1973’ Sleeper.

Dad-In-Law explains what happened to poor Jim, with some cod-medical mumbo-jumbo “His homeostatic stasis was so out of balance be blew himself up!”

Hmm. Okay.

By the way, the father in law isn’t played by a chuckling Wilfred Brimley from Carpenter’s The Thing, but only because they could only afford a “chuckle-alike.”

Back in the hick bar they are scrubbing Jim’s blood from the sawdusty tiles. But…hey, what’s this? The more they scrub…the more blood there is! Perhaps ole’ discount Brimley is right?

And now, as if by magic, we have our Crazy Ralph. You’ll remember the “Crazy Ralph” trope from past reviews. He’s very much a mainstay in this sort of “splattery small town” caper. Much like Randy Quaid in 1996’s Independence Day, he’s got a warning for us all! He warns of hidden demons in the mist!

They get him a pint and he shuts up.

But wait, who is this weird new chap in the bar? All dungarees and squinty twitchiness? He’s askin’ directions to another part of town. Hell, he ain’t from these parts. Perhaps he’s some Invading Blood Farmer? (I’m jumping ahead a little bit here). But the newcomer is soon chased away from the bar and out of town by a huge white dog. We’re not sure why. Maybe he smells of cats. It’s not clear. But dogs don’t trust this fellah, which should tell anyone who’s studied “Screenwriting For Beginners” he’s a wrong’ un. See the station-toilet scene in Pulp Fiction.

“He’s barkin’ at me. I mean he’s barkin’ at ME.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P-f-nzOTV4

And then something unexpected happens (or terribly predictable happens, depending on how many of these appalling cheap splatter-flicks you’ve seen). Out in the forest, by the river, the dog jumps up at Dungaree man. They appear to dance and struggle, or rather then actor does his best with half a white polyester rug, and then the man eats the dog. Yep. Eats the dog. Or gives him enough of a bite to kill him.

However (and I’m attempting more suspense than the movie manages), during the dungaree vs canine struggle, we see a mystical KEY dropped in the stream. Could this be the legendary KEY OF MALANON? Or perhaps a DAGGER OF MAGIDO? Or, ffs, is it THE GOBLET OF FIRE? Well the camera lingers enough to tell us this key is important and ole dungaree-face shouldn’t have dropped it in all his pooch-munching antics.

Phew! So what’s next?

Well we now get something worth mentioning, as the camera suddenly gives us what we in the trade call a “Lewton Bus”.

Now if you know your stuff, you will know the term. Named after the famous heart-stopping HISSSSS of a bus in 1942’s Cat People, it refers to a sudden noise or shock designed to jump-scare the audience, that turns out to be something innocent. A cat, a car, a balloon popping. Whatever.

So we get a nice “Lewton Bus” with a blanket shaken in the camera that turns out to be…a fuckin’ blanket.

There are a fair amount of “lewton buses” in this movie. It’s like Lewton Bus Depot on a busy Saturday.

But hold on. Keep up! We’re back now with the preppy twins. All happy families over breakfast of coffee and eggs, Leave It To Beaver style. The only fly in the ointment for the preppy twins is their missing dog? Hmmmn. Where could the hound be?

Dan dan dahhhh! There it is. Hanged in the porch, all fur and blood. Duncan finds the mysterious key. What could it be? A harmless trinket? And why is the dog’s blood missing? What CAN be going on? It’s almost as if there has been…I dunno, an invasion of blood farmers? Or something.

We haven’t had a decent murder in a while so we now get a lovely little set piece of a newly wed type couple in a motel. She’s in the bathroom, he’s getting undressed, so far so cosy. All of this is filmed in one take, in one shot, from a fixed camera (like a stage play) to cut down on cost and time. It’s very 1970s, (all pink velour and brown suede). There is fuss with sponge-bags and nightgowns and whatnot. All very Kays Catalogue. However someone is on the hunt for blood (an invading farmer perchance?) and as they prepare for their wedding night out dungaree-sporting creep appears! Doing his best to mirror the tension, horror and shock of Hitchcock, the director gets Mr Dungaree to attack the man in the shower.

Watching this scene, and Psycho, back to back should be enough to convince anyone that film directing is a skill most people simply don’t have.

Beating, blood, shock, blood, beating, falling, flailing, beating. The arm movements don’t even match the sound effects. And the “blood” is blackcurrant jam.

But now, with this fresh victim, we get – at last – an insight into the titular Blood Farmers and their dastardly plan.

And what a plan it is. (Ahem).

We join them in a cabin out in the woods. Their leader (the offspring of Kurt Russel and Doogie Howser MD) incants and chants over the same clear-plastic coffin left over from The New Adventures Of Snow White. See episode 6 of this site). His dead queen lies in the plastic box, awaiting enough blood to revive her! He chants and incants and tries not to think about his stick-on grey sideburns.

“It will soon be TIME!” he chants. Time for what, is not clear. “We must save the race!” he chants. “The Queen must have a host to avoid the Prince Of Darkness” he chants. He’s clearly making it up as he goes along. He needs blood to save some race of some sort. It’s all rather Ira Levin (if that means anything? Rosemary’s Baby? Stepford Wives? The king of pulp novels about suburbia being over-run by mystery. See also, The Boys From Brazil. Man that guy could write a concept).

As he does all this, a tall gormless “Egor” type nods along, giving it plenty of Peter Lorre-type “yesssss masssster!” This is important, as you will see in about 4 paragraphs.

As the incantations continue, we see our newly wed motel-man all trussed up in a barn. They want his blood! They are farming it! Like some kind of Invasion of Blood Farmers! And so on.

But wait! The Key Of Melanon is missing! They must have the key! For…reasons! Doh! He dropped it when eating the dog. They must find it! Otherwise…things.

We then get, which is becoming a trope in these movies, a 60 second cut-in of an entirely pointless, storyless, gratuitous murder just to keep the body count up. A beardy gardener is grabbed by a black- hooded man. They wrestle! As does the camera-operator! And boom! A bill-hooked machete! He’s dead. And they presumably farm his blood. For…reasons.

Right. That got that one out of the way.

So now the preppy fellah Duncan is showing off his find. A weird key! Found near the dead dog/rug. What could it be? A very unusual metal… The dad-in-law knows a metallurgist. He will call him. He does. But the metallurgist is…? EGOR! Yep, the guy from the ceremony. Although how the dad in law knows him if he’s an invading blood-farmer is not clear. Where have they invaded from? Two streets away? (Or is someone PRETENDING to be the metallurgist??!!) What do you think. Sigh. Let’s keep going.

Egor (or whoever) will go and get the key! All will be well.

On the way, of course, they stumble across a “drifter type.” We know he’s a drifter, as he has fallen out of the local pool-hall/bar, stinking of whisky. He is picked up as a hitchhiker. I wonder what will become of him? And his blackcurrant jam/blood?

Back at the homestead, dad-in-law and Egor discuss the key. “Tis’ but a cheap penny arcade trinket” Egor says. Well he would do, wouldn’t he?

The chief of police meanwhile calls the bar. He’ll be back tomorrow. Cue dumb clutzy cliche deputy (all brown bomber jacket and dumb expression straight out of The Cannonball run) getting stressed about the Chief finding out he’s been a-drinkin; on the jaaaawb!

The Blood Farmers drain the body of the drifter. Of course they do. The coven all line up to kiss the Perspex queen. Apparently this will help.It’s not made clear why.

The newly arrived police chief drops in on the preppy twins. Asks many a question. What the hell’s been going on?

Another random “let’s keep the body-count high” murder of a young woman by the stream. That’ll keep the blood-hungry viewers sated, and the censors busy.

And now…Egor arrives at the father-in-laws laboratory. (Don’t worry, there’s only about 15mins left of this utter drivel).

With a variety of phone calls, the dad-in-law realises that the man who’s pretending to be the Key expert is an imposter! Egor tells Doogie Howser that everyone knows too much! They must be destroyed!

At which point the movie descends into rapid fire chaos. Egor kidnaps the preppy lady and her dad! They must be part of the blood sacrifice! There is rope and struggling. Duncan tells the chief of police! “They’ve gone!”

Mr Sideburns decides the preppy girl can be the blood sacrifice/host/whatever. Honestly, I’ve no idea. There is loud incantations of “smiting your enemies!” (Which enemies, it’s not clear). Duncan goes to the house to search for his bethrothed!

In what is clearly the last day of filming, in mid afternoon on a Californian hill, blood is wiped over Perspex-queen’s lips! She awakes! And then chaos reigns as everyone fights and falls and stabs and chants and generally all fall down like the end of “Ring a Ring Of Roses.” She-Preppy is injected with the “stop your blood turning into Sleeper sponge pudding” serum. The score goes apeshit bonkers on the piano.

Everyone bad is dead. Preppy and father-in-law are fine.

It’s a new day. A new dawn. It’s absolute nonsense.

Is It Any Good?

No. I’m sorry if you need more than that, but no. And anyone who tells you this is a “classic of the genre” may be right. But honestly, it doesn’t mean you have to watch it. In a genre that can give you Straw Dogs or Night Of The Living Dead? Jesus…

What we have here is yet another “spooky bloodthirsty murders in a small hick town.” Invasion Of The Blood Farmers is another in a long line of feeble hick-heavy “horror movies” that is neither scary, horrific, shocking or indeed, remotely noteworthy. It has the standard amateur production values of no end of “shot over a weekend”, overcast, am-dram, plodding pieces of US nonsense that the hard working British constabulary had to spend valuable time seizing and storing and charging and prosecuting, because of a leery video-box and the word “blood” in the title.

The production is the wrong side of cheap, many scenes clearly done with a single camera on a tripod and everyone plodding through half-learnt dialogue. If ANY of the cast were actual actors, I would be shocked and stunned to find out which.

It has every shlock cliché going but does nothing remotely interesting with them: The crazy local “Ralph” warning everyone; the tortured animals warning of evils to come; the meaningless druidy incantations suggesting the supernatural; the Gregorian chant/latin to conjure up mysticism. And on and on.

As mentioned, the “shower scene” murder only highlights what can happen when a visionary director (Hitchcock, with a rumoured heavy hand from Saul Bass) has material that an amateur director has. Psycho is shocking. Stunning. Startling. This is stabby, splatty. Silly.

Cops are in the classic hick “brown bomber jackets” – a clear sign, at least in the UK, of racist, dumb, hick good old boys. See every movie ever made ever (mainly Smokey & The Bandit).

There is absolutely nothing to recommend this picture. Not silly enough to be fun, not gory enough to revolt, not tense enough to grip. 77mins you’ll never get back.

Nasty?

Well no, not really. You can see plenty more in plenty other movies. My notes tell me there are a handful of “kills.” But yet again, as we are discovering, real gore-hounds want the “during” – knives on flesh, daggers in stomachs, machetes in skulls. What we have here, once more, is a lot of “flailing about with knives” and a lot of “screaming close ups” that end with “actor lying down covered  in jam.” The “blood harvesting” scenes are actors writhing and squirming with tubes full of Ribena sticking out of their shirts. Nothing to see here.

Ban worthy?

No. Simply no. Not enough effort, syrup, prosthetics, care or talent has gone into the making of this nonsense to bother anyone bar the most shivery or nervous of patrons. Maybe I’ve seen too many by now? But its cheese and jam and shaky-cam and if you;ve seen ANY horror movie in the world, even the PG family favourites, you’ll be bored by this effort

What Does It Remind Me Of?

Well we’ve had some ropey old nonsense so far but this effort is right up there. Filmed in the director’s house over a number of summer weekends, the cast rumoured to have been paid in beer, it’s at the naff end of the spectrum, up there with a clunky amateur-hour cue-card reading of Blood Feast and Blood Rites. The gore is splashy blackcurrent reaction shots that are of the preposterous type, without even the relish or scrunge of Night Of The Bloody Apes. In fact Afternoon Of The Bloody Stupid would be a much better title for this silly cheapie.

Where Can I See it?

Here. If you genuinely have nothing else to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN3iNxq0GBQ

“I’m a human being like you! I’m a man! Not a FISH!”

MAN FROM DEEP RIVER aka SACRIFICE aka DEEP RIVER SAVAGES

Who made it? Directed by Umberto Lenzi | Written by Francesco Barilli /Massimo D’Avak  | Director Of Photography Riccardo Pallottini | Special Effects Sergio Angeloni

Who’s in it? Ivan Rassimov | Me Me Lai |Prasitsak Singhara | Sulallewan Suxantat | Ong Ard | Prapas Chindang

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

Live & Let Die | Westworld | Soylent Green | The Exorcist

Production notes and whatnot

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069956/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_the_Deep_River

What’s it all about?

1972’s Deep River Savages is, once again, an “us vs them” style expose of what happens when civilisation meets savagery. Shot in the pseudo-documentary style, popular in the genre for giving that sleazy, snuff, “did it really happen?!” sense, it comes complete with BBC style voice over and outdoor stock-footage scenes of wildlife and riverside frondy exoticness.

We open with the love child of Richard Chamberlain and Julian Sands, clearly in good spirits after winning some kind of “He-Man doing a C-3P0 impression” contest. This is our hero and we’d better warm to his hunky charms as he’s pretty much going to be our onscreen tour-guide for the next 89mins. The tone is one of an Alan Whicker upbeat travelogue. He’s sightseeing with his camera and safari-suit. Captions tell us we’re in Burma. A place I know nothing about apart from this:

Which I don’t imagine helps. Anyhow, it’s boats and junks and rice and hats and fruits and toothless locals and our Man From Delmonte, (Monte, which is what I’m going to call him), is snapping away with his Nikon. You’d swear, if the camera kept rolling, he’d be plugging Barclaycard.

When in Rome, or indeed Burma, one does what the Burmese do and Monte is next seen at a traditional Burmese kick-boxing fight. Hoo boy. He’s getting his kicks (much like one of the poor boxers) but his squeeze Susan is having none of it so she ups and leaves him to it, like many a bored girlfriend when the quarter-finals are on. Monte cools his heels in a local bar but somehow his shirty Westerner attitude and his western shirty clothing, Julian Sands demeanour and C-3P0 campness gets on the nerve of the locals and he’s in a stabby bar fight. That’ll teach him to try and pay with Barclay Card.

So hopping on a train, pulling his hat over his eyes Indiana Jones style he heads alone with his camera off into the jungle and we’re into the plot proper. Cue lots of lush plant-life, screeching birds overhead and elephants.

Arriving at his destination, he meets a trope, we’ll call him Crazy Ralph. Every good horror movie needs a crazy Ralph. Someone to chew ‘baccy, sneer and warn tourists to “beware the old mill/stay on the path/don’t go to the summer camp/avoid the creepy house.”

NOTE: Ignoring someone chewing-baccy is a “wookie” error. Thanks, here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress here at the International House of Tortuous Star Wars puns.

So “chewie” tells Monte not to go too far up the river. Avoid going “where the river narrows.”

Advice Monte promptly ignores because he’s a hard-drinkin’ safari hunter type who’s going up river to take daring nature shots of fish and take his mind off Susan. To further highlight the culture clash, Monte shaves on the boat like a gentleman and drinks whisky (standards, always) and monologues to himself about foggy London all those 6000 miles away

Which is now making me think of Richard Burton and his beloved Carrie from War Of The Worlds. Blimey I’m easily distracted today.

Anyway, things pick up – in a sense – when Monte awakes to find his trusty guide missing from the boat. A panicky search and his corpse is discovered tangled in the reeds. What has happened to him? Well, they’ve gone too far up river and ignored Chewie’s advice and now he’s in the snare of the locals. And what locals they are: War-paint, spears, loincloths and headbands straight out of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, replete with beardy elders and scowly faces.

In two shakes of a Nikon FTN Silber 35mm SLR, he has been tied up, bagged and beaten like a piñata. Hoisted up, the tribe called quest carry him home, through the forests and reeds and whatnot. Lord know what awaits.

You know that bit in Return Of The Jedi, when the Ewoks capture the rebels? It’s EXACTLY that. I mean EXACTLY that.

So what next. Well we’re in horror territory so upon arrival, Monte is witness to a savage way of life, here in t’jungle where the river narrows. 2 tribesmen are strangled and have their tongues cut out. Men in loincloths and facepaint stand around with spears. In fact, let’s take it as read that this happens a lot, as we’re going to get very bored if I have to keep saying “and men in face-paint and loincloths stand around with spears.”

There is a good touch of 1968’s Planet Of The Apes in the whole set up, especially when Monte spots the beauty of the bunch. Paler skinned, booby, coy and a great deal more “Western looking,” she’s the native “it’s okay to fancy.” (See similar tropes of Helena Bonham Carter/Lisa Marie/all the hot aliens from Star Trek). There’s a lot of this around the 70’s. And ‘Monty’s fancy is taken. Which is odd, given the circumstances. But hell, that’s men for you.

The next few minutes of screen time establish the set-up. Monte is now very much a prisoner, considered (as they found him in a wet-suit in the river) little more than a particularly helpful halibut. “I’m a man!” he bellows at one point. “NOT A FISH!” The USS Indianapolis monologue, this is not.

He is put to work in the tribe, complaining and kvetching and pleading for freedom all the while. He catches fish, he lashes bamboo together, is pushed around and beaten and caged like an animal. When they try and feed him he spits out the food (rude) and cries sorrowful anguished lonely tears.

Help and hope arrive in the shape of one of the tribeswomen who explains she ain’t really from these parts, but was adopted. Monte suddenly sees a way out! Maybe they can both escape together? However she tells him it’s a useless plan as they are too far from anywhere and further up river (where, one assumes, the river narrows even further to nary a trickle) reside a cannibal tribe. More despair is stirred in when a helicopter circles the tribe’s camp and Monte yells and waves…only for the chopper to chop-off elsewhere for more sightseeing, leaving him stranded for life.

We’re about half an hour in.

Spin forward a month with a caption and some spinning newspapers and Monte, for reasons passing understanding, is fitting right in. Maybe he likes the weather, maybe he’s given up hope, maybe he fancies the lady on show. Maybe he’s got thing for face-paints. Or maybe he’s juts biding his time?

Either way, a work-based accident for which no-one is insured causes a tribesman to be flattened by a falling idol. He is ceremoniously torched, much like Qui Gon Jinn at the thankful end of The Phantom Menace. The tribesmen see off the corpse with a respectful wake, which involves taking the guy’s wife and giving her a right old seeing-to on his ashes. Which, when it comes to getting over your loss, beats the hell out of tequilas and a haircut.

But this is Monte’s chance, and while they hand out the sandwiches and toast to what a solid bloke this chap was, Monte’s off! Running through the dappled jungle, we don’t know where he’s hoping to get to. But one assumes a world where you don’t get your tongue cut out, get crushed by an idol or treated like herring. He hits the depths of the jungle. But uh-oh. The tell-tale signs of skulls hanging from trees tell him he ain’t in Kansas anymore. And he comes across some more tribesmen who aren’t going to let him escape.

Whether these are just more chaps from the tribe or the much hyped “fine young cannibals” from the narrow river, I cannot fathom. But whoe’er they are, he ain’t going nowhere.

We then get a lovely bit of Robin Hood Price Of Accents action as Monte takes on a tribesman with those stick things. Sticks. Or “staffs” if you prefer. You know, the long two handed ones, like broom-handles. Where opponents take turns to tilt at 45 degrees and go “clack” against the other? It’s all rather Friar Tuck. (My favourite spoonerism, since you ask. Think about it).

So there’s plenty of gruff manly clackity clack action as East meets West. But down Monte goes. One again a circling helicopter gives Monte a glimpse of salvation…but no. He remains in the clutches of the tribe. He battles with his stick valiantly, but…just like The Doctor’s hapless assistants in the world of Eddie Izzard, once again….he’s captured. See here at about 4m 15s

Or watch the whole thing, as it’s infinitely more enjoyable than “Deep River Savages.”

But Monte is slowly being accepted. He is told that in just three more moons, if he survives, he will be a true member of the tribe and be accepted as one of them. (Olde fashioned Fantasie Faerie types always say “moons” rather than “days”. Irritating).

So three days? He can manage that. Much like Marty McFly trapped in 1955.

“Okay, alright, Saturday is good, Saturday’s good, I could spend a week in 1955. I could hang out, you could show me around…”

However it’s not the 3 moons he was looking for, as Obi Wan nearly said, as Monte is promptly tortured for 3 days. First up, he’s sent to what appears to be the Aztec Zone of Richard O’Brien’s Crystal Maze and locked on a revolving scarecrow-type contraption, his head locked between bamboo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNeCDVuWiY

.This is the shot used on a lot of the promo material. As he revolves on the turntable, folk with blow pipes send poisonous darts at him.

Next he’s pinned down and stretched under the baking Burmese sun to cook and fry, threatened continuously by the shadows of vultures circling above.

Once a nice golden brown colour and his juices are running clear (don’t forget to turn halfway through cooking) he has the final trial of “lunch by monkey brain,” a la Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom.

While all this goes on, the local tribe kill time with their usual sport of BBFC Censor Baiting. So we witness actual live cock-fights, crocodile carving and a real snake go tongue-to-claw with what looks like a Mongoose.

But finally, after his trials, and all the cock, goose, croc and snake bits have been Dysoned up, Monte is presented to the elder Ewok and presented with a ceremonial sword. He is now very much accepted as a part of the tribe and his workmates are presumably told not to tease him or call him “Seabass face” anymore.

All this tanning and time passing now makes Monte more the Flash Gordon type. I won’t call him Flash, as this will confuse you. But you get the idea.

The next 30 mins or so cut more back to the documentary style as we now witness what happens when a westerner joins a lost Burmese tribe. Monte gets all the loin-cloth and face-paint get up.  He introduces modern medicine tracheotomy to an impressed witch doctor type to treat diphtheria.

He finally “gets the girl” by a fascinating mating ritual it’s worth dwelling on.

Have you seen ITV’s Blind Date? The UK one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM_ITR6wiuM

Three men vying to be picked and one woman asking questions from behind a screen? Well it’s a bit like that. Except there’s a hole in the screen and each fella bungs his hand through and gives the dame a good old booby feel-up. Whoever’s mangly boob mashing and tummy-stroking and fingering she likes the best, gets to be the husband.

It’s a “lorra lorra laffs,” as Cilla Black used to say.

Well Monte lets his fingers do the talking and she likes what she “feels” so its wedding bells all round. At which point the “savage” couple fall into standard 1950s I Love Lucy tropes. He goes to work, she cooks and cleans. It gets terribly domestic and it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to have her in fluffy-mules and him in a fedora, sipping a glass of scotch and having the boss over for dinner

Bliss continues as they get it on in the shed, on what appears to be a lot of finely ground flour or enough cocaine to keep a Rolling Stones tour going for literally hours. She falls pregnant from Monte, (Flash by haircut, Flash by sexual technique) cueing up a “cancel-worthy” bit of dialogue from our hero: “A boy! “My little black savage!”

All would be well from this point, Monte finally finding happiness among the simple tribal life, away from Kickboxing and Nikon repair bills. But life in the savage wilderness is red in tooth and claw as we now discover.

His past accomplice, (you remember her, the adopted woman) comes a-running! The cannibals from the even narrower part of the stream are heading their way. There is much chasing and carnage, slicing body parts (arms, breasts, hands). The only way to save her is a canoe to the “big city” where proper medicine can be administered. So off they head, canoe laden with whatnot, up the river to get help.

But … “I’ve been captured” once again. They don’t get far. This place is more difficult to escape than IKEA at 5.25pm.

In the final 10 mins it all kicks off and the cannibals mount their last attack. Everything is thrown into the fray as huts are burned, tribesmen are stabbed, women are chased, blow-pipes are puffed, darts are shot, grass is ignited and we finally witness the full brutality of life in the jungle.

In all the fracas, Monte’s “little black savage” is born. An omen of a black butterfly, flitting about the maternity ward, makes his wife scream. It apparently wasn’t on the John Lewis gift list. The obligatory goat gets his little throat slit and blood comes a gushing, thus sealing the deal. But the omen was a true one, signifying death, and Monte’s wife passes over. “The wind will carry me with you forever. Help my people. They need you…” she croaks.

Final flashbacks occur of Monte’s time with the tribe. From his fearful start, his torture, his rituals to the eventual romance, love, pride and acceptance.

The final test is the circling one more time of a helicopter.

Monte hides. He wants to stay with his new people, his new family, his new life. Awwww, bless. Pass the crocodile soup.

Is It Any Good?

This movie, like many of its type, has gone through numerous iterations and re-titlings. Usually these “rebrandings” (Sacrifice! Aka Man From Deep River! Aka etc etc) enable the distributors to get as many bums on seats as possible by simply re-branding the movie to modern tastes. Were it released today, it may well go under the title “Magic Mike Goes Native” or “Not Woke? Poor Bloke!” or something like that.

However, and I cannot stress this enough, the best possible title for this jungle cannibal escapade would simply be: “If Ewoks Were Wankers.”

As mentioned, all the jungly tropes, clichés and fear-of-foreigners clichés are on display here, straight out of the Rebels landing on Endor in Richard Maquand’s Return Of The Jedi. Count them. Strange westerners in a tropical climbe? Check. Cutting through reeds and fronds as they get further into the woods? Check. Trapped in ropes by yelling and sqwarking “natives”? Check. Hoisted on poles and carried off to the lair? Check. Crying and screaming to be set free as the westerners approach huts and fires? Check. Learning the native customs and becoming one of the tribe? Check. Showing western techniques the natives consider magic? Check. All it would take is for Monte (a very capable and convincing Ivan Rassimov) to tell them the tale of Yavin 4 and for the cannibals to all have white uniforms and appalling shots for this to be Return Of The Jedi II – Jungle Jedi Ferox

The movie has a lush travelogue air to it and we feel on very safe ground as we begin. We trust our hero and are with him all the way, a real sense of identifying with the panic, culture shock and horrors as the “cultured West” meets the savage wildlife. He is a great lead and we buy his performance throughout. Well…mostly. I know the “1 month later” and “6 months later” captions tell us time has passed, however it’s difficult sometimes to jigsaw the horrors and carnage to the acceptance and understanding, when the whole thing occurs in less than 2 hrs.

We should mention Crazy Ralph as a staple, as I think this is our first proper “Crazy Ralph” example in the dozen or so movies we’ve looked at so far.

The name “Ralph” comes from the trope pummelled, molded and finally baked in Friday The 13^th. Every horror movie needs one, and Ralph, played famously and unforgettably by Walt Gorney back in 1980, is the template. But as we can see from “Deep River,” he was far from the first. You’ll have lost count of the horror flicks that have a weird, twitchy, untrustworthy figure, just outside the action (local gas station, travel agent, hotel reception, moon base) who warn the hapless victims of what might occur if they continue into the fray. They come in many guises (parodied brilliantly in the hyper-meta Cabin In The Woods) and are traditionally right…but fatefully ignored, much to the teenager’s peril.

As is true for many of the “Cannibal Slashers” that this movie inspired (there is an argument here that Man From Deep River was the first “Cannibal Exploitation/Lunchsploitation movies that started the craze that continued well into the 70s with such noteables as Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust), it was not so much the unconvincing gut-and-shut gore that had censors reaching for the scissors and the rubber stamp, as the animal cruelty.

Many of these flicks padded out the human-on-human feasting with cuts to genuine trapping, taunting, teasing, cutting and eating of real animals. The Man From Deep River is guilty as any of reaching for these audience-squirming scenes as we are witness to genuine on-screen cruelty on snakes, mongeese (plural? Ed), turtles and crocodiles. It was these scenes that caused the BBFC in England to ban these movies, much more than the fake horrors of cannibalism.

So we have what may be the first of these horrors – western culture meet savage rapey cannibalism – and it’s a decent enough adventure. We watch as our hero is first repulsed by acts of violence and then over time (2hrs) comes to accept this “alternative” way of life, understanding his shaving, whisky, technology and manners are just poses of one culture and there is more to the world than Victorian values as he learns the ways of a more primitive, but no less rewarding, way of existing on this planet of rivers and green.

Nasty?

Not amazingly so. As we’ve said, it’s the animal cruelty, in true RSPB and RSPCA British style that are really the turn offs here. The violence (tongue removal, scuffly rapey sex, slashings of limbs are what we are used to. Ketchup, wax and latex and cutaways of blade flashing and wound splashing are what we’re used to and there’s a fair deal of that. But it’s the animal-action that might turn some stomachs.

Ban Worthy?

Well, we’ve been here before. As the worst type of woolly snowflake liberal, I cannot honestly stand up and say ANY art should be banned. Give it a certification to keep it from the eyes of impressionable little’uns. Make sure no-one stumbles across it by mistake. But banning art is the beginning of a slippery slope that starts with harmless “think of the children!” and ends with book burning. However, that said. The torturing of innocents? These animals have been teased, beaten, goaded, sliced and garrotted for the camera and the audience’s relish. Scenes like this belong in tutorial tapes for medics, nurses, butchers and vets. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

What does it remind me of?

Well as we’ve said, eagled eyed viewers will get their synapses firing as we are very much in the ideas, scenery, ideology and landscape of everything from Return Of The Jedi, Friday The 13^th, The Phantom Menace and of course Planet Of The Apes. As we move forward in our journey and discover the horrors of the Italian Cannibal movie genre, all of these scenes and more will be repeated, parodied, stolen and, ahem, “homage” in the work of Ruggero Deodato, Umberto Lemzi, Jesus Franco and Joe D’Amato. Some done with more skill, some with more artistry, some with more flair but many with just more tits and chicken liver.

Where do I find it?

Man From Deep River is there on Amazon Prime, if you want to stump up the membership and subscription. YouTube is elbow deep in trailers. But I haven’t been able to find it for free. So it’s an Ebay VHS or a DVD Blu-Ray purchase from the usual stockists if you fancy it. And why wouldn’t you?

Well. For the above reasons mainly. Enjoy.

“The director’s most complete failure to date. If you were appalled by the gore and slaughter in Blood and Black Lace, this latest film contains twice the murders, each one accomplished with an obnoxious detail … Red herrings are ever-present, and serve as the only interest keeping the plot in motion, but nothing really redeems the dumb storyline…“

JEFFREY FRENTZEN – CINEFANTASTIQUE

Who made it? Directed by Mario Bava | Written by Mario Bava, Giuseppe Zaccariello, Filippo Otton (English Version Gene Luotto) | Director Of Photography Mario Bava | Special Effects (not credited)

Who’s in it? Claudine Auger | Luigi Pistilli | Claudio Volonté | Laura Betti | Leopoldo Trieste | Brigitte Skay

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

The Andromeda Strain | Willard / Klute | Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

Production notes and whatnot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bay_of_Blood

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067656/

What’s it all about?

Well I can’t lie, I’ve been looking forward to this one. What we have here is a glorious celebration of what can happen when you workshop around a table with flip charts and marker pens, eleven (yep, eleven) gruesome deaths. Spears, shears, guns, a noose, a blade, a bill-hook machete, there are no bad ideas. There are some creative and “blimey” and “good heavens” and “you’re kidding me” moments throughout, as you would expect, the movie never going more than about 10 minutes between another inventive stalk and slash.

Downside to this schmorgazbord of grue is of course the 3 writers and director then had to come up with some crazy-assed tale to link these gruesome moments together. This task, and I feel I’m being fair, might have been beyond them. Bay Of Blood has been called a lot of things. It also goes under the name of “Carnage” and “Last House On The Left 2”. But “unfollowable” tends to crop up in the word cloud more often than it should.

Anyway, without trudging through every single character, twist, couple, kid, another twist, an unmasking and about 14 red-herrings, let’s see what we get for our buck.

We start with a lovely score and scenes of tranquillity. Zithers and guyros do their plinky plonk and we pan around a charming bay in Lazio, Italy. All is well.

In one of the half dozen beach houses around a bay an old wheelchair bound dowager countess type trundles about in the halflight. Meet Countess Frederica. She has an old gothicy home decorated by whoever did Norman Bates’s mum’s gaff. Liberace piano tinkles and a coming storm is ominous. As she wheels about among busts and oils and doilies and velvet, little does she know what’s around the corner. It’s a nutjob. But a creative one.

Head in the noose, yank on a wire, kick away the chair and whoopsie, the Countess is hanging from her neck a foot from the floor. Blimey. Death #1. (Keep count, this is going to get worse before it gets better).

We see a swarthy moustachioed chap cleaning up after his deadly deed. A-ha! He plants what appears to be a fake suicide note! We have a villain. Well…for about 2 mins when – boom – death #2 arrives and our killer is stabbed violently in the back. Down he goes. And we’re only about 8 mins in.

Who would want to murder the countess? And make it look like suicide? And who would wait until he had, only to then murder the murderer?

Well we’re in the horny old plot of the “missing inheritance.” It seems The Countess and her now-stabbed husband owned the rights to this lovely bay and there is about to become a whole bloody stream of claimants to the property, most of whom are not beyond a bit of the old claret and carving to get their cut of the will.

Let’s meet the cast!

Well we cut next to some lawyery, solicitor big business swindler types. We know they’re wrong-un’s from the start. She’s a buxom “Tales Of The Unexpected” blonde, all anklets and baby-doll nighties. He’s Frank – the gruff, quoiffered medallion man, all chin-dimple, leather briefcase, tumbler of scotch and slip-ons. Straight out of Howards Way. If this means anything to you, “Marjory wants control of Derwent Enterprises.”

Think Bill Bixby via Thomas Haden Church for the casting.

Anyhoo, we meet them in a mid-afternoon canoodling (now acceptable fare since Janet Leigh and John Gavin got it on in the opening scene of Psycho). There are a large amount of balloons. We don’t know why. What we DO know is that Frank is trying to get hold of the deeds to the Bay. The Countess has killed herself and her husband is missing. Time for Frank to swoop in with his Duofold and his Hai Karate and get the deal done, goddammit.

Suspects one and two.

Meanwhile and next up, we have 2 further oddballs bickering at the edge of the bay. Simon, a weather-beaten fisherman type (all Arran sweaters and lobster pots). He snipes and jokes with oddball two, Paulo. He’s the classic scatty scientist living on the island with his odd wife. He chases bugs and pins them to boards and wears corduroy and is a bit giggly and twitchy. Think Doc Brown from Back To The Future or any other cinematic creepy science type.

Suspects (keep up,) three and four.

And add to the mix, unknown couple (we’ll call them Lee and James, as they’re the Lee Remick and James Caan lookalikes). Who are they? They are watching the bay-side shenanigans with binoculars. Hell, we’ll call them suspects five and six.

Got it so far? That’s six suspects. Six.

Ready for four more? Cue the arrival of what we can only describe as slasher-fodder. Hyped up, hopped up, drunk and in the mood to party as only 2 yanks and 2 European exchange students can, they appear in the bay hollering and whooping in a yellow Dune Buggy which, frankly, might as well have “please kill us” painted on the side. Classic “party” kids in this sort of 70’s caper, we have lots of denim, polo-necks, flares, big bottoms, knee-high boots and a transistor radio on a lanyard. They may well be playing randy 17 year olds but they’re all pushing thirty.

Are these the murderers? It’s unlikely, they’re thick and drunk and just here – frankly – to be a nuisance and get picked off. Still, that should be fun to watch as they all have it coming. We’ll call them suspects 7-10.

Ready for suspect eleven? Of course you are. Let’s meet Paulo’s wife. A standard loony hippy gypsy crazy lady. All hoopy earrings and tarot cards. She could have been played convincingly by Noel Fielding. She senses danger coming! It’s in the cards. Paulo is clearly tired and bored of his tarot-spouting wife and just wants to be left to his bugs and magnifying glass.

Back with the four kids (suspects 7-10) they’re partaayyyy-ing hard. They’ve broken in to one of the houses in the bay and there is much dancing and swinging. The German student decides she needs to cool off and a bit of nudie skinny dipping results in her finding Corpse #2 – the dead husband. Tangled in reeds and seaweed, he bobs about in the bay to much shrieking and running away.

Not that she’s getting far. (See where this movie is going?) As her desperate fleeing ends with death #3. A blade to the neck and down…she…goes. Rather craply, to be honest as Bava has clearly asked her to collapse in “as sexy way as possible.” Anyhoo. We’re three down.

Where has poor Brunhilde got to? (Honestly, that’s her name). One of the hapless party boys goes looking and walks straight into…yep, death #4. An absolute beauty of a murder – a billhook machete straight to the face. Boom. Down he goes, blade jaw-deep into his shocked visage. Probably the best death yet in the 11 movies so far. (Oh I’m keeping a tally).

We’ve lost 2 suspects. We’re down to nine again.

What of the other 2 partygoers? Well they haven’t a chance and its spectacular deaths #4 and #5. From behind, as they shag and giggle, our unseen assailant wanders in, all spooky POV, and thrusts a spear through the pair of them, pinning them to the mattress like so much shish kabab.

Keeping up? That’s murders #4 and #5 and we’re another 2 suspects down. By my count, we have 7 suspects left. Let’s crack on!

But a-hah! The spearing of the hapless lovers is followed immediately by Paulo at his desk, spearing another insect in his collection! Is this a clue? Does it matter? We have another six murders to get through. Don’t think too much about it.

Meanwhile James Caan and Lee Remick are heading back to the bay. Leaving their 2 kids behind in a caravan, they head to the Bay to face Paulo and Mrs Paulo (Noel Fielding) and fishy Simon and Bill Bixby’s chin. Someone’s getting this deed!

In a lot of chatty exposition we discover this mysterious couple with the kids in the caravan are, in fact, the step-daughter and husband of the murdered man. (Keeping up?) The chap stabbed in the opening 8mins had a daughter. She is here to collect her land.

But, before you can say “where there’s a will there’s a sobbing relation,” we discover none other than fisherman Simon is ALSO a claimant, being the illegitimate son of the countess! Born and hidden away on the bay to grow up a simple octopus hunter and lobster-pot flinger, he has as much right to the bay as anyone!

Look, you see where this is going.

So the rest of the movie, without leaving you feeling short, is a bloodbath. Bill Bixby, his sexy Tales Of The unexpected girlfriend, James Caan and Lee Remick, plus Mrs Noel Fielding, Simon and Doc Brown spend the next hour skulking, hiding, double-bluffing, hiding, running and failing to escape the next six murders. The whole audience, to be fair, loses track as everyone you think is the killer gets killed. And the murders keep mounting up.

To be fair, and that, I assume is why you’re here, we are treated to, in no particular order…

Suspects 7-10 found laid out, butcher’s shop window style, in a bedroom. Cue much screaming. Bill Bixby stabbed violently through smashed glass as he attacks Lee Remick. Death #6. James Caan promptly catches the insect-doctor on the phone to the cops so we get death #7 as he is strangled by the telephone cord. Noel Fielding tarot lady is decapitated gruesomely as her head and shoulders become distant penpals (death #8). It doesn’t matter who did it. By now, it’s every claimant for themselves. James Caan finds Simon – who is the rightful heir – and pins him to a wall on a spear. Is he dead? C’mon…you’ve seen Die Hard.

Simon then jumps out, just as Remick and Caan think they’ve got rid of everyone, giving us death #9 with a handgun.

And relax.

Phew. So, after everyone has bled quietly to death, Lee Remick and her hapless husband James Caan have the deeds. They can now claim the land. Time to head home with a blood-smeared parchment of ownership, to take the land they believe is theirs.

But wait? We are only on death #9?

Yep. Coz – in a brilliantly dark twist – upon returning to the caravan, their two spotty kids are having much fun with a loaded rifle and…”aren’t mum and dad good at playing dead!”

Death #10 and #11.

Cut to 2 kids leaving the caravan to frolick innocently in the woods to some 60’s sha-la-la Robin Asquith singalong theme as the credits roll and we all wonder what the fucking hell have we just watched.

Is it any good?

Weren’t you watching? It’s Mario Bava’s A Bay Of Blood for Chrissakes.

What we have here, and we’re going to have this term a lot in the next few reviews, is something film students, Kim Newman, Mark Kermode, Mark Gatiss and that lot refer to as the genre “Giallo.”

Wikipedia, if you fancy it, will give you all the details. But in short, Giallo is a genre of movie, known for certain tropes.

The first is considered Bava’s “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” in 1963, aka The Evil Eye. You can spot a Giallo movie from key ingredients. A murder mystery, lots of footsteps, men in black leather gloves, a slasher or two in the murder department, maybe a smattering of supernatural aspects, some booby sex action, red-herrings, femme fetales, psychological thrills and spills and a dramatic score. Bung in a baroque title and a number (the seven whatnots of such and such and such, the nine things of doo-dah) and you’re in Giallo territory. Other classics, if Bay Of Blood’s style tickled your whatnot, would include Bava’s Blood & Black Lace, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and A Suitcase For A Corpse.

Trivia fans will be thrilled to know the name “Giallo”, which is Italian for “yellow” is inspired by the lurid, shocking pulpy crime thrillers of the day, each one easily spotted by its distinctive yellow coloured jacket.

Bay Of Blood is classic of the type. However, for modern horror fans, the movie is not so much a masterpiece as a template. Despite what had come before in this series: Blood Rites; Mad Doctor Of Blood Island; Night Of The Bloody Apes, it wasn;t really until Bava hit the drive-in theatres with A Bay Of Blood, that young 70s film makers finally had their lightbulb moment.

What do you really need to make a movie kids will love? A single location. A killer on the loose. A bunch of extras, all contemptible enough to deserve a good killing. A flimsy motive. And ten or eleven decent murders, each one served up with as much gore, latex, blood, shock, surprise, creativity, originality and poor-taste as the censors will allow. Line ‘em up. Kill ‘em off. As long as someone is killed every 10-12 mins, we’ve got ourselves a show.

So A Bay Of Blood is not so much ground-breaking, as simply the FIRST movie to create the standard “slasher on the loose” template and play it out with as much fun, gore, colour, shocks and silliness as a teenage cinema audience could stomach. So to Mario Bava, we doff our hat. Without A Bay Of Blood, there would be no Friday The 13^th, no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, no Prom Night, no Hills Have Eyes, no Sleepaway Camp, no Nightmares on any street, never mind Elm. It was the success of this simple line ‘em up and cut ‘em down model that pretty much paved the way for all the movies that followed in the genre. The good (Alien/Halloween), the bad (The Burning) and the ugly (I Spit On Your Grave).

Hirschell Gordon Lewis may have defined “splatter movies” with Blood Feast in 1963, but Bava invented the formula we’ve been “enjoying” for the last 50 years. Jesus… Not many movie makers can say that…

For all that, it has some wonderful touches.

The setting is a gothicy home straight out of Psycho and all the haunted-house Victoriana we’ve come to expect. All the now well-worn horror clichés are there, from the weasily lawyer to the party-hungry teens. Bava leans on the subtext rather than the text, which is to his credit. Much fun is had, for example, with the parallels of the stabbed couple and the stabbed insects. Not so gratuitous as to linger on the bloody killings (although there is enough gore to satisfy the most corn-syrup starved splat-fan), Bava spends more time setting up creeping suspense, creepy characters and potential “what’s around the corner” shocks to get the viewer involved in what is – let’s face it – an incomprehensible plot of red-herrings and surprise motives.

Bava knows how to use his music and there are terrified bongos and startled drums throughout to help get the pulse up. Being a 1970s production, the entire film is shot in a mixture of brown, beige, mushroom, taupe, caramel and fawn. An experience not unlike being stabbed by a box of assorted chocolates. Lit matches light up much more of a room than they should, the final frames are an absurd slap in the face. And the score, (maybe it’s just me) is a plonky piano version of Hackensack by Fountains Of Wayne from their album “Welcome Interstate Managers.”

But by god, if you’re here for the horror, there is no better place to start.

Nasty?

Yep. Very. Bava and his production crew take a huge giggling pleasure in making the murders as surprising, creative and gory as possible. There are no cut aways and if gushings of red are what you are in the mood for with your Friday night kebab and lager, then you have plenty to enjoy. It’s not “nasty” in its mood, which is a nice change. These aren’t deranged psycho killers on the loose, and we don’t have the uncomfortable guilt of watching a crazed woman-hating loner stalking New York streets. It’s a fun, albeit convoluted, murder mystery with each potential suspect being “offed” in bloody carnage every few minutes. More in common therefore with a particularly machete-filled Agatha Christie drawing room murder mystery. Certainly not for the gore-phobic or feint hearted, it wears a sense of humour and fun on its tattered sleeve and serves up plenty of shocks, surprises and splat for your video-rental fee. If you’ve seen Friday the 13th or any of its bastard sequel offspring, you’re on familiar territory with this classic.  

Ban worthy?

For sheer body-count, close-ups and relishing of blade-on-flesh you can see why over-sensitive peer-groups considered this far from family fare. But, as I continue to relentlessly remark, there are films that are “mean” and films that are plain “unpleasant” that might make you question your morals, your taste and inspire weak-minded folk to try out some of the horrendous acts. But this piece of campy giallo is far too gothicy, arch and preposterous to be consigned to the bin.

What does it remind me of?

As I mentioned, it’s actually got the convoluted, plot-heavy, twist-rich, overblown characterisation and camp of a drawing-room mystery. So for all the blood and slash, the “inheritance” and family in-fighting is much more “Midsommer Murders”, “Morse” or Agatha Christie than anything else. The gore is rich and bright, like the best technicolour Hammer (think Christopher Lee’s bright ketchup 70s fangs). So if you enjoy Corman’s Pit & The Pendulum style high-camp and splashes of Middle England Kensington Gore, you’ll get a kick out of this pick-em-off plodder.

Where to find it?

Youtube (bless them) has it here. And Amazon Prime will rent you a copy for your laptop/kindle/whatever.

“Unkempt and gloomy, yet somehow radiant, the mind-bending Headless Eyes is a touch-point for every element that makes nonconformist 70s trash-horror cinema so enduring today. As soon as “The End” rolls around, you’ll want to watch it again.”

BLEEDING SKULL

Who made it? Directed by Kent Bateman | Written by Kent Bateman |

Who’s in it? Arthur Malcolm | Ramon Gordon | Kelly Swartz | Laura Betti | Ann Wells |

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

McCabe And Mrs Miller | Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song | The Omega Man | The Anderson Tapes

Production notes and whatnot

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067192/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Headless_Eyes

What’s it all about?

Ahhh! We are in familiar territory as this ghastly artsy-house over-acting student-style piece of 16mm nonsense kicks off.

The traditional “camera following feet down the dark street” to a doorway. Who can this person be? Not a good guy, as the music has BBC “Generic Spy Theme Tunes by the Geoff Love Orchestra Vol 3” all over it. But no time is wasted as we watch this criminal make his way through the door to the bedroom where a young Amy Winehouse lookalike slumbers. A grab at the costume jewellery on her bedside! She awakes! Screams! Struggles! Sound is cheap and poor but we can make out some desperation in our villain’s shouts: He needs sixty dollars for rent!

Now this should place the movie firmly in the early 70s, as 60 bucks rent in New York isn’t going to get you much these days. Without wanting to go all Monty Python Yorkshiremen, maybe a shoebox in the middle of t’motorway.

But our damsel in distress, (not “dat dress, ‘dis dress”) puts up a fight. Reaching out desperately to her dresser she grabs a nearby…spoon. Where’s a machete when you need one? (In the shed in Mario Bava’s upcoming 1971 Bay Of Blood it turns out. Stand by for that).

A spoon however is all she has. In the struggle she does her best and – among screams and shadows and hands over faces – sends the assailant spiralling away with gasps and hollers as she appears to have gouged his eye out.

Now THAT’s how you start a movie.

And we are in, our now obligatory horror-movie font with the required drippy bloody effects, to the world of 1971’s Headless Eyes.

(We will address that the movie would make more sense as “eyeless heads” at a later paragraph. I mean ALL eyes are headless. They’re eyes. You might as well call it “spleenless elbows.” Sigh.)

So we meet our “anti-hero.” Or killer. Or leading man. It’s not clear. Are we rooting for this chap? We are certainly meant to feel sorry for the blighter. I mean not even $60 to his name. Poor bloke Forced by Nixon’s economic plan to a life of eye-patches, petty theft and escalating sexual assault. All this while having to go through life resembling a genetic mash-up of Donald Pleasance, Michael Ironside and a whole dollop of Rob Reiner.

We can be thankful however that Amy Winehouse went with the “spoon to the eye” defence, rather than, say, biro to the testicles, as we are now going to drown in well over an hour of zoomy, dreamy focussed, swirling “eye” symbolism. Dots, circles, balls, mobiles, globes, spheres. You name it, the director Kent Bateman never misses an opportunity to zoom in and out of eye-imagery to hammer (horror) home the point. He’s lost an eye. He has one eye. He is monolcular. 3D cinema would be wasted on him. A monocle would be a lovely xmas gift. Rayban Wayfarers are 50% too unnecessary.

So. Where are we now?

Well the music is now a jazzy, gamelan plinky-plonky Doctor Who weirdness, much like bored teenagers tuning up before an ill-advised concert for the parents. Overture for theramin, triangle and empty bean tins. We are with our “hero.” He is a beatnik-type New York Greenwich villagey- art installation type. He has his own studio, his ow artsy gallery. A courdory jacket. The sort of nonsense favoured by Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. I mean, “straight out of Diane Arbus but with none of the wit.”

Better than that plexiglass sculpture.

Our hero however, since the spoony-eye-incident, has gone nuts. Proper psycho bat-shit bonkers. Toys in the attic. We’re not sure at this point if he was ALWAYS a straight-jacket mannequin, or if this one turn of eye-gouging has tipped him over. But either way, as he sits in his studio playing with eyeballs, frozen eyes in ice, eyes in Ziploc bags and scalpels, it’s clear he’s skipped his meds.

To better demonstrate his looniness, the director opts for rambling monologue voice-over. He sits, he cuts, he carves, he drools – all the while voices in his head muttering and mumbling. An understated Anthony Perkins performance this ain’t.

Interrupted from his ramblings, a drunken couple giggle and flirt and shriek and stumble at the window of his studio. He sneaks downstairs to watch them. They are rich and sozzled and ghastly. He is not a fan. And we’re about to find out how little a fan he is of this pair.

The non-descript pair of sauced-up socialites head back at their New York apartment as they bicker. A knock on the door and it’s you know who. Patch Adams. So they invite him in, as you do. No prizes for what happens next.

Out of his neat little suede “eye-gouching blade” pouch comes his knife and it’s ketchup and red paint akimbo as he brutally fights and struggles with them both and takes another set of orbs for his growing collection of ocular trophies for his fridge freezer.

He’s back on the street. Bloodied, bothered and bewildered. Thankfully befriended by that cinema staple, the hooker-with-a-heart. Seeing his distress, he is lead back to her apartment for brandy, a sit down and some Kleenex. But doh. His eye-collecting is far from sated so the poor prozzie gets a knife to the socket while she screams and flails in a bath full of red paint.

Next we get some context. A-ha! These are not his first victims. In a handy bit of newsreel exposition, we discover “Eye Killer Slays 14^th Victim!” in a bold banner newspaper headline. Yep, looks like this has been going on the whole time we were distracted by the title sequence.

The next visitor to his studio/museum of optical atrocities, doesn’t fare much better. Although she find herself on the end of a ranty screaming self-indulgent poor-me tortured artist lecture, rather than on the end of a knife. This, y’see, is his ex-wife. She pleads with him to “get over” his eye loss and come back to society. But no. He is too far gone and bellows at her for five minutes about being “understood” and such. He doesn’t want her money, he doesn’t want her help. He is an artist! Just as Bob Hoskins once tried to explain to a hotel owner about a clearly deranged Bob Geldof in Alan Parker’s “The Wall”. “’Ee’s an arrrrrtist!”

But the investigation continues and TV reporters and vox-popsing New Yorkers about how they feel with this maniac on the streets. One can only assume these are actual New Yorkers, given their stilted and confused appearances. If they’re actors, he’s been over-charged.

Oddly, one of them looks very, very much like Jeff Goldblum. But I can assure you it’s not him. As a huge Jeff Goldblum fan completist, I’d have known if he’d been in this. JG doesn’t appear on the silver screen until Michael Winner directs him as “Freak #1” in 1974’s Death Wish.

But I digress.

He is on the run, being followed it would seem, just out of shot, by a jazz percussion band. All crazy booming timpani and crazy wah-wah Hendrixy Stratocaster action.

The music then, in a pleasant respite, goes all Howard Shore and we get a sort of version of The Fly score. Great score. Made me want to stop watching and watch Goldblum in The Fly. A feeling, to be fair, I get 6 or 7 times a day. Or an hour. Here it is. Glorious.

Our “hero” is now on a dusty sun-baked New York rooftop. I’m not sure why. On the run still I guess and staying out of the way. He follows a young lady (a blondey model-type) to an office. A lengthy sequence as he skulks and dodges her in lifts and corridors to a meeting, where he eavesdrops outside. She is indeed a model (yay). She has a portfolio. A chap on the phone argues about scripts and whatnot to an unseen writer. The woman wants work. The man asks to see her body.

It’s that sort of studio. Nice.

Finally, to a bongo-groove out, in case we forgot it was New York in 1971, she scuttles off to a pimpy looking dude in his pimpy looking dude car.

So Mr Eyes takes advantage and is back, at yawning length, to the office, to the lift, to return to find this woman’s contact details in a filing cabinet. His is disturbed (or should that be, further disturbed?) by a frumpy secretary. You remember the estate agent lady in Ghostbusters? That sort.

Anyway, he strangles her, because it’s that sort of movie. More crazy mental monologing ramblings. But to stress his mental state, he at least gives sweaty, gasping apologies as he does so. He doesn’t want to kill her. He’s sorry. But he’s going to strangle her anyway. Sorry.

He then cuts her eyes out for fear that we might have forgotten what the film is about. (What IS this film about? Well, it’s about 80mins too long).

Still, stay with me. Not much more to go. And keep repeating to yourself “he watched this so I don’t have to…he watched this so I don’t have to…”

Back home. Over more crazy Ginger Baker snazzy jazziness, he washes the eyes in one of those big “art room” school sinks. The muttering and mumbling continue to suggest this is all very much against his will. Not quite the split-personality set-up of Psycho, but he’s clearly a tormented fellow, rather than the bloodthirsty relishing of a Lecter or Krueger.

The director has much sixth-form film-student fun showing us his craziness with zooms and swirls and spirals and woozy walks to give us a sense of his fractured mind.

But meanwhile, he gets his third visitor of the movie. Unwilling to talk, he dismisses her but she leaves a note. She is a keen young art student who loves his work.

Well he has no time for that nonsense. He has graves to rob.

Yep. Graves to rob.

At this point we get the nearest thing to suspense as our “hero” and his incredibly obvious mid-afternoon grave-digging catches the attention of a dull, off duty cop.

Whoops. Much gun waving and arresting and apprehending follows.

Well, for about 2 minutes, because our hero overpowers the cop and pounds him to death with rock. So much for a twist.

Back at the studio, his female admirer has left a note and arrived to talk. She wants to learn his techniques! She admires him! She has so much to learn! Initially unresponsive to this request, our hero tries to limply sell her an eye in a cube (“Eight dollars…”) but she is persistent. Do we see a crack in his craziness? Is this young wide-eyed padowan the woman to change his ways? It seems so, as he agrees to meet her to “talk.”

And we get a lovely, almost Ephron-like Romcom walk and talk around New York as the couple meet and wander and discuss art and life. I mean, he’s no Billy Crystal. And they don’t even discuss whether hieroglyphics are an ancient comic strip about a character named “Sphinxy.”

But they are getting along. Could this be redemption?

Well not with another 20minutes to go in the running time, no.

So back to the model (remember her?) With her new found stolen address, he prowls about and finds her home. Up on the roof he overhears her making plans. “Meet at the Dock at 2pm.”

So we now get the obligatory stalking scene, straight out of Carpenter’s Halloween. The model (nobody has names in this movie) takes a nervous, guilty, scuttling, look-over-your-shoulder run to the docks, followed at snail’s pace by our plodding villain. They arrive at the set of West Side Story, it appears, and there is a chase through warehouses and ladders and docks and wharves and New York whatnot. Fearing for her life, our heroine ducks into a meat-locker. Old Eyeball follows and we half expect to catch Rocky Balboa practising his punches on the huge slabs of dead meat on frozen hooks. But the chase continues. Tension “mounts”, but it’s a bit late at this point. More Gamelan music clonks crazily, meat-knives are grabbed from workbenches, screams and fallings-over. He attacks! She fights! The dead creatures stare down at him, echoing Norman Bates’s parlour once more.

A door slams! He is locked in the freezer. “But I haven’t shown my art yet!” he pleads.

And then it’s The Shining nine years before The Shining.

Freezer door opened hours later. The eyes wide frozen body of our killer collapses, stiff as a corpse, speckled with ice. Dead. Credits. Breath out. Check watch. Eject.

Is it any good?

It’s an odd one this. Writer/director Ken Bateman has much more going for him, for better or worse, than your standard “stalk and slash” ketchupy killer thriller on the loose. Here’s a chap who has been to film-school. He has more to say than all the Friday The 13^th relentless-psycho-with-a-knife teen shockers. What Bateman is doing here, in his intention at least, is to show a film about art and madness.

Our villain is an artist. A sculptor. A creativey type. There are no hockey-masks or razor gloves. Driven to desperation to survive in the world who clearly couldn’t give a flying arse about his work, his desperation leads him to a dumb act of petty theft. We discover his wife has been supporting his “failed career” all this time, a fact which fills him with frustrated rage. The stupid theft, ending with a loss of an eye, is the last straw for him, tipping him into madness. A world that cares nothing for him, a man who lives only for his art, to lose an eye. What is he now? He was very little before. Now after? Just rage and hate, bitterness and violence.

It’s a credit I think that this amount of thought has gone into creating our villain. Bateman has given him motives, means, a backstory and we have what could have been – in other hands – a terrifying story of frustration, artistic drive and psychopathology. In the hands of De Palma, or even the artsy swirling palette of Argento, this might have been quite something.

But it was in the hands of Ken Bateman. Idly doodling on the back of a pack of cigarettes, he’s hit all the cliché “how to show madness” tropes of a 17yr old goth art-student who’s been leant a cine camera for a weekend. Artsy zooms, swirling skies, booming score, focus twists, woozy wobbling sweeps, ranty voice-overs, sweat and shadows – it persistently hammers us to death with uninspired visuals that are trying so, so hard to give the film an art-house aesthetic, to raise it above Gordon Lewis’s gratuitous drive-in Blood Feast of a decade earlier.

He is let down too by performers on the lower-end of the budget, who demonstrate rage and melancholy with pantomime staring and ranting, teeth gritted eyes-wide mania. One can almost picture Bateman shouting “more! Again! With more yelling! Shouty! More shouty!” at his cast, desperate as he is to demonstrate all the clichés of “madness.”

Because take this am-dram, film-school, shoot-it-with-your-mates aspect out of it and it’s just a drive-in, killer on the loose movie. And not a very good one.

The music is doing most of the heavy lifting and comes from the “more is more” school of piling-on drums and sound effects. The lighting is all glaring shadows, over lit and under lit.

The “frozen in the freezer” ending, coming eventually when it does, is a long breathe out. Not from suspense. But just the tired, stretchy “thank god” end you feel after an 8hr plane journey.

But finally, what really marks it out as an ambitious dud is the confusion between “suspense” and “boredom.” Given we know at the end of each, achingly long tortuous scene of following up and down stairs, corridors, in and out of lifts, up and down streets, in and out of cars, is another off-screen bloody squirty murder, we just want the film to bloody well get on with it. A great script and director could have a man following a woman in an elevator as nerve-shredding, pulse-pounding edge of your seat “quick! Run! He’s behind you!” and the longer the scene, the more tense we’d get.

Sadly this is an art and our director doesn’t have it. Waiting for a lift in Headless Eyes is duller than actually waiting for an actual lift.

Hitchcock knew how to create tension and suspense. Sadly Kent Bateman is no Hitchcock.

Hell, he’s not even Kent Brockman.

Nasty?

It’s not pleasant. But it’s far from gory. Yes, the attacks – as we are discovering on this journey – are agressive madmen on screaming women which is unstomachable for many and part of the banned-video stable of tropes. Not sure if you can have a stable of tropes. Collective name for tropes? A cliché of tropes? Anyhoo. The tension is zero so it’s fine in that respect, and all the murders/eye gougings actually appear, as it were, off screen. At no time do spoons touch eyes, it’s all shot from behind and created with the suggestion. Blood, scream, growling, writhing. And then pull backs to reveal blood-smeared faces. In fact the scenes in the producer’s office are shot with the victim actually off screen and out of frame. So yes. Nasty. Not one for BBC Xmas Day viewing. But you’d be hard pushed to find a still image of knives and flesh.

Ban worthy?

Tch. Rediculous. Just, as we’ve said, keep it on the top shelf. And choose other films. So far, from what we’ve trawled through, it’s one of the less bloodthirsty. We’ll talk more on this page later about how and why movies were banned during the 1980s. How tastes changed, how authorities had sketchy lists based on rumours and cover-art and scaremongering. But infinitely tamer than the Rob Zombie tortury “Hostel” stuff that’s now available on Netflix to anyone with a remote control.

What does it remind me of?

Headless Eyes nods along to many other pictures, riding a wobbly Fail-Army wobble on the coat-tails of some classics.

The pleading and sorrow of our killer as he murders against his will is reminiscent of the glorious Richard Attenborough weeping and apologising and “shush”ing his victims in 10 Rillington Place.

The footage of New York is lovely – all handheld and echoing traffic honks and steam-billowing grates and lovely 70s nightlife hipsters. Both Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver) and Ralph D Bode (Saturday Night Fever) would enjoy the groovy images.

The ending, as mentioned, is a pre-empting of The Shining. But the aesthetic actually is nearest to a fine bit of British comedy you may have missed. Writer/comedian Matthew Holness has an alter ego (based apparently on novelist Shaun Hutson), named Garth Merenghi. You can see his pastiche of flimsy Brit sci-fi “Darkplace” here.

But what some won’t know is another one of his comedy characters Randolph Caer, a washed-up actor and “star” of some nasty exploitation movies called “Bitch Killer.”

The love and care put into these mock-trailers by Holness and co is a delight. Anyway, point it, Headless Eyes is pretty much what Bitch Killer is parodying.

Where to find it?

It’s on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvPi9G09jDM

“A completely bizarre mish-mash of wrestling, gore, bad monster make up and mad scientist fun, Night of the Bloody Apes is a blast from start to finish. The effects are shoddy and as fake as fake can be and the make-up looks like something out of a high school play but that’s all part of the film’s low budget charm” DVD TALK

Who made it? Directed by René Cardona & Jerald Intrator | Written by René Cardona Jr. & René Cardona | Director Of Photography Raúl Martínez Solares | Music Antonio Díaz Conde  |  Special Effects (not credited)

Who’s in it? José Elías Moreno | Carlos Lopez Moctezuma | Armando Silvestre | Norma Lazareno | Agustín Martínez Solares | Noelia Noel | Gerardo Zepeda

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

Candy | Bullitt | Funny Girl

Production notes and whatnot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Bloody_Apes_(film)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063090/

What’s it all about?

Well we start with some gloriously bombastic bloody credits. Yellow text in a 70s “Spangles” font tell us the name of the movie, while off screen, a substandard Neil Buchanan (or similar) squirts squeezy bottles of red poster paint all over the screen to let us know what to expect. This is going to have some gore, and then some. And then a bit more on the side I expect.

Sadly however, this turns out to be about as bloody as the whole movie gets. Like so much of the genre, it’s all mouth and no trousers. Shame. Ah well, let’s move on.

We start properly with the secondary theme of the movie (aside from gory ape make-up): Female wrestling. Yep, we are in the odd world of the “wrestling/horror” crossover. We are going to get gore, hair, murder and transformations…but with generous interspersing of canvas-pumelling Saturday afternoon “World Of Sport” grapple-fan tosses and holds. The whole bit. Leotards, boots, masks, half-nelsons, pinnings. Yep, we are in odd crossover territory here. Where Dickie Davies meets Lon Chaney. Lon Davies, if you will. Or not. The Undertaker. You get the idea.

So, to the plot. Of sorts.

Backstage before a bout, a female wrestler, with the help of her preposterously handsome detective boyfriend, dons a red “batman-esque” mask ready to go toe-to-toe with her pay-per-view opponent. (What any of this has to do with killer apes we can only assume will become apparent).

So. Boom, we’re in the ring. Dressed as they are like Mexican toy knock-off “El Power Rangers”, we watch throws, clinches, rope twanging, Giant Haystacks vs Big Daddy (if you’re British. I assume WWF’s Hulk Hogan vs Hulk Hogan if you’re stateside) action happens as our red-masked heroine tosses her green-garbed opponent out of the ring.

Is she hurt? Is she dead? Well, she’s not well, I think we can all agree, having landed spine first among the wood and chairs of a wrestling event. Much shouting for ambulances.

Meanwhile (and, as ever, there’s gonna be a lot of “meanwhile” in this), we are at a zoo. Shot in unconvincing “day for night” with a crappy VHS filter, a fat Doctor (a mix of Howard Keel and Jerry Stiller) and his “Igor” accomplice (a sort of Mauritian looking Joseph Stalin) shoot an ape in a cage, who promptly spasms and collapses in exactly the way a man in a polyester ape suit would. Yep. It’s that sort of movie.

Now we’re at the hospital. Where we find out the poor wrestling victim has skull fractures. There is much guilt and sobbing from red-masked Batwoman. We all wonder what will happen to this poor woman who lies comatosed in surgery. Hmm. Maybe someone might need her body, blood or organs later? I guess we’ll see.

Now we’re back with Dr Howard Keel (as I’m going to call him from now on). He’s in his lab with “Stalin”. We discover he has a son (Julio). A sick son. Dr Keel reassures his son that he will be okay,

although we in the audience know he’s a gonner. Not a fuckin’ hope. Unless..?

Dr Keel decides the only solution is to give his son strength. And what better place for strength than the heart and blood of an ape! (I have added the exclamation mark myself. I wish I had added this plot point myself).

And now we have some genuine bloody nastiness as Dr Keel performs a transplant of blood and heart between his son and the tranquilised ape. Cut to a much bloody medical procedure. White coats, slicing, hearts, blood, pulses, splashes and ER style treatment. More of that later.

We’re back then, in a “meanwhile” moment, to some more wrestling. As it seems the producers of the movie would only cough up the funding if there was an equal amount of latex-ring-tossing-grippy-WWF-shenanigans as there was blood-letting, our red-latex batman-esque heroine gets a bit of a pummelling.

But in the lab meanwhile? Our hero slowly becomes an ape! Of sorts. Hmn.

This being the only draw in a movie of this garish nonsense, let’s take our time here. Using some feeble fades, some stick-on “hair” and cack-handed prosthetics, his face goes a little “apey.” To be honest, a face covered in burnt chocolate sponge cake would be about right. And only from the chin up. In fact this may be because, when the prosthetics dept looked at their budget, the director said. “Ah well. Chin up.”

The “ape man/cake-face” gets loose, by way of some feeble locks and wood.  He goes on the “rampage.” Which means he climbs up an apartment building and breaks in to a woman’s flat while she showers and he makes…well he sounds like Mutley from Penelope Pitstop. “Rafnnfrafnn, suzzunfruzzun,” noises. You know the type.

The attack is screamy and writhy, although it’s not really clear what the beast is doing, aside from rubbing her boobs with red poster-paint and making even more aggressive Hanna Barbera noises. She is left for dead. Well, naked and covered with paint. Whatever.

The beast is caught by dad and hauled back to the lab. How to fix this? (Oh who cares?) Well dad cares. And decides, in an “at last” moment, that his son needs a pure heart and pure blood to put him back on the straight-and-poorly.

But where in the name of “confluencing plot strands” are they going to get an innocent person’s heart and blood? And at last the wrestling and ape nonsense collide. If Dr Keel can use the body parts of the victim of the earlier wrestling snafu, perhaps his son can be saved? (If you’ve lost interest by now, just think how I feel. We’re only about 20mins in…)

So a surreptitious stealing of the wrestler’s body transpires, and we get some very tedious “mock medical” chat about the swapping organs between the ape-man and the female wrestler. Someone has leafed through Grey’s Anatomy so it’s “corpuscles” this and “tissue damage” that.

After some more actual bloody medical business (footage taken from real transplants, I am told), the woman is killed and the son has fresh organs. However, inevitably in this type of caper, the swap is less than effective. Shock.

The ape-man/cakey-face hybrid escapes once more, (despite Stalin’s ineffectual guardship) and is off on his next rampage. Into a park he runs, all galloping lope and grunty noises. A park that is clearly an indoor soundstage covered in grass clippings, as any scuffle reveals the concrete underfoot. But wait! Who is this he comes across? The obligatory B-Movie “courting couple.” Some bloody attack and gratuitous boob-flashing causes a screaming wench to go hurtling from the park to a local convenience store. Her one loose boob continues to jiggle as she tearfully explains her sorry plight. “Apes! Boyfriends! Attacks!” and so on.

The counter clerk responds heroically, running into the park to find the beast…only to be stabbed violently by the creature.

Then oddly, the beast, in the most gratuitous “we’ve got the prosthetics, we may as well use them” moment, seizes – in a total cul-de-sac – on a by-stander and tears out his eye. Cue a soft-boiled egg being pushed through some plasticine. Nice.

We then have the obligatory approach of wailing sirens and ambulances as the authorities descend on the park to catch – what they still assume – is an escaped ape.

Meanwhile the traditionally ineffectual cops argue unnecessarily in their boxy office. Is it really the killer ape escaped from the zoo? Or is it, as handsome-McBoyfriend suggests – a weird man-ape hybrid?

The police chief, doing his best impression of The Rocketeer’s “all part of the show!” moustachioed huckster Jon Polito dismisses all talk of the supernatural. It’s an ape. Kill it. Back to work boys. But our hero fears different.

Dr Keel, having snatched up his rampaging cake-faced offspring once more, high-tails it back to the lab with the body. They can only wait a tedious 6 hrs to see if the boy turns back to normal…

Even though it feels like six hours in real time, the director chooses instead to zoom in on a clock…go out of focus, adjust the clock and refocus…thus demonstrating time has passed. Any longer and we would have had to see calendar pages fluttering off the wall.

The beast awakes, no better. Daww. So we are into our final pursuit. There is a lengthy “head removal” yanking scene that resembles a Victoria sponge being pulled apart by a bored chef. And the resulting smashing and crashing noises bring the cops a-running from the street.

There are fist fights and punch ups among the grandfather clocks and antiques of the doctor’s home. A police man is scalped by the beast, peeling back his toupe to reveal a gunky mess of Branston pickle and jam. Tongues are bitten, noses wrenched off in a mass of plastic and red paint. This, pretty much what we’ve all been waiting for, if the bloody credits and poster were anything to go by.

Until, in a shameless King Kong style finale, the beast steals a child and heads off to the roof for a dramatic showdown.

Down on the street, passers-by gawp and point, officers blam-blam with their handguns and in searchlight sweeps, the ape flails about with the child.

Dad appears (hooray!) for the final passionate talk-down. Some appeal is made to cake-features. Much cop yelling and public screaming. And the beast, of course, is shot.

In the final moments, much like An American Werewolf In London, the beast returns to human form and lies on the roof, all confused and bewildered as children are coddled and the spectators disperse.

Can his dad ever forgive him? Will we ever find out if the wrestler’s career takes off? Will the woman in the park find a sewing kit and get her boobs back in place? We can but wonder as the whole movie comes to the thundering trumpety close and we press eject and wonder what we’re doing with our lives.

Is it any good?

Well its nonsense. Whether it tips over into funny, campy nonsense or remains firmly in the “oh what the hell are we watching” is a matter of taste.

The credits are deliciously runny, promising, as these movies often do, a lot more offal than we ever actually get. The composer Antonio Díaz Conde has much stabby and punchy fun in what in all honesty is a mix of the thundering camp of The Medusa Touch (now THAT’s a score) and the jolly Saturday teatime drama of Barry Gray’s work on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the like.

The dubbing is workmanlike, with no real attempt to match the length of sentence to the original, cue lots of yabbering mouths with no sound and a confusion of vowels and plosives that crash about the mouth. Best, as I oft do, to sort of unfocus and look elsewhere on the screen when the cast are talking.

The aesthetic is very 1960s, or what I consider that look. Tight Italian suits, skinny ties, sunglasses, pocket squares and oily wavy hair. Transitions betwixt scenes are a multi-coloured swoosh that put one in mind of the “daddla-daddla-dahh” skips in the 1966 Batman TV show. A very cheap equivalent of “meanwhile…”

The cars are chrome boxy sedans bouncing around corners in glinting gun-metal and green. Think Hawaii Five O or Get Smart for the look. Actually, now I recall it, it’s more like the frenetic chaos of an old episode of The Monkees. Which seems oddly appropriate. Night Of The Bloody Monkees would have done just as well. In fact, add a speeded-up chase scene with Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz and a few verses of “Daydream Believer” and it could pass for one of the weirder episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKs43dHBSWA

Going for it, I suppose, is its commitment, amongst the silliness and gore-for-gore’s sake (what is that eye gouging/scalping all about?), we can admire the genuine footage of heart transplants the director has cut in for maximum effect. But as ever of course, the real can never surpass the imagined so for all its clinical accuracy, it moves the movie into “ER/Casualty” fascination, rather than shock or terror.

The Ape effects, as mentioned, are not in the least bit apey. In fact “Night of the Bloody…anything,” would have made as much sense. There is no simian tinge, not even a werewolf fanged look. Just a face from the neck up caked in dark-brown paste. Odd looking, rather than scary.

All in all, not much merit throughout and there is a temptation to start checking one’s watch or phone during the run time. The wrestling scenes are for variety and novelty to add at least “something” to differentiate this red-paint rapey schlocker from all the other cookie-cutter cheapies doing the rounds of B-movie flicks and drive-ins at the time. One can at least say, “Oh you know, it’s the one with the wrestling in it…” when trying to explain to confused loved ones what you’ve wasted these particular 83 mins on this time.

Nasty?

Well it’s a little unpleasant, let’s say that. The transformation from man-to-ape has nothing to have Rob Bottin or Rick Baker updating their CV. It’s all fades and stick-on prosthetics. The “beast” itself is more plasticine than powerhouse so is more of a giggle than a shock. There are scenes of rapey monster killing, with our hapless, helpless showering victim all screams and poster paint, writhing and shrieking under the weight of the “creature.” The “gore” is reserved for some quickie set pieces of eyeball removal (eggs and plastic) and scalping (wigs and ketchup) so it’s got an “urrgghhh!” factor. But as ever, so dated and cheap to be more upsetting by its half-assed amateurness than anything genuinely stressful. Women, as ever, are there to scream and be slapped and have their boobs flap about. Although in the plus column, we have out female wrestlers. Being very dynamic, modern, physical and righteous. Albeit with the hunky boyfriend there to tie the masks and give bicepy hugs.

Ban worthy?

A mixture here of the headline grabbing title, the cover art (some versions of which really do suggest some great creature-feature make-up) and the inclusion of actual transplant operations got the censors in a celluloid-snipping frenzy. Although, oddly, the fact that it’s genuine clinical surgery footage, and not the usual wax-and-lasagne splat, softens the impact and gives the scenes a school-biology lesson feel, rather than a gore-fest look. So no. Banned for silly reasons, caught up as it was in the furore at the time.

What does it remind me of?

As I said above (and if my writing was better, I wouldn’t be repeating myself). It really does have the feel of an “adult” cut of an old Monkees episode. Maybe it’s the fashions, the cars, the music, the hammy running-about. But loose the 20 secs of prosthetic “gore” and it’s a groovy slice of south American sixties fun. Suits, cars, hair. Book ‘em Danno. Murder One. Plus an eyeball on the sidewalk. So Murder two, perhaps. I’m not sure how it works.

Where to find it?

Well I saw it on the ever reliable tax-haven that is Amazon Prime. It cost me all of £2.49. A quick look on YouTube tells me you can’t see the whole movie, but there are plenty of clips, reviews, trailers and in-depth whatnots to whet sixties appetites. eBbay has old original VHS copies for abut £30.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=night+of+the+bloody+apes

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=night+of+the+bloody+apes&_sacat=0

“Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.”

SLANT MAGAZINE

Who made it? Directed by Sam Peckinpah | Written by David Zelag Goodman & Sam Peckinpah | Based on the book The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by |Gordon M Williams | Director Of Photography John Coquillon | Special Effects (not credited)

Who’s in it? Dustin Hoffman | Susan George | Peter Vaughan | TP Mackenna

If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…

The Andromeda Strain | A Clockwork Orange | Diamonds Are Forever | Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory

Production notes and wikipages and whatnot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Dogs_(1971_film)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067800/

What’s it all about?

What we have here is one of the most notorious, scandalous, controversial, bloodthirsty and downright problematic motion pictures of the decade. What could have been a taught, bare-bones simple “home invasion” shocker where hicks meet liberals has gone on to be still discussed, pored over, debated, dismissed and championed fifty years later.

We open in the British countryside, familiar to all, via BBC or PBS, from chocolate boxes and period dramas and mumsy Sunday evening detective shows about clumsy sleuthing vets and doddery vicars. We know where we are. However there is a lack of chintz, a lack of soft-focus and no red-roses around the door. It’s grubby. Soiled. Dirty fingernails and wet wool. Broken land-rovers and ratty scarecrows. More Worzel Gummidge than All Creatures Great & Small.

American mathematician David has arrived in his “a bit too flashy” sports car with his young, perky and oh so wholesome wife Amy. All arran sweaters and roll-ups. It’s Cornwall. It’s a small village. They are here to spend some time. We’re not sure how long. A weekend? A year? It’s clear they’ve got trucks delivering belongings and such so it’s not just an overnight stay. The locals, having little more to do than nurse warm pints of bitter and tinker with rusty engines, begin to take an interest in the couple as they drive through the village. Nobody says “arghhh, we don’t get many strangers in these parts…” but from the angle of their bobble hats and bob of their briar pipes, it’s pretty clear this is a novelty. And not necessarily a welcome one.

But what’s this? Amy is a familiar face. From reactions, flirts, remarks and forelock-tugging it seems all the men know Amy.

She is a local who had long since brushed the dust of this small town from her suede boots and gone off to “better herself” in the USA. Apparently something of a small-screen TV star, all the locals flitter and flutter about her. Hasn’t she grown! Isn’t she beautiful? The snotty, snarly menfolk titter and gawp and make filthy remarks from behind their dimply pint jugs. Oh they remember Amy all right. And it looks like they are keen to get very reacquainted. And they’re not going to let some nerdy jewish American academic stand in the way of what’s theirs.

David and Amy do their best to settle in to the old “Trencher’s Farm” house up on the hill. A white stone, solid but draughty place. Full of old furniture, copper pots, creaky pipes and damp. David has come to write. To work. However conversation between the lovers suggests they are not so much holidaying in Cornwall as running away. This is the time of Watergate, of protests, of Vietnam, of riots on campuses. Is David hiding from confrontation? Has he done wrong? Is he scared of the politics? Of making a stand? Of having his comfy academic life disrupted by campus violence and tenure-committee protest? We can’t be sure. But he doesn’t seem proud to have left and we get the sense of hiding from the world. From his fears.

On the other end of the scale, a group of the town’s locals are anything but backward in coming forward. Hired by David to repair the roof of a barn, they arrive in a noisy truck, all bare-chested, beer swigging, noisy, aggressive and bullying. They make themselves far, far too at home for David’s liking. A little too friendly to Amy, a little too eager to walk in uninvited and drink from his fridge.

David isn’t brave. But he isn’t stupid. Better to join them than to beat them. And we squirm as we watch David try and ingratiate himself with the butch locals. They despise him and his tweedy effeminacy. His glasses, his jumpers, his Mozart, his mathematics. He buys them drinks, tried to befriend the gruff head of the town, Tom. A grizzly, drunken bear of a man with a young daughter who is forever being told to stay away from the local paedo/weirdo Henry who stares and stumbles about the cobbled streets.

Amy is bored. David just wants his blackboard and his studies. Any attention from the workmen, with whom she clearly shares a fumbling sexual past, is better than no attention at all and some flirting, flashing coyness keeps her idly amused. However she is clearly over-stepping the mark as it is only too clear to us the gruff and female-starved men want more than pranks and giggles.

A sign is left when David finds their cat hanged in the cupboard. Was it the workers? Kids? A prank? A warning? David doesn’t want trouble. Or confrontation. His excuses infuriate Amy who accuses him of cowardice in the face of “men.”

Meanwhile, setting their trap, the workmen tease and taunt David about his manliness and his lack of machismo, finally goading him into spending a day with them. Drinking and hunting. Feeling threatened and on the back foot, David unwisely agrees to join them. Maybe he can prove himself and get on the same level with these guys? Perhaps Amy might respect him a bit? Maybe they’ll finish the damned roof and leave him alone.

However the plot is merely to get David away from his home. Amy’s old flame and head of the workers Venner, arrives at the farmhouse, forces his way in and makes is frighteningly clear he will have his way with Amy, whether she lets him or not. At this point, in a key moment, Venner rapes Amy who is too terrified to fight, too eager to get it over with or just frozen with fear. Her lack of “fight” only encourages Venner to believe her complicit, confusing matters even more. There is no confusion however when one of Venner’s workmates arrives and Amy is violently held down and raped once more by this second man.

David returns to the homestead, having been abandoned as a prank by the workers. Amy says nothing of her ordeal but is clearly traumatised and shaken by it. Why tell her husband? What would this pathetic man possibly even do? The guy couldn’t even defend a cat.

Finding courage, at the end of his tether form the bullying and taunts, David fires the workmen. Pays them off and sends them packing in an odd show of bravery. But these are not men to take this condescending dismissal lightly.

That night, at a church fayre, Tom’s daughter takes local Henry’s wandering hand and they depart the church-hall together. Once it is clear she is missing, the menfolk become a spitting, violent and drunken lynch-mob, out with guns and tools to hunt down the evil paedophile for fear of what he has done to Tom’s daughter.

In a panic, befuddled Henry hides, smothering the girl to keep her silent for fear of being caught. However the smothering turns to suffocation and now he has a dead girl in his arms. Henry, terrified of retribution, makes a run for it, only to be struck hard by David and Amy’s car on a dark road.

Unaware of the kidnapping, death or approaching lynch-mob, David and Amy feel responsible for Henry’s injury and take him back to their farmhouse. They will tend his wounds and await an ambulance. However the townsfolk finally have Henry trapped and no feeble intellectual American will keep them from justice.

The stand-off is prolonged. Violent. Bloody. As David is forced to take stand to protect his wife, Henry, his home and his own sense of self, the drunken mob begin to smash, burn, punch and shoot their way through the house to beat bloody revenge out of Henry. And of David, should he stand in their way.

The last twenty minutes we see what happens when men are pushed to the edge, when masculinity is threatened, when it becomes us vs them, when might meets right and the two unstoppable forces of a small-town’s violent rage and a man driven insane with territorial vengeance meet in the Cornwall darkness with nothing but empty rifles, stove-boiled fat, glass shards and a rusty bear-trap between them.

Is it any good?

Is it any good? It’s Straw Dogs. It’s an absolute masterpiece of its type. Is its TYPE any good? Well then we’d better dig into that. Here we go.

Firstly, as I consult the pages of notes made during my watch, it’s horribly grubby. I mean genuinely. Nature red I tooth and claw. It reeks of manure and dirt. Of shit and dust. The film has blue cold mould in every frame. Fingernails crusted with grime, Wet dog blankets, sopping cordory, dank musty rotten wood and creeping, seeping cigarette smoke.

The cast are gruesome. Natural, but as far from Hollywood glitz as you can get. Buck teeth, bowl cuts, ratty sweaters and stubble. It’s as if the whole film has been taken with an old Kodak Instamatic, the brittle black plastic cameras of the 1970s, that produce those ectochrome colours and photos square with rounded corners. This film belongs in an old green Clarks shoe box in a cold plywood sideboard.

The olde atrmos is helped, when viewed from the shiny laptop digital world of 2021, by faces we know from the small British screen. Faces from ITV, from BBC, from crackly Christmas specials and saturated sitcoms. The young girl who is abducted is a buck-toothed mary-jane wearing Sally Thomsett who aficionados of 70s telly will know when she grew up to be a cheeky buxom rascal in Richard O’Sullivan vehicles Man About The House. All mini-dresses and babycham. Somehow knowing she has this giddy future ahead of her gives her abduction a leering, Brady & Hindley foreshadowing.

Buried beneath ratty beanie and scraggly beard is Peter Vaughan, the terrifying glare of Porridge’s ‘Grouty’ as the thundering force of nature who is Tom. British TV fans will know his threatening prison persona, all rough denim and screws on the take. We shudder just to see him drunk, shouty and bitter. I don’t think we ever discover what brought Grouty to HM Prison Slade. But it wasn’t for parking on a double yellow.

Uncredited due to a leg injury which meant he could not be insured on set, we have horror stalwart David Warner as the “misguided” but dangerous paedophile Henry. My generation recognises his shuffly paranoia from his turn in Richard Donner’s The Omen, when he scurries shiftily about trying to persuade a brooding Gregory Peck of his son’s fate, only to enjoy one of horror fans’ favourite beheadings at the hands of a glazier’s truck.

David’s wife Amy is Susan George. Star of episodes of Tales Of The Unexpected and Armchair Theatre, George was always typecast as the “sexpot.” Busty nipples poking through tight sweaters, mini dresses and knee-high boots, her country-girl charm has a naughty innocence. She seems both virgin and whore with her blonde coquettishness, her “who, me?” innocence but a knowing wink when it might get her the attention she craves. We have a longing to bring her in, wrap her in cotton wool and warn her of wolves.

Which brings us to our “hero”, David. An intense, trembling Dustin Hoffman. At this point in his career, he was only 5 movies in, far from being the method acting legend we know now. However his brief career had seen him jump from awkward sex-symbol in The Graduate to limping pimpy Ratzo in Midnight Cowboy. Straw Dogs was a new Hoffman. Playing a little on his “academic hottie” persona Ben Braddock, we see his apologetic awkward nebbishness pushed to its limits here to reveal the man beneath. And it’s an extraordinary transformation.

I am reminded of what, I think, Joe Queenan or perhaps William Goldman (apologies if it was Kermode or Ebert) said about transformation in movies. And Hoffman overlaps here. Indulge me.

When Hoffman won his Oscar for Rain Man, playing the autistic savant Raymond Babbit, it was seen as a spectacular method performance.

However Queenan/Goldman (I think) is not so impressed. A performance of “acting tropes” (stutters, twitches, stammers, tics etc) is bread and butter to an actor and a show-offy bit of schtick. The real acting, Queenan suggests, is the more understated but compelling development by Tom Cruise’s Charlie as he turns from wheeler-dealing salesman to caring family man that is really the acting masterclass.

Watching Hoffman slow go from shy academic to vengeance filled territorial monster is a performance of startling achievement. “Twitching’s easy” as nobody has ever said. “Growth is hard.”

The movie itself is a rollercoaster of tension. A classic tale of us and them. And one picks one’s side carefully.

The tale of the outsider in the wrong place is as old as the hills in which eyes are sunk.

City folk faced with “country ways” has been a staple of tension and horror since stories began. The fear of the comfy middle-class life upset and disrupted by the earth, by reality, by nature. The suburbanites faced with the darkness of the outback (Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance); the “polite” normality against the feral Council Estate/Projects viciousness, (Eden Lake, Falling Down), the tourist in the wrong place (An American Werewolf in London). Hell, there’s even a cinematic argument to make that Alien is a simple “culture vs nature” stand-off. A woman who values hairspray vs a pure survival machine? “I admire its…purity…”

We are forced somehow to pick a side. Is a man who knows maths and books and Mozart a real man? I mean…really? Where would he be with a fire? With a BBQ? With a broken roof? Stumbling about apologetically, trying to get a plumber on the phone in the face of a hands-on-hips wife who thought men were meant to be “good at this stuff?”

Not that the females in the movie are wide eyed innocents. One of the joys (not the right word, but bare with me) of Straw Dogs is the confusion. I think it was Mark Kermode that criticised the remake as being bereft of “problems”. The story IS problematic. It isn’t a simple ys vs them tale. It’s not good vs bad, or right vs wrong or culture vs ignorance.

A watch of the movie shows Susan George’s Amy flash her knickers at the sweaty, panting idiots on the roof. Bare her young breasts through an “innocently” open window. Playing the men at their own game.

A right, of course, anyone has to do. However it starts the audience asking very troublesome questions about behaviour, about innocence, about naivete, about expectations. Questions we might not be braced to face head on.

“Why don’t you wear a bra?” asks David at one point. “Why should I?” responds Amy. And who are we to argue?

The rape scene is the moment that got the censors rushing for their scissors and better arguments than mine have been made about the work they did. I cannot speak for Peckinpah, for George or even for the novelist Gordon Williams’ intent. It is true that the scene is a woman taken violently against her will. It is clear the sex is rough, unwanted, brutal and violent. It is the movie’s choice however NOT to have Amy screaming and pounding and fighting and punching throughout that caused censors to wonder exactly what they had. Was this a woman consenting? Giving in? Giving up? Or, god forbid, taking some pleasure from this violence? It can be read in every way and every cut of a scene, trim of an expression, cutaway from a moment of pause on a clinch tells a different story. Cut out the troublesome “reaction shots” and we leave the audience to interpret the reaction themselves.

My thoughts, worth nothing 50 years later, is a scene of a violent assault. That these people may be past lovers, that this may not be the first time he has forced himself on her, that an eagerness to get it over with may be preferable to a drawn out punch up? We don’t know. It’s up to us. However the “idea” that Amy may be “enjoying” the experience (her lack of fight, her gripping and grasping the biceps) was enough to have scissor happy editors try and repair the scene to something easily understood. And that, I believe, is the issue. There is no room for nuance. There is no room for discussion, for debate, for empathy or understanding of this trauma. We need a clear good guy/bad guy dynamic. It’s a horribly scene to watch BECAUSE it’s so troublesome and inflected with whats and ifs and buts and maybes. The BBFC simply didn’t trust an audience to understand the complexity of the act, the ex-boyfriend attack, the familiarity, the maybe-they-did-this-a-lot, the give-in-so-it-ends-quicker supplication.

More essays will be written about this. And long should they. It’s a powerful moment and the ambiguity and what-the-hell? These moments are what lift it from mere sex-attack-titillation.

There is so much more to say about this movie, and my little blog is hardly the place. Hoffman wanted a smaller age difference between him and his leading lady. His middle-aged academic and Susan George’s perky youth suggested a relationship he didn’t think helped the plot. It’s not a movie about an ogling academic and his sophomore crush. However we cannot help, given the casting, side with the locals who might feel this “old man” has taken the flower of innocent youth from their simple Cornish village and corrupted her with his bookish ways.

The fact that David and Amy are charged with protecting a paedophile? What could be more a liberal dilemma than the need for “due process” in a black n white world of right and wrong? Henry killed a young girl. End of story, surely? We are torn brilliantly between sides. If we were David? If we were Tom? The strength of the movie is in this back and forth. We side for neither, we side for both.

And it is in this that, for all its problems, politics, polemics and prejudice, Straw Dogs remains a masterpiece in execution, script, performance and polarizing positioning.

Nasty?

Hoo boy. Yes. Those who know Peckinpah for The Wild Bunch (albeit a movie I have yet to see at time of writing, but right up there on my “next to.” I think this weekend), no punches are pulled.

The rape is spiteful, teary, thrusty, gruesome, tearful and upsetting. The final 20 minutes of the house attack pull no punches. Gunshots, bloody wounds, torn flesh, glass cuts and gruesome wounds abound. To be fair, there is no lingering voyeurism of the violence. We do not see unnecessary close-ups, slo-mos or gratuitous body-horror. Acts are short, hard, real and horrible. Peckinpah, while enjoying the ballet of violence, is not interested in pause-button fetishism or teenage “wooaarrgh!” in his battles. It is angry people against angry people. We see it. We are not encouraged to enjoy it.

The last moments where “Chekov’s gun” come into play and both barrels of swinging and heavy farmhouse shotguns explode and bang with raging ferocity are the necessary bloody finale. That rusty bear trap over the fire place, which hangs ominously throughout, is not there for show.

Ban worthy?

As ever, consistently, there is nothing in Straw Dogs that could corrupt or harm a mature adult viewer. That the non-regulated industry did nothing to ensure viewers were adults or mature was of course the entire problem. Cuts made by heavy handed censors that removed necessary or “troubling” reaction shots left audiences with too much time to decide how the characters were feeling. An attack not laced with screams and struggles is a complicated attack. There is more to life than fight or flight, and this nuance is where the trouble sits. Aside the flight or fight there are also the reactions of “freeze or fold.” These are no Hollywood reactions and we are not used to seeing them on the screen, Heroes and cowards either run or punch. Anything else is…questionable. Why not run? Why not fight? Can one freeze in terror? Or is to “freeze” to “invite more?” A movie who’s set up, performance, framing and ambiguity invite conversation and debate is a movie for sincere thought and discussion. This isn’t a goodie/baddy Die Hard shoot-em up. And whether the audience of 1971 was prepared to put the intellectual work in I suppose caused and erring on the side of caution.

What does it remind me of?

Well nothing we’ve really seen so far. It has the home-invasion shocks and, what Kim Newman calls, the “hand through the window” jumps, of Night Of The Living Dead. It has the flashes of fleshy gore of some of the earlier movies we’ve discussed. But it’s done for real. More like a public information film about the dangers of farm-equipment, barbed wire, rusty knives or damp floorboards. You know those cold, dark, damp 1970s short ads the Government put out about the danger of Fireworks?

About swimming in deep waters? About Frisbees up in pylons? That’s the aesthetic. Designed to upset, to shock and to have one fearful of the unknown darkness of woodlands and strangers.

Where to find it?

Usual places. Amazon Prime has it. You can get shiny Blu Rays and DVDs from the usual places. And YouTube (18+) will show you a decent Criterion Cut version for free here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-1qVNa-gQ8&t=3s