Who made it? Directed by Michael Armstrong | Written by Adrian Hoven & Michael Armstrong | Director Of Photography Ernst W. Kalinke | Special Effects (not credited)
What we have here is an old timey medieval-style crucifix and cackling period shocker. If I was to say a loose “Witchfinder General-ly” set of speeches, trials and jailings had been stapled together as an excuse for some violent tortures, screaming maidens, bloody set-pieces and old-worlde iron devices of pain, then I feel I’d be on the money. Racks first, questions later.
We open serenely, with a cart full of harmless nuns. A gentle “Little House On The Prairie” aesthetic, only to be slammed in the face with some good old bright yellow teutonic type-facery, proclaiming MARK OF THE DEVIL. It’s that bold sudden war-film opening, reminiscent (in my memory at least) of old Lew Grade movies and stuff like Guns Of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare. The name Herbert Lom appears. And if your my age, or thereabouts, this has a ring of quality to it.
Up until now (and we’re on film 7 of the project) we haven’t really had a “star” as such. Oh, some of the actors may have gone on to be cult favourites or, able to flog their Sharpie scrawl on a b/w 8×4” glossy photo at a Comicon near you. But I think this is the first time I’ve seen a “household name” in one of these. And when I say “household name”, I refer to Lom’s twitchy mania in seven of the eleven Pink Panther crime comedies.
Hey! You said your dog did not bite! “That’s not my dog.”
This is pretty much why my generation has heard of him. So to see his name appear in the credits of this was an unsettling treat.
Anyhoo, the nuns continue to trundle and we are clearly in that odd period of history that’s very difficult to put your finger on. Tricorn hats, waistcoats, pantaloons and such. But castles and witches and farmland and urchins. Plus everyone is buxom and in a cape. Let’s say the 17th /18th Century. But it could be 100 years either side of that. And it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m not going to check.
With a whip of a looming fish-eye lens, some bandit types arrive and murder the nuns, which is unpleasant. But let’s you know what you’re in for.
We are in a world of witches and fear, where villagers and councilmen and townsfolk and other types in bright velvet and dusty lace have hangings in town squares. Witch trials are rife and it would seem you don’t have to do much to be cursed and spat at by an “inquisitor” type with a crucifix and promptly tortured in a manner of excruciating ways.
We watch as a chap is tarred and feathered and his hand chopped off. We observe 2 screaming “witches” being burnt at the stake. Crowds cheer and rave like they were Monty Python at a stoning.
For once, Cleese cast himself as a short-tempered bearded shouty authoritarian.
Next stop a tavern – of course. Because we’re a few minutes in and no-one has said “flagon” or “meade” yet and nobody has upset a tankard.
We meet some key characters in the sketch: Count Christian, a painfully handsome man with eyes that would make Robert Powell look squinty. Peircing just about does it. He resembles what a test-tube baby would look like if grown from the seeds of Harry Hamlin and Peter Gallagher.
Blue Steel
Christian is a “witchfinder in training,” if you like. On an unpaid zero-hours apprentice scheme. He works under the big wig of Herbert Lom’s Lord Cumberland. Pretty much the Philip Green of witch-finding in those parts. He sits carousing and carolling with his chum Herbert, the local executioner fellow.
Of course we need some plot after all this set up so the current Witchfinder of the village, Albino, played with gusto by Reggie Nalder, arrives. There is lively discussion over a “proclamation.” We discover that Lord Cumberland is on his way to take over the local “witch-finding” duties. Albino is less than happy.
Now it seems Albino is mainly irritated because he’s got a sweet little gig here. Clearly madder than a box of cheese, Albino has been swanning about, all cassocks and buckley boots, calling all the women witches so he can get his 18th Century rocks off torturing them, raping them and generally behaving like a premier league football player in a hotel. The last thing he needs is Herbert Lom’s ‘Cumberland’ sticking his sausage in the town business and finding out about the corruption and what a Deloitte consultant would probably call “a lack of documented audit trail.”
But arrive Cumberland does, in a manner pre-empting Darth Vader’s swooshy cape action by 7 years. Or long, long after – depending on how seriously you take the Lucas timeline. He also has a menacing looking cane, which gives him something of the Biff Tannen. Cumberland is not impressed with Albino’s documentation or processing. He wants “confessions! Not corpses!”
It’s a Lom way to tip a Heathen, it’s a Lom way to goooooo…
A quick review of Albino’s work shows he’s been rather slack on keeping receipts and as such, some women are set free with a government apology and a church gift-voucher. One of these young wenchy buxom maidens is Vanessa, who we will discover becomes something of Count Christian’s favourite. They laugh, they run, they dine and eat fruit in a lusty manner. And indeed a lusty manor.
The remaining bulk of the movie follows Christian as he gradually loses faith in Cumberland’s actions. There are only so many innocent women (farmers, puppeteers) he can see put through water torture, thumbscrews, stocks, burning, stretching on a rack, branding with scalding irons, whipping, sat on beds of nails, lowered into a fire, having their eyes cut out, beheaded and, famously, having their tongue ripped out with a clamp, before he loses patience. All in glorious technicolour.
Did you want more ketchup, luv?
Things come to a head when Albino accuses Cumberland of being a crazy assed sadist who only tortures women to make up for his impotency. Well, you don’t go around accusing Inspector Clouseau’s boss of shooting blanks. So Cumberland gets rightly peeved and strangles Albino.
This is the last straw for Cumberland who is beginning to realise this whole “churchy witchy” plot is really just a way of letting greedy priests and bishops steal gold and land and property from everyone they come across. And then, like it were Paris in 1789, there is a huge revolt.
By which I mean all the extras, dressed as they are like folk off the lid of a Quality Street tin, storm the castle and there is much shrieking and bloodletting and revenge from the townsfolk o’er the corrupt church. And boy do they enjoy getting their hands on the old torture kit. So in a final scarlet flurry of chains and whips and spikes and flaming torches and scissors and sharpened nutcrackers (hoo-boy), there is a glorious overthrowing. Much sunsets and crying and it all goes rather Wicker-Man hysterical. At which point, one assumes, everyone goes home, free of the tyranny of mad priests and thumbscrews, to enjoy a flagon of meade and a buxom velvety wench.
Is it any good?
We’ve taken a step up here, it seems. Certainly from a production and casting and general “let’s try and make a proper film” point of view. Yes, ‘Night Of The Living Dead’ was a sensational masterpiece, but even had a found-footage, newsreel, black and white, art-house project sensibility. Amazing for all that, but clearly made by talented amateurs on a weekend budget.
Michael Armstrong’sMark Of The Devilis a step up and we are entering the more glossy, expensive, well-lit, lavishly costumed affair. Far from an epic (it has no sweep or majesty, no extensive outdoor sets. No one is going to accidentally tune in and think they’re watching Cleopatra), it could sit quite nicely alongside Zinnemann’s highly regarded A Man For All Seasons in its aesthetic.
“…must have been kicking himself as the flames licked higher, that it never occurred to him to say, “I recant my Catholicism.” BLACKADDER III
A quick check on imdb and we see that Armstrong has a stable of quality and reliable productions on his CV, working as he has with Vincent Price and Christopher Lee (1983’s The House Of The Long Shadows) and some quality knockabout telly (The Professionals, The Return Of The Saint). Fact is, it’s a German funded movie with a top cast of familiar-ish faces, shot on location in a quaint Austrian town with no expense spared on making it look suitably 18th Century and you wouldn’t be embarrassed being caught watching it on your iPad on a bus.
Until the tortures start, obviously.
The production company and producers and distributors absolutely knew what they hadwhen the final processed technicolour reels came back from the chemist. No attempt was made to pass this off as an Oscar winning documentary, a sombre discussion of life in the 1700’s, a moving tearjerker about forbidden love or a hard-hitting expose of some of the Catholic church’s seedier moments. Nope. They knew they had a crowd pleaser, a crowd screamer, a cover-your-face blood riot of sadistic torture of every stripe and variety and packed the audiences in with a marketing campaign claiming “Positively The Most Horrifying Movie Ever Made!” The overstained poster, rather than focussing on the dashing Udo Keir or the gothic goatee of Herbert Lom, shoves the gurning grotesque of Reggie Nadler’s noggin all up in the audience’s grille, plus screaming women and the following hysterical claims: Guaranteed To Upset Your Stomach! The First Film Rated V For Violence! And my personal favourite, ‘Due to the horrifying scenes, no-one admitted without a vomit bag (available free at box office)’.
And what nasty fun doth await the punter and his/her popcorn (hopefully not confused with the bag of vomit halfway through the third reel).
The sets and costumes are on the cheap side, but the locations are real as you like and we get a genuine sense of time and place. It’s real concrete, real rocks, real dust, real stone, real horses. Not a hardboard gravestone or polystyrene altar in sight. The castle used held genuine witch-trials during the period and some of the horrifically rusty torture equipment being waved about the place came from the castle museum and are genuine relics of the age.
The cast, who uniformly do their best to keep menacing straight-faces throughout the thunderous panto bible-bashing, are earning their wages. Much staring, pointing, spitting, scowling and some serious eyebrow work. Campy, yes. But playing it true to the gothic horrors of the material.
There seems to have been plenty of dubbing (possibly over the German, although tales are told of an entirely mixed European cast and crew speaking over half a dozen different languages on set). So if you grew up watchingThe Flashing Bladeon telly during the summer holidays, you’ll get the sense of how it goes.
How to till 20m every day of your Summer Holiday waiting for Why Don’t You to start
There are no shortage of all the tropes one expects from this sort of galloping, shouty, purple-robed anger-thon set in these days. Tricorn hats aplenty, waistcoats, doublets, hose, capes and everything has a buckle attached. Like the aforementioned Quality Street tin, the colour has been turned up to eleven so it’s all a bit garish on the retina, but boy when the claret starts to flow, we get some serious ketchup-red squirts.
The music trumpets and thunders and it took me a while of staring off an humming to realise it wasn;t a million miles away from the theme to The West Wingmixed with John Barry’s sweeping score toDances With Wolves. But not as catchy as either.
As in a lot of movies of this time, the foley artist in charge of sound effects (footsteps, clanks, keys, swishes, hoofbeats and tankards) has whacked his headphones off the scale so every lock, every cup, every horse, every zip sounds like a 12ft chandelier being run over by a milk-float full of coat-hangars. When the jailer gets his huge key ring out, it’s no quieter than Godzilla playing Kerplunk with bits of the Pompidou Centre.
But for all of this, the time romps by. I didn’t check my watch once. For sheer variety of torture methods it can’t fail to hold you interest. Don’t like having bare feet branded? Here’s a rack. Don’t like water-torture? Hold on a second, we’ll burn someone to death in a minute. Too tame? How about a chair full of nails?
Vomit, there was none. It’s 1970s. But bored I was not.
Nasty?
Yes. Thoroughly. Its’ almost the care, expense and gloss that makes it so, rather than the other way around. Being 7 movies in to this project, I have felt until now that the backroom, cheapy, wax/ketchup, animal innards gore of the low-budget meant it felt more…I dunno, nasty. More repulsive, more – somehow – dirty. However when one begins to see what this stuff looks like with expensive prosthetics and decent fake limbs/blood/stumps/wounds, it is a very different experience. Not necessarily more real (movie blood will always be movie blood, movie skin can only ever look like wax or latex – at least in the 60s/70s), but its’ the lingering close-ups that bigger budgets can afford that give the movie a more voyeuristic and downright sadistic layer. We don’t cut away, we don’t whip pan to a scream. We linger. Knives cut, blades tear, wood crishes, irons burn. And because it’s been done with some cost and expertise, the camera hovers around getting all the good bits.
So it’s leery. That’s the word. Leery. “Lom, lecherous and leery”. Which, by coincedence, is also the name of my solicitors
Ban worthy?
Hmn. No. I mean it’s viscious as I say and lingers lasciviously on wounds and burns and scalds and cuts and spurty blood-letting. So it’s gross. And, effects admiration aside, the screaming helplessness of the female victims at the hands of the churchy patriarchy is not a turn on. Unless it is. Then God help you. But it puts the viewer right there next to the inquisitor and invites you to revel in the pain and torture with him. Which is not in the least bit fun. And I can imagine kiddy nightmares of blades and cranks. Don’t ban it. Just keep it on the top shelf.
What does it remind me of?
Ha. Well for the second time around, and it’s the clothes and such more than anything, it’s an X Rated episode of Dogtanian & The Three Muskerhounds.Starring Adam Ant from his pirate flouncy period. All meeting up with Mariam Margoleyes to shout “fornicator!” during Blackadder II. In a butchers window.
Sounds a bit like “bum,” doesn’t it!
Where to find it?
Again, easy to track down this one. Once you have confirmed and proved you’re over 18, the wonders of YouTube’s hidden content (“inner tube” if you like) are accessed and you can get the whole movie for free there.
Who made it? Directed by Rolf Thiele | Written by Jacob Grimm / Wilhemlm Grimm (hardly) / Peter Laregh / Rolf Thiele | Director Of Photography Wolf Wirth | Special Effects (not credited)
The story, that that there is, of “The New Adventures Of Snow White,” is something of a mish-mash of a portmanteau of a fable of an episodic rambling chapter play. It brings together familiar tropes and tales from the brothers Grimm (Cinderella, poison apples, dwarves, handsome princes, lute playing folderol and lush arborial settings) and mixes it awkwardly with a cavalcade of painfully exhausting Chuckle-Brothers style knockabout gaffes and soft-focus topless Euro-porn smut.
If you require more detail than this, here we go…
We begin with our two fools. Bickering and falling over as they wend their way o’er German hill and dale like a couple of panto idiots. If you were to look up “clot” in an illustrated dictionary, it would be these two gurning twits. They act as our Greek Chorus of sorts as their mishaps and misadventures act as sort of chapter headings for each “Grimm” section.
Next up, to an odd iPod shuffle of Krauty country twang guitar and Hendrixy wah-wah meets jazz piano, we meet the first of our fairy tale heroines, putting the “tit” in “titular,” Snow White. Like almost all the women in the plot, she is running, all nubile and perky, topless through some fields. Camera gets very smudgy and soft-focus. If she was eating a Flake or washing her hair with Timotei, you wouldn’t be surprised.
Before there was the internet, before there was Cadbury’s Caramel, there was this…
Running as she is, a talking dog (honestly), a talking bear (yep) and an enchanted frog (also big on the chat) all ask if she wants to have sex. She declines and continues to lollop and gambol in soft focus.
Meanwhile (there’s a lot of “meanwhile” in this), a wicked witch or queen desires to have her killed. “Mirror mirror on the wall,” etc. dubbed over from the German into shouty Carry-On lingo. She rubs her nipples. Think Jonathan Ross’s wife Jane Goldman being extra vampy.
I can’t imagine WHAT he sees in her.
Dwarves suddenly appear in the forest. Seven of them. From magic toadstools in the shape of penises. Hendrix continues. Snow White’s top falls off. The Goodies seem to take over the soundtrack, having a crack at some bluegrass. Snow White shacks up with the dwarves and hangs out their tiny underpants on the line.
Meanwhile (told you) we enter a castle to find everyone splayed out, asleep (either from reading the script or from an enchanted spell, it’s not clear). They are of course all mediaevally in their garb, most of which is on the floor. They are largely nude. Our two dolts both kiss a sleeping beauty (possibly THE sleeping beauty) and she awakes! With her boobs out! And she has to marry one of the dolts, according to the king. There is an argument about some geese. The music goes all Dukes of Hazzard and we cut to the Ugly Stepsisters in a carriage. I can’t recall why. But they’ll be back towards the end when there’s some business with a slipper.
Its difficult in recollection to link a lot of what happens in these laederhosen-ladled shoutily dubbed vignettes, as plot seems to take second, third or even a fourth place to more nubile soft-focus foresty boob jiggling. But my notes tell me we are now in an obligatory cabin. Lumberjack types abound. Another nameless nubile European woman in her late teens is chased about with plenty of wobbly upskirt shots of thighs and gussets. In order, it would appear, to add some unwanted violence to the unwanted titillation, we find mutiliated and dismembered limbs strewn about the cabin. I assume this was the last girl to be caught in the cabin cocking about among the wine barrels.
We haven’t had a meanwhile in a while, so let’s have one of those. More wah-wah, more-soft focus, more silly men falling over, until we are back with the King. He has “decreed” as Kings must in such Grimm Fayre, that all the virgins in the village must congregate so his young son may choose a wife.
This is cause for maidens the town over to gather themselves in soapy water and splash about a bit, nips akimbo, to prepare for the ball. We see some 1970s pubes flash in a mirror for a moment. The Evil Queen or Wicked Witch (it’s not important) decides to cast a spell or two and our two clumsy dolts become doves. That can talk. Sleeping Beauty, now awoken, is unable to find any man to fall in love with her (or at least, have soft-focus waist-up sex). Even the bear and the dog and frog don’t fancy her much. It’s not clear why.
The doves tell Cinderella to dance about a bit in slo-mo and a magical party frock will appear. She does so. Her clothes fall off. She continues to run about waftily. A stage-hand off screen lobs a floaty cotton number at her. She is naturally aghast and enchanted.
The witch offers Snow White (we do seem, at this point, to be in about 9 fairy tales at once) an apple. Snow White eats the apple. And then very very slowly collapses. Very slowly. As she is nude and standing on a cold rock and wants to be comfy and they haven’t got a stunt team.
The Evil Queen finds this most satisfying and legs it away, cackling. Oh, and taking her clothes off and flinging them into a hedge.
Then, for some respite from all the nipples, pale hips, doltish knockaboutery and buckly shoe business, it all gets a bit po-faced and some actual olde timey dancing happens in court. Much bowing and curtesying and fans and pomp. A flute. Maybe a tambor. And the villagers have lusty looks over velvet pantaloons.
At which point the party is over, it seems. Midnight or something. Cinderalla drops a shoe and everyone departs. It’s not clear why. Or I might have nodded off.
(by the way – if any of this is making sense, or indeed piquing your interest, or making you ponder that this might be a jolly harmless romp, you have misunderstood).
Then we rush towards the finish as the camera crew are losing light, losing film, losing money and losing most of the tired audience
The ugly sisters try and get into the slipper, as is de rugeur in this sort of sketch. And in a nod to the original Grimm story, cut each other’s toes off to jam their feet in the footwear. Much ketchup bloody and waxy fake toes.
Snow White is layeth in a clear Perspex box so she resembles just so much sushi. Pouting occurs by the Dwarves. They are not short of pouts. They are however, short.
Well now you’ve opened it, you’ve got 24 hrs to eat it before it goes off…
Someone gets on a horse (by now it’s so tiring, so soft focus, so pale and wan and the sunlight fades between the autumnal fronds and the wiry pubes, it’s difficult to tell who or what. Or indeed why). But there’s some bouncy naked horse riding. Can’t be sure if they have sex on the horse. Or are just cocking about a bit. The sound track gets heavy on the wah wah.
The Prince waves a magic flower and lots of nature appears to transform. Into nude women. The 2 doves return to their natural state as 2 over-worked seaside children’s entertainers. The bear turns into the beardy man from the cover of The Joy Of Sex. The magic flower opens the box of sushi and Cinderella clambers out.
It now goes full “rolley-oh-doh” with the madrigal nonsense like very, very early Pink Floyd when they sung about goblins and pixies. Some heavy petting in a hedge.
And then it all wraps up with a hilarious comedy misunderstanding about some rocks, they burst into song and over the fields they go, into the sunset. Like that bit at the end of Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade. Except nude and giggling in German.
All together now chaps, “Dan t’dan dahhhh, dan-da-dahhhhh! C’mon Denholm, cheer up!”
I think that’s it.
Is it any good?
Well who am I to judge. It’s a sex comedy. Not that it’s sexy. Or noticeably comedic. Perhaps the jokes are funnier in German. Or the boobs are sexier.
Sex comedies happened much when I did. That is to say, the nineteen seventies.
There have always been comedies and farces, be they Shakespearean, Chaucerian or Hogarthian, that rely largely on a man trying to get his end away, with hilariously disasterous results. Or lusty maidens and coy virgins and a variety of misunderstandings causing people to pop up in the wrong bed, in the wrong clothes, with the wrong partner. And we invented the word “bawdy” to cover most of these.
But it wasn’t until the 60s and the heyday of the 70s that the idea of popping along to the movies on a Friday night to catch some “cheeky” soft-core romping against the backdrop of sitcom silliness and swanee whistles really happened.
Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film PostersOriginal Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film PostersAs far as credits go, Richmond always insisted on going on top.
It saved the industry, some say. In the UK, as the British public began to settle in to cheaper and cheaper colour television sets to take in their daily dose of soaps, game shows, cop shoot-outs and quizzes, audiences began to stay home from their local cinemas. The flickering delights of the Roxy, the Odeon, the Gaumont and the Picture Palace lay empty on suburban Saturday nights. What was out in the rainy streets that you couldn’t get at home for free? And in the warm?
Well sex. Thanks to the BBC and the like having very strict guidelines on pre- and post-watershed content, the idea that dads could get a bit of cheeky tits and ass on television was zero. Maybe a bikini in a James Bond film? Maybe a daring cleavage on ITVs Miss World contest? But it was never going to be racier than that. The cinema however? Well, things could go a lot further. Disguised as “documentaries” or the catch-all “nature film,” much could be seen on the screen that would never been seen on the beeb. This all pre-VHS of course.
And for some reason, the silly, jokey, slap n tickly sitcom set-ups made the soft-core fumbles and bra-twanging rutting seem so much more harmless. A McGill seaside postcard rather than anything “sinister.”
Can’t even be bothered to put a caption.
So the 1970s saw an influx of these daft films. Too sexy to be funny, too silly to be sexy – falling between two stools and just ending up curios for the agitated, horny, drunk and bored.
When VHS, and un-regulated VHS at that, reared its head in the 1980s and suddenly ANYTHING was possible, the appetite for Timmy Lee’s Confessions and Eskimo Nell’s Igloo vanished.
Christopher Timothy, fresh from having his arm up a cows bottom.
Which leaves us with things like The New Adventures Of Snow White.
There is nothing sexy about this movie at all. It’s not porn. The woman are topless, yes. There is a little full frontal. A pale bum may wiggle. But it’s Benny Hill silly. Kenny Everett silly. Two Ronnies cheeky. Nothing raunchier, pervier, grottier or seedier than a Confessions’ movie, Keep It Up Jack or Beneath The Valley Of The Supervixens.
The jokes are none. Unless twits knocking themselves on the head, a frog asking “you ‘ad some?” or a toadstool looking slightly similar to a penis is what gets you guffawing. At one point the innocent girl tries to milk a cow. But doesn’t know how. So sucks it off instead. Sort of. Cue the bufoons scratching their heads and going cross-eyed like The Chuckle Brothers.
For reference, if you are – like me – new to this sort of motion picture and want to know what you’re missing, it’s Panto. Silly Panto. Or perhaps one of those “adult” pantos that drunk dads and darts teams go to. With Jim Davidson and Charlie Drake. You know the sort. That.
The cinematography is pure 70s slush. Over exposed and full of lens flare, the colours are sickly. Everything is shot in what one supposes is “dreamy” soft focus, but is in fact just “not in focus.”
So. Imagine renting a 4th generation VHS tape off a weird man in a pub. It’s an adult pantomime called something like “Pussy In Boots” or “Cock Whittington” or “Hansel & Genital” or something. It stars the Chuckle Brothers, Linda Lusardi, two girls from Hollyoaks and Brian Blessed. The sound is crackly. The lighting is poor. They chase women about shouting “to me! To you!! For about 90mins.
Yep. That’s about the size of it. Oo’er missus.
Nasty?
Nasty? Well I mean it’s lewd. In a bums and bushes sort of way. But as I say, no more than you’d get from the saucy postcard flared corduroy antics of Robin Asquith. But there is that one odd bit, where for reasons passing understanding (ratings and shock I assume) it goes all blood thirsty and rapey. Limbs being severed, knives flashing about, waxy fake arms and legs full of offal spilling out over the farmhouse table. And the ugly sisters really do give their toes a right good spurty, ketchup hacking when trying to get into the size 4s. Which is a little “uurgh!” and giggly. Close up, it’s grosser than Casualty. But so, so much less convincing as to make you wonder why they bothered. I suppose it helped, being able to describe it as having “sex and violence” when really it has neither worth the rental fee.
Ban worthy?
No. If the title might make a young parent pop it in the VCR for their toddlers to watch after Paw Patrol and Bob The Builder, then yes. Because it’s a rompy bum-filled double-entendre fest full of sex starved dwarves and horny toads. But the cover of the VHS is so painfully “cheeky” or “saucy” it might as well giggle like Babs Windsor when you open the case or blow a raspberry when you pop it out of the machine. You can’t ban something for being dumb.
What does it remind me of?
It’s a bit Dogtanian and his 3 Muskerhounds, it’s a bit Benny Hill, it’s very Flake advert, it’s got a touch of Shrek with the fairy-tale mash-up. And its as sexy as the underwear pages or shower-installation pages of a 1976 Kays Catalogue.
Where to find it?
For some reason, YouTube has it. I know. Must tell you something. Give it a whirl. Then give it a pause. Then give it a miss. As unfunny as Mr Tumble, as sexy as Are You Being Served. In German. And all done in an old fashioned way with swords and horses and magic.
Well to be honest, summarising this motion picture effort for this blog is –and I’m going out on a (naked) limb here – probably the most writing this movie has been involved with. And I’m including the script, the receipts for Swatika flags and hiring an angry dog to bark at nude Jewish ladies.
Yep. It’s that sort of movie. So, if we must – and as I say, I watch these to stop you having to do so – here’s the “plot” of Love Camp 7.
So we start in the present day (1969) where a grey haired Britishy business man is “consummating” a deal with some American. Or just “closing” a deal, as humans say. Post contract chit-chat leads to talk of the WW2 map framed on the wall, at which point Mr Britishy Businesschap gets all misty eyed and the film is a narrated flashback (“fleshback? Ed) of his derring war “story.”
The 1940s. We’re in a bunker of some sort. Army paraphanalia from a local theatrical-prop store all about the place. Some top brass with a “Mind Your Language” school of accents are talking about a a daring rescue plot.
A scientist with some kind of plans for some kind of super rocket/jet thing has been captured. Or possible killed. It doesn’t matter which. His assistant, one Martha Grossman, has been captured and sent to a Nazi “Love Camp.” Essentially a French brothel type concentration-camp type torture chamber type barracks where tired and weary Nazi officers can take their furlough to relax and have violent whippy sadomasochistic angry slappy sex with naked female Prisoners Of War.
As you do.
Martha (not to be confused with Marcie – see below) has all the knowledge they need to build the rocket. If only they could somehow infiltrate the Love Camp and get all the details…
Simon Helberg does a remarkably good Tom Cruise impression as well. Since you asked.
Cue the arrival of two female officers who have been trained to have eidetic memories and remember everything they hear and read. These two will be parachuted behind enemy lines, picked up, hopefully sent to Love Camp 7 where they can get all the info from Martha before the Allies burst in to rescue them after 3 days.
Okay, so far, so Where Eagles Dare. The bulk of what remains of the movie revolves around the women being brought to the camp, hosed down by a barky, overacting black uniformed SS-Type Commander and his troops while an Alsatian barks at their screams.
Picture Barry Kripky from the Big Bag theory. But fatter. And a peverted Nazi. And a comedy German accent.
A violently abusive medical examination follows by a brusque Sapphic doctor (all naked screaming and plunging fists and wobbly cameras). In fact “Naked screaming, wobbly camera” would have been a much more fitting title for this piece of exploitative drivel.
Off to the dorm room where the other semi-naked prostitutes lounge around in open-chested boiler suits on iron bunk beds. One of the “spies” is being a bit “difficult” in the whole “let us beat and slap and violate you for kicks” game so is hung by her wrists by the ceiling. She screams and sobs a lot.
Now some Nazi guards come in like a cattle market and choose their “lovers.” Not much like a cattle market, to be honest. Unless when you get your dairy herd home you strip to the waist and rape it on an iron bed while it whimpers and twists and sobs.
One nazi (the names couldn’t be less important. Let’s call him Coburn, as he looks a little like a young James), gets all emotional and complains that he’s only doing his job. That he’s not a big fan of the slappy rapey boob-mangling humiliation that seems a prerequisite for is role. A spy thinks this is lovely. So they, of course, have proper sex. (This tender boob noshing and gasping cut “cleverly” between as we watch the other spy get a teary assault. See what they did there? No, me neither.
Next up, Coburn goes to “Kwipky” in order to prove what a “nice” Facist he is and requests a transfer. SS Kwipky laughs this off and forces Coburn to go and work as an assistant in the gruesome “medical lab” where hard working lesbian doctors are trying to perfect sterility by pumping foam and gunk up women’s bits. He is less than thrilled.
Oh I almost forgot. The spy tied to the ceiling? Remember her? She’s eventually cut down and made to crawl naked on the floor and lick the Commandants boots, which she does with a lack of gusto. And then taken to a torture room to be stripped (again) and whipped.
What did you expect out of a Torquay hotel window? Sydney Opera House perhaps?
Oh what next. And how much more of this awfulness is there?
Well the woman have all been “promoted” to see only senior officers. So they are marched tediously into another room (clearly the same set, just with some hardboard put up) where they are then assaulted and fondled by men in sharper Nazi gear. All caps and whips.
By the way, in case one was to accidentally mistake this pseudo “based on true events” harrowing “documentary” for just gratuitous “uniforms and boobs” tittiliating tripe, Mr Businesschap provides a clipped narration throughout. Like a young David Attenborough. But shit.
Where were we? Sadly still here. A tippity top Nazi SS chap then turns up for no reason, criticises SS Qwipky for his shabby treatment of his officers and promptly asks for recompence. In the guise, natch, of 4 of the women stripping off and sort of half-heartedly lezzing up with ineffectual moans and gropes.
Meawhile (exciting isn’t it) spy number one is then left alone with…you guessed it, what are the chances, Martha Grossman. Martha spills the beans about the rocket/jet plans thing.
And then something amazing and unexpected happens! Seriously!
The YouTube channel I was watching this on (or streaming service or swastikas-and-sluts-on-demand.com site or whatever the fuck it was) suddenly had an audio problem. This was the most stimulating part of the whole tedious minutes. So I was unable to hear the sparkling THX crystal clear sharpness of phrases such as “Jawohl” and “uhhhh! Ooooh!” and “you like zat you bitch?!” which was a shame. The woman who uploaded it (I assume it was a woman) just looped the audio track over so we got the last 15mins of pictures, mixed with the first 15 minutes of sound again. So there we are, watching lingerie draped waifs fake a mixture of bored and violent intercourse with some laxidasical Nazi officers in a sort of “compilation orgy best-of/Now That’s What I Call Munich” repellent romp, while we hear the title music and Mr Britishy Businessman seal his business deal again.
So I’m going to have to surmise the ending based on visuals alone.
The women plan to seduce all the generals and catch them off guard with their trousers down. At which point the allies can burst in to rescue them. And then, in some feeble “I Spit On Your Grave” justice/comeuppance, the women can despatch all the Nazis with beatings, shootings and a lovely skewering in the neck with a corkscrew. Lots of flailing and blood. Oh and boobs bouncing about.
They escape.
We cut back to the prologue where the old Brit is ending his hilarious tale of escapes, spies, intruige and violent genital violation. He leaves, gets in cab to go home. Meets up with his wife…who is one of the spies in old-age make-up. See! He married one of them! So, y’know, it sort of worked out. Except obviously this is all just revolting.
I’m going to stop now.
Is it any good?
Are we grading on a curve? Because “is it any good,” is a rather difficult question. Is it a good film, well crafted, performed, produced and displayed, demonstrating creativity and storytelling at its cinematic best? No. No it fucking isn’t.
Is it a harmlessly titillating pervy bit of soft-core boobs and whips nonsense designed to appeal to a certain type of lonely WW2 buff who has 90mins to kill and can get in a quick wank before his mum knocks on the door? Well no, it’s not really that either.
Sigh. Yes, I suppose it is.
Is it a fine example of something called “Nazisploitation,” which Wikipedia calls “… a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves Nazis committing sex crimes, often as camp or prison overseers during World War II. Most follow the women in prison formula, only relocated to a concentration camp, extermination camp, or Nazi brothel, and with an added emphasis on sadism, gore, and degradation…”
I was always slightly confused by films in the “exploitation” genre as a lad. Your John Waters style schlockers being tagged with this label. What was being “exploited” exactly? The cast? The crew? The audience? And when it came to genre offshoots with specific themes, sich as “Blaxspolitation” and of course, “Nunspliotation” again, I was scratching my head. Is black culture being exploited to make this movie? Are nuns?
Reading a little further, it seems – and I’m sure there are ciniphiles and cineats with their own definition – “exploitation” cinema simply exploits whatever is currently en vogue, to make some quick cash.
Of course, both David and Victoria live in fear of the rise of Becks-sploitation movies
Take a newspaper fear, such as ASBOS and Hoodies, for example. Scaremongering stories of feral knife-weilding skate-boarding tearaways and ruffians fill the newspaper. The Daily Mail has a hysterical Op Ed about the state of the nation.
By all things godly, no. Just no, no, no…
Quick thinking film makers can then, riding the wave of the cultural impact, release a movie like “Eden Lake” and cash-in on the mood of the people.
The theme, mood, class, grouping, politics or attitude you wish to “exploit” can of course be anything. Hence “Teenspolitation (Bikini Beach), Mexsploitation (Machete) and Sharksploitation (Snarknado) etc.
So who are being exploited in “Love Camp 7?” Well, it appears almost everybody. But the taboo, shock, terror, think-of-the-kiddies, hateful sadism of Nazi War Crimes and the fear of the unknown horrors of camps and doctors and evil SS maniacs is being exploited here to try and drum up some creepy, sweaty “fasctination,” I guess, for what is a rather humdrum, if toe-curlingly sadistic, “beneath the counter” grubby porn.
It’s incredibly cheap looking, what budget there was clearly going on renting convincing – albeit ill-fitting – Nazi uniforms. One assumes that historical accuracy is important to the porny-nazi crossover market and nothing’s going to put one off one’s stroke than a misplaced insignia or error in rank badge. Clearly all filmed in one small studio, on one sound stage, props (desks, swastika, Adoph busts, bunk beds) have been slid in and out of the one-camera set-up.
You remember Prison Cell Block H? The Australian women’s prison soap opera? Well make that on half the budget, strip all the cast down to their knickers and bung in some jackboots. That’s what we have here.
All together now: “You used to bring me roses…”
The acting and whatnot are as piss poor as you might imagine. Stilted, shouty, camp, dumb and over the top. Think Confessions Of A Window Cleaner meets Allo Allo on the set of Emanuelle.
The film has nothing whatsoever going for it. The Nazis are unconvincing, the sex is grubby, nasty, violent and unpleasant, the gore (in the final shoot out) just ketchup and reaction shots. A Maguffin of a “spy plot” cobbled together to string a load of slapping, fondling, crying and “Heil Hitler-ing” to make a nasty little piece of crap seem 2% more “taboo.”
Nasty?
Fuck. yes. I mean there’s all sorts of porn in the world. Apparently. Hard, soft, presumably something in the middle. Black, Latino, dwarves, POV, teen, bondage, threesomes, fetish… You name it. It’s difficult to imagine a word you could hyphenate with “-porn” and not get somekind of dark-web hit. “Animal-porn?” Probably millions of hits. “Bus-Driver-Porn”? Probably just as many. “Hassidic-Porn?” Uhm…well, I’ll trust you to check that out.
So it stands to reason that finding folk who like one thing (steam-trains, tuppaware, horse-brasses) and draping some boobs over the top, gives you a niche bit of VHS to sell. What’s disturbing of course, is that films like these have added nudity and sex to “Nazism, violence, butchery, degredation, torture, rape and humiliation. So our target market here is a viewer who’s either seen Confessions Of A Driving Instructor but was disappointed that Timmy Lee didn’t tie any of the buxom wives to an iron bed and whip them til they screamed. Or people who’ve watched The World At War and thought it could have done with a bit more tits. Or Prince Harry.
Happy and glorious, long to reign over us, God help the lot of us…
People like this exist and the Nazisploitation market blossomed from the 70s until it died out around the mid eighties.
I assume no animals or people were harmed during the making of this motion picture. But what it says about the viewer’s tastes could lead to some troubling psychotherapy sessions.
Ban worthy?
Would banning it help? I mean I feel sbout this stuff like I do about many niche interests. Make it very very hard to find by accident. Make it viewable at a cost for adults on some kind of subscription set up. Get it off the shelves of WHSmith certainly. Will folk who “get-off” on this stuff resort to recreations, violent re-enactments and rape if they can’t find this sort of 2D outlet for their lusts? I don’t know. But for Chrissakes if you have to make this stuff, make it better. It may be politically appalling, the worst taste and unforgiveably exploitative. But then cinema often is. You could at least write in some jokes and light the damned set properly.
What does it remind me of?
As I said, Prisoner Cell Block H meets Confessions of a Gestapo Cleaner vs Allo Allo. Shot over a weekend by some amateur dramatic wannabes who’ve got pissed on Liebfraumilch.
Where to find it?
Must you? Oh well. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Youtube has it I think. Protected under age restrictions. And…
Actually…no. Find it yourself. Christ the last thing I need right now is accusations of nazi-porn distribution. Will no-one think of the children?
Well it starts with a warning. Classic William Castle style gimmick. (see John Goodman in MANT for a sense of the silliness of these tingle-o-vision gimmicks).
Viewers and cinema goers are asked to imbibe a green liquid and chant the initiation rites oath of Green Blood, which will protect them. (Green liquid available in the foyer next to the Butterkist and Kia Ora, I assume).
Then we’re straight in to a sudden murder on a tropical island. Not clear who or what and no idea why. A small glimpse of a human-ish creature is all we get. A ship arrives at what we discover is Blood Island where a mixed group of seafarers are all here with their own motives: family reunions, research, the usual. One looks to meet her father, another to get their mother home. The ship’s captain warns the new arrivals of a curse, green-blooded men escaping into the sea.
Now pretty much trapped on the island until the boat returns for them, the travellers meet the suspicious Dr Lorca, (imagine Dr Moreau being played by a fat Cuban cocaine dealer) who refuses to give too many details on why the inhabitants refuse to leave or what caused the death of one of the islanders. But an eerie atmosphere invades the jungle, and there is much tribal whispering.
We discover the woman’s father is an alcoholic who is virtally bedridden by drink. Evidence comes to light that son’s mother refuses to leave since the death of her husband, Ramon. However investigation reveals upon opening his coffin, no body to be found. Perhaps there is more to Ramons’s death than meets the eye?
Meanwhile the island is stalked by the monster from the opening scene. Green skinned but humanoid, there are random violent attacks on tribes-people in the jungle throughout.
After a number of chases, deaths and puzzles it is revealed Dr Lorca has been conducting experiments on the island, working on a cancer treatment based on chlorophyll. A victim of one of these experiments is Ramon, who has transformed into the green-blooded beast that terrorises the island.
In the final confrontation with the monster, folk are killed but the monster briefly is redeemed when it recalls its humanity. A fire in the laboratory lays waste to the evidence of the weird experiments as the few survivors depart on the ship. Although are they alone..?
Is it any good?
Hahahahaha. No. This was a treat for none of the reasons it should be. First of all, I found a copy free on YouTube (which is helpful, because the last damned thing I want is to spend a fortune collating knock-off DVDs to put in the bin after a £9.99 plus shipping). But then not a great sign, as movie available free on YouTube do tend to have a “fuck it, watch the damned thing, I don’t give a shit” attitude from the producers. Which tends not to happen with classics.
But I found the movie, under the title “Tomb Of The Living Dead” (1969) Hosted by Elvira Mistress Of The Dark (full movie)
So let’s talk about that, as it’s a darn sight more entertaining than the messy, unwatchable, zoomy silly, underlit drivel that is Tomb Of The Living Dead.
Elvira I had heard of. Mainly, to be honest, as a plastic clip-together figurine one might find in a toy or model-shop. There was a spate of these in, I think, the 70s. Made by Aurora and advertised in the back of horror comics and annuals. Wolfmen, Dracula etc.
Some quality pocket money investments to adorn your bedroom mantlepiece.
All Hammer favourites for you to build and paint to decorate your bedroom and stop girls coming to visit. In my head (I’ll check now) there was one of a very vampy, voluptuous, bee-hived vixeny maiden called Elvira. Or was that a “Mobius” model? Rings a bell. Let me see.
Ah yes. Here you go. These sorts of delights always appealed to a young me. I never got one. But this is who I knew Elvira as. Just a sort of sexy Morticia Adams type. It turns out Elvira was a US late night cable TV host who would “introduce” late night monster movies with sarcastic, cheeky, valley-girl sass as she lounged on a chaise barely visible over her teutonic cleavage. For many, she was the face of late-night-tv and the face of horror movies.
Before Pornhub. There was…
This version, with the intros and – it turns out – interruptions for cheap puns and hoary old gags at the movie’s expense – is the one on YouTube. So it was this version I “enjoyed.”
Oh who am I kidding. There is nothing realty to enjoy about this early slasher/splatter. Or very little at least.
The opening gimmicky “drink the potion” warning is fun. And apparently was, in limited cinemas, distributed to patrons as a sickly drink. The titles are the first I’ve seen to actually be in that “drippy blood” font, which fans of the Young Ones will recognise from their horror episode “Nasty.”
Has anyone done the ‘Stiffy’ joke yet?
Our two heroes on the boat – destined of course to fall in love – are played with hammy gusto by actors who resemble the love child of Shakin’ Stevens and Hawaii 5’0s Jack Lord. plus a young Yootha Joyce-a-like.
However it’s the production, once again, that makes it almost unwatchable. The lighting of the sets is blindingly harsh, making the dark shadowy scenes pretty much a pure black screen. The odd flash of colour or light, but endless chases and confrontations, murders and fights take place in almost glaring white or ink black. Among the leaves and fronds of the jungle, or the corners and shadows of laboratories, it’s almost impossible to see what’s going on.
This helps a bit, of course, when one is trying to save money on effects. The monster, when finally revealed, is an odd looking fucker. Clearly the “man in a boiler suit” type, the face and head are such a mess of prosthetics, what looks like a leather gimp mask and who knows what as a hairstyle, the creature – all flailing arms and growling – belongs more happily in the Cantina on Tatooine, chatting with Obi Wan Kenobi and Chewbacca about Kessel runs.
Tell Jabba I’ve got the money…
The other aspect of the production and cinematography which had me squinting and clutching my temples is the murder “effect.” Director of photography Justo Paulino had either fought and lost a battle with the director and was forced to employ an absurd, vertigo inducing woozy camera effect every-time the monster made a kill. Or he’s just discovered a new “zoom in/zoom out” button on his camera and wanted to get his money’s worth. But the camera whips in and out and in and out by an inch like a lusty teenager after too much Diamond White, making the viewer positively air-sick.
The score is impossibly thundering and camp, like having someone shout “dun dUN DAAAHHH!” in your face every fifteen seconds. Strings and brass going full bonkers at every opportunity to suggest thrills that simply aren’t there.
Oh and there are no living dead. Clearly a title conjoured up to take advanteg of George A Romero’s hit, plus a director with the surname was bound to have punters queuing up for what they thought might be a part-two chiller, only to find a limping, lame, noisy mess of an unwatchable clunker with the contrast turned up to eleven.
Nasty?
I mean not pleasant. Not pleasant at all. But certainly not stomach-churning, or “turn away” shocking. The effects are the usual cheap standby of “film a flailing limb or sweeping knife. The film a screaming face. Then the angry face of the killer. Then zoom in on a close up of fake-looking bones and blood and gizzard bits in a pile of bright blood lying strewn on the jungle floor.”]
It’s all “before” shots and “after” shots, when true gore fans are hungry for the “during.” There are no “during” shots.
Ban worthy?
Tasteless, in its relentless staking and picking off. You could ban it for being boring, but that’s not a crime. A case of “ban it because it “looks” nasty and “sounds” nasty,” but honestly, it’s campy gore that would look unconvincing in an episode of Buffy.
What does it remind me of?
Nothing really sticks out. It has the aesthetic of the other cheapies we’ve seen so far, (Blood Feast / Blood Rites) and we will be back in the jungle soon enough when we hit the zombies of the eighties. But honestly, I spend so much time tipping and dipping the laptop screen to try and get the glare off to see what the hell was going on, I didn’t have the time or interest to engage enough.
Where to find it?
It’s here on YouTube for free! Featuring Elvira and her sarky inerruptions.
“If you want to see what turns a B movie into a classic … don’t miss Night of the Living Dead. It is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in horror movies not to see it“
REX REED
Movie art for the film ‘Night Of The Living Dead’, 1968. (Photo by Continental Distributing/Getty Images)
Who made it?
Directed by George Romero | Written by George Romero & John Russo | Director Of Photography George Romero | Special Effects Marilyn Eastman and Karl Hardman
Who’s in it?
Duane Jones | Judith O’Dea | Marilyn Eastman | Karl Hardman | Judith Ridley | Keith Wayne
If you weren’t watching this, you might have been watching…
We open on a low budget. Its black and white and sixties looking, grainy film stock. Library music pulled from a file probably called “The Best Of Scary Dan-Dan-Daaaa Orchestra Tunes Volume 3” tell us something’s either up or about to be up. It’s any town USA, a remote agricultural highway, all spidery dead trees and old farm buildings. Could be anywhere. Its’ Pennsylvania actually. But I’m pretty certain that, in 1968, even Pennsylvania, the 2nd state to join the union, considered itself the definition of “could be anywhere.”
The credits state this is going to be an IMAGE TEN Production (a company still going today, although pretty much like many the one-hit-wonder, living off its sole glory and still peddling Living Dead trivia, merch and factoids on its site here: https://www.image-ten.com/). The music supervisor has decided to fade in some eerie sci-fi theremin to unsettle us more. And what’s this? A dull saloon car, a boxy ‘67 Pontiac LeMans idles past us on the road, two folk inside. And the oddly perfunctory titles appear giving us a matter of fact “Night Of The Living Dead” over more woodland and blank winter pasture.
According to the graphics department, the main point clearly here is the ‘night’. Not the ‘dead.’
No dripping blood, no gory splashes. What follows as the we watch the car continue, enter a cemetery – with what looks like a bullet pocked sign – are your basic Image Ten production credits: make up, props, special effects, hair styles. And, standing there like a lone student film project entitled “cultural symbolism” a fluttering US flag.
Let’s meet the drivers. At the wheel, Barbra. Youngish. Twenties, I’d say. Standard 60s garb when everyone dressed like their parents the moment they left college. Flat centre parting, rain coat, sensible low heel. In the passenger seat, it’s Johnny. Or what you’d get if you ordered “wise-ass pen-pushing ad exec desk jockey putz” from Etsy. Dark suit, neat geek parting, spotty tie, pocket-protector, big heavy black specs, cigarette.
Just a face you’d want to slap. Not chew-off, necessarily. But definitely slap.
We learn through some clever snappy back and forth that these are brother and sister, driven up for 3hrs to visit the old man’s grave and put some flowers down, as demanded by a frail old mother who won’t make the 6hr trip herself. He’s whining, she’s sighing, he’s bored and wants candy, she wants to get the whole thing over with. He can’t understand why they don’t use the same flowers every year and can’t even remember what dad looked like. If you have a younger brother, you’ll know the type. If you have an older sister, you’ll know the type. I have both, since you ask.
Some smart dialogue tells us summer is coming to an end, so we know its light to save on camera costs, but it’s still 8pm and will be dark soon. The car radio is playing up, a hint of something bigger than them out there somewhere. A flat, 60’s, manly broadcast voice giving crackly “testing testing” and “back on the air after technical interruptions…” Still, let’s get it done. They pile out and start the search for the headstone to dump the bouquet.
How many US channels can the radio get? Oh, ALL five? Really!
Thunder claps. As they wander and Johnny goofs around, they spot a looming darkly suited figure walking slow and stiff a few plots away. Seemingly lost? Drunk? Homeless? The two reminisce and recall silly teasing and hi-jinks as kids when J would tease B. Like the tiresome office wag, Johnny puts on his spooky “Peter Lorre” voice and starts giving it lots of “they’re coming to get you Barbra!” like a knob. Brothers, eh? “Here he comes now!” he continues as the solo stranger lumbers dully toward them. We see him up close. Older. Forties? Shabby and torn clothes. Pale skin, heavy creased face.
And then, from nowhere, he’s on them. Lurching, attacking and grabbing. He wrestles Johnny, suit tearing, glasses flying, struggling among the stones.
Slow dancing between takes helped create a romantic atmos on set…
They tumble and flop like men in a real fight (no Hollywood punch-up this. Remember Hugh Grant and Colin Firth slapping and toppling inBridget Jones? It’s more like that). But whoopsie, as Barbara screams and gasps, Johnny goes down with a CRACK, temple catching the edge of a stone. He’s out cold. The composer reminds us this is terrifying with more orchestral dan dan dahhhhh!
We’re just six minutes in and 50% of our cast down.
Barbra, hysterical, makes a desperate run for the car, half terrified for her life and half scared of abandoning her brother to his fate. The figure stumbles after her, determined, gurning and clawing. She trips! Shoe lost! Stumbles up. To the car! Locks the door studs, his grey tormented face is at the window. He’s pulling and slamming, a crazy wide eyed but blank face, desperate like a sick dog. He grabs up a fist sized rock and shatters the passenger glass.
“Johnny! Stop fighting! I’ll be late for my Phoebe Buffay look-a-like competition!”
He’s climbing in, Barb’ fighting him off. Struggling with the controls, Barb manages to get the car to pull away. Thundering brass and timpani accompany her as she swerves and lurches through the cemetery, sliding the car up against a tree with a screech. Breathless, she’s out of the car and running. In the distance the figure lurches madly after her with dead steps. Onto a road!Texas Chainsaw style, with all the dan dan daaaaa music giving it plenty of elbows and strings, she hurls her way down the tree lined tarmac. What’s that between the trees? Over the hill? A house! Plain, white and simple. And outside it, a fuel pump! Heaving herself forwards, Barb gets through the brush, to the steps, to the porch, to the door! Slamming. Breathlessly she searches around the house. But he’s still coming! A back door! She’s into the home!
Inside it’s darkly underlit, sparce and spare shot with gothic expressionistic shadows at Burtony angles. Slams door behind her. Thunder and woodwind surround her. She is alone? We only hope help is at hand.
(If you fancy taking a trip, the nice people at Image Ten have a computer generated 3D walkthrough you can enjoy here: https://www.image-ten.com/virtual-house)
Barbra explores and we follow. It’s a simple house, a farmy house. Gingham and lace and dark wood and lino and cork. She takes a kitchen knife from a drawer and creeps room to room. It’s untidy, papers scattered. The owners left in a hurry? Furniture knocked over. On the walls, deer heads stare, on the floor animal rugs lie. To the window, Barb peers out. The dumb grey figure is still there, a few dozen yards from the porch. He seems to be confused by the washing line like a shell-suited executive middle manager on The Crystal Maze. Shocked but practical, Barb is at the phone, rattling the connectors in that way that I’ve never understood. The line is dead. She checks the window again. Oh lord. It seems that the ruckus has gathered a gawping crowd like a Covent Garden mime. Outside are more pale, drunken figures, looming and lurching. Oddly, they’re all in suits so it looks a little like a convention for fans of The Jam or a stoned reenactment of Reservoir Dogs.
Desperate for help, Barb decides to check upstairs…only to be stopped in her tracks by…URGH! What appears to be half-eaten, decomposing rotten remains of a human skull. Body still attached. One wide, gnawed-eye staring.
“Maybe she’s born with it? Maybe it’s Maybelline.”
Well that’s enough of that shit, and Barb is back down the stairs, only to be suddenly blinded by the piecing headlights of a new car arriving. Thank Christ! Through the door he comes and we feel we can somewhat relax. Young, black, male and healthy in a smart shirt and tidy crew-cut, he looks like the type you’d want on a camping trip. Armed with a tire iron, he fights off the grabbing monsters, pulling them away from a terrified Barbra. Locking doors, cautious and methodical, it appears this ain’t his first corral. “Don’t worry about him,” Ben says (for tis manly Ben, our hero). “I can handle him. Probably be a lot more of them when they find out about us.”
Ben. Our hero. About fuckin’ time mate.
Ben is now very much in charge. A man with a plan. He moves about the rooms, purposefully and deliberately for the next few minutes, talking fast, talking solutions. His truck is out of gas. Is there a key to the pump? He’s checking windows and doors, moving furniture, setting up. He’s calm but firm with dumbstruck Barb. But he can get nothing from her silent, shell-shocked face.
Ben’s up the stairs, searching for people, searching for weapons, searching for the key to the fuel pump. But…”Jesus…” he stumbles over the corpse on the landing. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he says (not, predictably, for the last time). Blood from the corpse drips from the upper bannisters, splashing onto a trembling Barbra. “What’s happening?!” she repeats over and over. Understandably so.
We’ll talk later in this piece about the making-of and the direction, script and pacing. But just to say this at the 15-minute mark. It’s terrific. I mean really something. Sparce, edgy, fast, twisty and relentless, we are in very safe hands here and it’s a simple but terrifically handled set-up which Romero is having all sorts of carnival fun with, pulling out all the jumps and tricks of a huckster taking you on a penny thrill ride.
Okay, enuff. More of that Film Studies nonsense later. Outside the farm house we can see the Reservoir Dorks lurching and gurgling, stumbling and moaning, smashing car lights like thugs. Inside Ben is desperate for information from Barb but she’s giving up nothing. She’s limp and empty – it’s all too much. But there’s no time for that as the enemy is now, as the poet said, at the gate. The undead “ghouls” (as we’ll call them) have got in. Ben figuratively tears off his shirt and bellows “by the power of Greyskull!” as he proceeds to go Medieval on their asses. Punching, pounding, banging, thudding. He bruises and bashes and beats the figures one after another as they crawl over him and over the house. Boom! Thwack! K-Pow! Adam West’s Batman would be proud. It’s bony, its crunchy, its squelchy and – if this is what cinema goers have come for – then it’s just what the doctor ordered. Imagine punching fistfuls of Lego into a rotten melon? It sounds like that. THUD! A tire iron to the head of one. Pow! A thwack with wood on another. Barb can only gather her pale legs under her coat and cower on the couch like a maiden. The ghouls are of every stripe; Men, women, old young. One has a dressing gown in the manner of a zombified Arthur Dent on the search for his towel. As the last of the intruders are beaten back, battered and bashed, we see over Ben’s shoulder, another half dozen slowly lope and limp dead eyed across the lawn to the warm light of the flimsy house.
S Club 7 auditions struggled during the make-up artist strike of 1997
So now we’re in it. For the next few minutes it gets very practical. Doors are locked. Bodies are dragged out of the front room. A corpse is hauled out by Ben to the front porch where he douses it and sets it alight in a scorching white blaze, causing the timid ghouls to back away like animals. We see them gaze and cower up close for the first time. This is no “Walking Dead” zombie grossness. No skeletons or exposed jawbones. It’s ragged, torn and sparce. Pale, scars, wounds, scratches and torn fabric. If these are the corpses we have been promised by ghoulish titles and leering posters, they haven’t been dead long. Most are dressed in shabby but “ordinary” day clothes, like they’re taking a break from a day at the mall.
Inside, Ben remains busy, yelling fast orders like a general. Lights on, searching for tools, hammers, wrenches. Some nails and bolts in box in draw. Barb is too limp, too frail. For which General Ben has no time. He almost loses his temper, barking at her to gather wood, gather furniture. The plan is to board themselves in. “We have to work together, you have to help me,” he demands. Eventually, she agrees in a pathetic, limp wristed fey manner which makes Sissy Spacek look like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. While Ben tears up skirting, piles planks, stacks wooden drawers and begins to hammer up the windows, Barb shifts idly from handing out flimsy planks to staring transfixed at the innocent charm of a simple music box in a way that would make you want to slap her. Honestly, it would be like getting a sleepy heroin addict to play Jenga. “Won’t be long before those things are back pounding their way in here.” Ben says. “They’re afraid now…”
They fall into a plodding process, sharing stories of their circumstance as hammers pound and wood stacks up. Thinking barb is the owner of the house, Ben’s enquiring about resources. Beekman’s Diner down the road? That’s where he found the truck. Listened to radio. The things attacked a gasoline truck. Saw the truck moving in a funny way. They were catching up to it. “Slammed on my brakes.” He wrenches and saws table legs as he talks, tossing them to the fire. “Went right through the bill board, ripped through the gas pump and never stopped moving. By now it’s like a moving bonfire.”
He continues, vivid and shell shocked. “Still hear the man screaming…” Talks of the huge numbers of “them.” 50 or 60 of those “things” just standing there. He’s half narrating, half…what? Looking for forgiveness? Redemption? “I just wanted to crush them. They scattered in the air like bugs…”
Now it’s Barb’s turn to explain her story. She warms up a little as the fire in the grate crackles. “We were riding in the cemetery…” But she cannot recap the horrors without reliving them. As manly Ben continues to board up and barrier the doors, Barb gets hysterical. Ashamed and traumatised and so confused. “We’ve got to wait for Johnny! PLEASE!” she begs as Ben closes the house to the world. Oh he’s had enough of this feeble whimsy and loses it. “This is no Sunday school picnic! Your brother is DEAD!” and SLAP! Pow, right in the kisser, he cracks her with an open hand. Overcome, Barb goes down, thud to the floor and Ben carries her feinted body to the couch.
A short respite as the Romero uses every trick in the budget story-telling book to bring us up to speed. As Ben hammers, slides heavy furniture, stokes and fire and sets up a safe haven to hopefully sit out the horrors, he finds a radio and with whistles and crackles, he tunes in.
“First caller wins on the station where the 70s survived. K-Billy’s Super Sounds Of The 70s…”
We begin, as messages and reports come and go, get a growing, terrifying realisation of what awaits them in the outside world. A masterstroke of world building that conjures up images of carnage, horror, devastation and widespread chaos. Again, we’ll deconstruct this later, but much like a radio play, it allows us viewers to create their own personal images.
Classic crackly 1950’s stern, hasty sounds. The facts. “An epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins.” Ben keeps hammering wooden panels. Outside, more figures lurk by the car, swaying and gurning. The radio announcers at a loss to explain or warn details. “Best be described as Mayhem.” Phrases drop, like Eastern and other States, like National Guard being “mobilized at any moment.” Stern reports of police, “military action…” We listen and watch Ben in silence tearing curtains and creating torches with wooden table legs.
Why these won’t immediately burn-up, by the way, I don’t know and have never known. Just as an aside. Torn rags, gasoline, wooden stakes… From Frankenstein to Indiana Jones, it seems to be a cinematic ‘torch’ technique. Does this shit work? Hmm. For another time perhaps.
As the radio burbles and tension grows – “the safest course of action is to simply stay where you are…” we freeze. As at this very moment, Ben opens the door and paces out to the front yard, torch aloft. He lights an armchair, kicking it over, the ghouls retreating, fearful. More radio: Presidential Cabinet for a behind closed door meeting. Something about White House spokesmen and chattering typewriters over latest Despatch. Those listening will notice the plot twists here as…what’s that…? The closed-door meeting will include…NASA?DAN DAN, and definitely, DAAAAAA!
Ben continues purposefully. But thankfully not with silly, cinematic Home Alone bear traps or Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg gizmos. Just plodding, Protect & Survive, Government Duck and Cover pamphlet advice. Nails, boards and hope.
Time passes. Tension builds. What’s outside? Now we can’t see. Doors are blocked; windows boarded. Barb awakes groggily. Ben sits; he draws tensely on a cigarette he is not enjoying. The radio talks of victims “torn apart.” It began “2 days ago with the report of the slaying of a family of 7…” Ben is up and at ‘em, he can’t sit still. Cupboard to cupboard, searching and bustling for food and rations…wait! What is this? A lever-action rifle. Ooooh here we go!
You remember when a blood-soaked Bruce Willis goes weapon to weapon in the Pulp Fiction pawn shop? Hammer? No. Baseball bat? No. Fuckin chainsaw?! No. the SAMURAI SWORD! Boom! Yep, that’s how it feels. Ben cocks the rifle, chack-chack! He fumbles for a box full of shells. Here we go.
“Eeny Meeny Miney Mo…”
He brings Barb some shoes. Thoughtful. Puts them on her. “We ought to be alright here for a while.” Great guy. Explains he’s going upstairs. Reassuring. We’re 37mins in. An hour to go. Let’s up the ante even more with an end of act one twist. Ready?
They’re not alone in the house. DAN DAN DAAAAAAAH!
From the basement door a ruckus, a bang, a clatter and now the room is full. Two more men, yelling, cursing, shouting the odds. Ben is furious! Who are they? They didn’t come up and help?! They didn’t hear the screams? But they said they heard the ghouls attack! “Get your story straight man!”
Let’s meet these two new comers. First we’ve got the elder man, Harry. Think of an angry Jack Lemmon. Or Burt Young’s Paulie from Rocky, but with a nagging wife and a mortgage. Balding, insecure. A bossy, petty, bureaucratic little-man, picket-fence republican busybody. All cigarettes and sweat patches. Next to him, Tom. Younger, plainer. Mid-twenties college type. Now the yelling and alpha posturing and racial tensions and masculine panic explode. Harry wants to board everyone up in the basement. Safe and secure. His wife Helen and hurt child Karen, plus Tom’s girlfriend are down there. It’s the safest place.
The Trouble With Harry…
Ben is louder, angrier. Oh, and has a gun. He wants to stay up here. Escape routes. It’s locked down. Not boxed in. Chest bumping and finger pointing and “hells!” and “goddamits” and one of two “now look here, mister’s!” Barb can only gape as the “tough guys” try and take the lead, take charge. Harry calls Ben’s boards “lousy pieces of wood? Those things turned over our car!” Back and forth, back and forth, the posturing and barking. “There could be 20,30, 100 of these things!” Arguing the logic of cellars vs windows. Tom talks logic of Ben’s escape routes. Harry threatens to board him and his family up in cellar…
But suddenly its every man for himself as the ghouls are back! A dozen figures, lumbering and lurching outside by the car. SMASH! They reach thought window! Hands and arms grasping! Tom is stabbing and cutting their hands with pocket knife, tearing flesh. Ben’s shotgun BANGS! BANG! BANG! Re-load, chack-chack. BANG! But, as Jeff Wayne and Richard Burton warned us, still they come! Confused, lurching. BANG! A shot to the head takes one down and out. BANG!
And now they come in hoards.
Slowly walking. More mucky, scarred, stained and scabbed than rotting skeletons. Music builds, timpani and twitching strings. Ten more, twenty more. Some naked, others in flappy hospital gowns. Thudding, relentless, marching towards the light. Face flesh torn and sore, picking and gnawing on tree bark.
In the house the arguments escalate. Cellar! Board the windows! No, cellar! No! Board the windows! It rises to panic. Harry wants to take Barb down with them. And bring the food too. “We got a right!” Ben is standing firm. “It’s tough for the kid that her old man is so stupid.” Bold and fierce they roar at each other as the ghouls bang and thunder at the buckling, splintering doors. But Ben, if you’ll pardon the vernacular, ain’t going to die for an idiot whitey. “You can be boss down there! I’ll be boss up here!” Finally Harry retreats down the stairs, boarding himself, his wife and his child behind the wooden door. Tom’s girlfriend Judy comes upstairs to join Barb and Ben. The house is split. It’s time to take sides.
Downstairs? Not a happy homelife. The fruit cellar is quiet and well lit, roomy and stocked. On a workbench, young Karen lies, sick from her earlier attack. Harry and his wife Helen bicker snidely, snatching at cigarettes, arguing and sniping.
“If she starts levitating, spinning her head or vomiting pea soup, I for one am getting out of here…”
These two have not been in a love for a very long time and have dropped even the pretence of companionship. Harry is insufferable, Helen is bored and spoilt. “It’s important isn’t it,” she snarks, lip curling. “For you to be right? Everyone else to be wrong?” Clearly it’s not their first row about this one. Helen wants a radio down there. Harry is stubborn, faithful to the idea of submission. He knows his place. “If the authorities know what’s happening, they’ll send people for us. Tell us what to do.” Harry is desperate cling to the status quo. Its where he eats, it’s what he knows. The alternative? Take his family upstairs? His wife? To some black guy? We feel the tension. “We may not enjoy living together,” Helen snipes from within her starchy, tweedy coat. “But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”
But suddenly! An olive branch. A reconciliation! Some shared ground. Or, well, a television at least. Something they can all get behind. They call out from upstairs. Caring duties are swapped and the ladies move positions. Helen smokes. Harry snatches one. A boxy TV is hauled in, big dark wood thing with wiry rabbit ears. The men fiddle, knobs and wiggles. They tune it in to the news and gather, hushed, to hear more.
Gogglebox had taken a much more sinister turn in recent episodes…
Now it’s pure television. Hyper-real TV news and reporting. Eyewitness accounts. Men in heavy glasses, Cronkite style, tappy tap of ticker tape and typewriters. Formal and sombre, the news breaks. National Civil Defence in Washington. “Persons who have recently died have been returning to life and committing acts of murder.” Arising from funeral homes, morgues and hospitals, the unburied dead are rising and seeking human victims. The Government have a new plan. Rescue stations. Food and shelter and national guards. “Stay tuned for details on your nearest station…”
Despite this supernatural horrific turn of events, the house is too frantic and scared to debate the physics. Immediately hearing of these rescue stations, Ben is keen to get in the truck and get to safety. But fuel pump is locked. But idle thoughts nag… “Why are space experts being consulted for an earth emergency?” The TV talks of a recent satellite shot to Venus. Destroyed by NASA when it was found to be radioactive on its way home…
Back around the all-knowing TV, the group watch, mouths agape, as an Army spokesman is caught by a walking reporter outside the majestic Capitol Building. He thrusts his heavy microphone at the brassy five-star General type. “Everything is being done that can be done.” It’s all cameras and hats and snappy suits. They dodge details, ducking into a staff car. As they do, the ticker-tape on screen reveals “Willard Medical centre”. They recognise the name… Just 17 miles from there.
So here we are. Just 30 mins to go. A group, a challenge, a goal. Heroes and villains. Who will make it out alive? At this stage we’re rooting for the good guys and, lets face it, if Harry and Helen get chomped? Well, too bad. Poor Karen is better off without them. But no time for that, let’s go.
The arguments explode once again, chests bumping, fingers pointing. How they can escape? A sick child? And…and two women? (Yep, it’s 1968 folks). Another woman “out of her head?” The place is surrounded! But Ben takes charge again, moving folk about. Meanwhile news burbles on, suits and big framed specs. Sturdy and frowny and firm: Talk of “cadavers moving”, dead, limbless, eyes open.
In the busy basement, women swap caring roles. Still lying on the workbench, the young girl is in pain. Its got worse. The TV experts are now saying bodies must be cremated dead bodies. “The bereaved will have to forge the dubious comforts a funeral service will give.” Quietly the horrors mount, plodding and mundane. There’s no more Hammer horror, it’s just plain, relentless, dull grained tube explanations. Boffins, ties, suits, clocks on the newsroom walls.
But a plan must be made. Fuel. Trucks. Rescue Centres. But hell, how to get the ghouls clear from the house? Ben goes full Hannibal Smith with his orders and strategy: Kerosene, bottles, keys for gas pump, fabric to cut up, molotov cocktails. Clear a path, get the truck fuelled, get everyone to Willard. Good old Tom is happy to handle the truck. The two younger man begin to unboard the door. “Let’s move it.”
Poor Harry is frustrated. Things are moving on without him. And who is this guy making him look bad?
Tom and Judy discuss the escape as they cut up fabric for fuses to use in the bombs. She is not convinced. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” But like Harry, Tom has grown up listening to experts. To advice. To those ‘in charge.’ “The television said it was the right thing to do.” They discussing the town of Willard. Remember, they’ve been before? When there was that flood? Judy is scared; they hug. Meanwhile Harry wants Barbra downstairs in the cellar for her safety.
Oooooh, lots of tension as Tom and Ben start to loosen the boarded door. What awaits? Freedom? Death? We have not seen outside for a good while. Judy and Tom exchange pained longing looks. Oh for this all to be over. Outside? The numbers grow and ghouls surround the home…
But BOOM! The first Molotov! BOOM! The second! Harry is heaving the bombs from the upstairs window, each one with a musical Dan dan daaaah!
“Fireman Sam Nights XXX!” failed to be a hit with the Ceebeebies audience.
The ghouls, timid, they cower, moan and flee. BOOM! More light! BOOM! More flame. Quick, Ben and Tom battle their way out. Ben waves the rifle, Tom clambers into the rusty truck. But no! Terrified and desperate, Judy can’t bear it and squeezes past to burst outside to be with Tom. Goddamit! Determined, Harry locks her out. She’s trapped. No-man’s land. Ben lays torches on the lawn, jabbing and pushing a burning table leg at the coming crowd. Into the back of the truck. Ghouls claw forward but with a woosh of flame, Ben lights them up! Wow! Dazzling glare of crackling flame as they scatter and flail, still grabbing at the old truck.
With a rev, the truck heads off, music thundering, chassis bumping. In the house, panicky Harry moves from window to window. At the gas pump, its fingers and thumbs and panic as Tom struggles with the key. But BLAM! Hero Ben fires off the lock. Yes! You can feel the fist pump from the audience. Go on Ben! But whoopsie, wait, easy there… Tom careless, panicked, splashes and sploshes gallons of spilt fuel all over the side of the truck. “Watch the torch!” But WHOOSH! The side of the truck ignites.
Now, mission impossible fuse style, the fire begins to creep across the dirt floor, following the spilt fuel, towards the pump. Tom and Judy floor it, tearing away from the pump, but the back of the truck is ablaze. Ben yells warnings, Harry transfixed, aghast. Ben beats away the flames from the pump in desperation.
“Come an’ ‘ave a go if you think you’re dead enough!”
But no good. BOOM! The truck stalls, Judys jacket caught, the couple struggle to escape the cab but BOOM! The whole truck ignites in a blaze, frying a screaming Tom and Judy.
And still the groaning, moaning ghouls approach.
At the pump, BLAM! Ben shoots one down, rifle in one hand, flaming table leg in the other. Swiping his torch back and forth, keeping them at bay, he sprints, stumbling back to the house. But inside, Harry has other ideas, door firmly locked. BANG! THUMP! YELL! Ben is desperate to get in but Harry wont budge, fearful for his family’s safety. Ben steps back and BANG! Creatures stumbles and lurch onto the porch just feet behind Ben as the door splinters and he clambers in.
The men have a stand off. In the face of their own Armageddon, they glare at each other, seething with both terror and rage. But the fight must take a back seat as they take a brief moment to unite against the foe and desperately board up the door again, still scowling wide eyed at each other. Hoo boy, I wouldn’t want to be Harry once the doors fixed.
And I was right. Staring at each other. Trembling tension… And POW! SMACK! PUNCH! THWACK! BAM!
“And THAT is for the Jim Davidson tickets!”
Ben punches the Batman shit out of Harry all over the house. “I oughta drag you out there and feed you to those things!” An absolute bar-room bare-knuckle pasting that is a trembling joy to watch.
Dun dun duuuuuuh… And relax. The house takes a breath. But there is a long night ahead still.
Outside, the creatures approach the truck, pulling and pawing in the shadows at the crispy remains of the charred bodies, lustily drooling and gnawing on bones, fighting over intestines, sloppy livers and hearts, wide eyed chowing down like it were fried chicken on a Friday night. Gnawing at hands and limbs.
In the house, they all sit around, waiting, silence, brooding. Ben loads the rifle noisily. Practical as ever he asks, is Willard the nearest town? Can they get the car turned back over? It’s a mile away. Harry still fights his corner for leadership. “You gonna carry that child a mile? With those THINGS out there?” Harry asks. “I can carry the kid,” sighs Ben. Of course he does. He asks about the injury. She got bitten. Now it’s talk of disease? Carrying? Too weak to walk? More noise outside. The novelty of the BBQ fried dinner has worn off.
The TV is back on. More news of the mysterious radiation steadily increasing. “Dead bodies will continue to be transformed into the flesh-eating ghouls.” But hell, USA! USA! USA! News reports now show Butler County, Pennsylvania have a posse rounded up. Hicks and trucks and rifles and baccy chewin’ redneck lynchin’ types. Straw hats, marches, turnups and work-boots. Reporters talk to the chief baccy-chewin’ confederate hard-ass in charge, McLellan. “Yep. Ghouls can be killed by a shot to the dead or a heavy blow to the skull…”
As he chews and talks, little pork pie hat bobbing, braces stretched over his beef-filled tum, crew-cut Vietnam youths, dads in fleecy denim, trucker caps and furry collared corduroy, dangling fags and Stetsons. He breaks off to yelling instructions like a BBQ with bullet belts.
Or as they say in the US, a BBQ. “Beat em all, blasted em down. Beat em or burn em, they go up pretty easy.” He’s convinced they can wipe ‘em all out in 24hrs.
Back at the farm, its going from bad to worse. BOOM! The lights go out. A fuse? A power line? Harry wants to take over. Blaming Ben for the deaths. Needs to be in charge, needs the rifle. But the creatures are at the porch. Wooden banging, slamming, dull thuds. Boom, bang, Crash of glass. Strings and music start to frenzy up as the ghouls break in. Fights, punches, beatings. The rifle drops! Ben struggles with boards as Harry goes for the gun! He orders Helen to the cellar. The men struggle over the weapon until pump! CHACK CHACK! BANG! Ben shoots Harry. Down he goes, limp. The wooden boards are smashed, splintered, hands and arms grabbing. Harry struggles, bleeding, to the cellar steps, through the doorway, tumbling. Karen is still on the slab. He crawls over to her sick body. Upstairs the chaos and horror is relentless. Arms, boards, grabbing, screams.
Downstairs? Well Karen has died…but awoken. And wounded dad has no defence. Mum comes downstairs… Karen? No! Oh baby! The child kneels over her dead dad. His arm ripped off, she calmly chews on the dismembered limb, bloody stump aloft, like a picnic chicken leg.
Spotting mum, Karen discards her supper and grabs up a sharp trowel. No! No! Mum screams! But no. Down the towel comes, hard, heavy. Chopped cabbage sounds, Psycho-style slashes over and over and over. Echoey screams, Blood splashing and dripping.
Upstairs the barricades collapse. In they come. Dead eyed and blank, relentless. They drag Barbra away to eat. Ben helplessly fighting as Karen emerges, dripping with gore, from cellar. Ben pushes her to the couch, hauls ass to the cellar, bolting the flimsy door behind him.
Now the house overrun. Amok with ghouls, furniture tumbling, they claw and bang on the cellar door. Inside, Ben is desperately boarding and blocking. Behind him however, dead but presumably still a lunkhead, old Harry begins to rise…
BANG! BANG BANG! No more Harry. Ben gazes at the mess of the wife. She stirs, eyes flickering… BANG. Stirs no more. Ben loses is cool at last, kicking over chairs, helpless and trapped. But focus. Still planning, still thinking. Hunkers down with the gun aimed at the top of the stairs. Upstairs they wander dull and lifeless like bumper cars…
It’s next morning.
Dawn breaks over the farmland. Dead silhouettes of trees. Birds sing, a lone chopper thumps overhead. Across the fields a cordon of men in a search party line, armed and ready, stride the field on their hunt. It’s McLellan’s killing party. Now we see hunting dogs, sheriffs, marshals. Coffee cups, TV crews, cigarettes. Checking out a house over there. “Everything appears to be under control.” Dogs, men, suits and mud.
Posse Galore.
In the house, Ben stirs. He was sleeping. Exhausted. Can it be?Hope? The sound of dogs above. Gunshots. Cops are trudging slowly, dropping occasionally to a knee – BANG – picking off straggling ghouls in their 1s and 2s. They pass the burned-out truck and remains. “Someone had a cookout here…” BANG. BANG. They pick of more ghouls emerging from the woods into the daylight. “Nick, Tony, Steve, get out in that field and build me a bonfire.” Boss pointing and yelling and ordering. Ben slowly climbs the cellar stairs and unblocks the door.
He comes to the window, holding a rifle peering out into the squinty sunshine.
“Hit him in the head,” McLellan snarls. “Right between the eyes” and BANG. Down Ben goes. “Good shot, okay his dead lets go get him, that’s another one for the fire…”
Now it’s stills. Wart footage style. Meat hooks, boots. Faces. Dead bodies piled high. Ben’s corpse carried. And finally WHOOOF! The pyre goes up in a blaze like a dry Wicker Man. Music. And we fade to black.
Is it any good?
Now we’re talking. Seriously. This, THIS is what it’s all about.
I believe it was movie legend Roger Corman (House Of Usher, Pit & The Pendulum, Little Shop Of Horrors) who would always give the same advice to new filmmakers. In order to learn the trade, the techniques, the tips and the practical tricks of getting a movie made, make a low budget horror. Take a group of people, trap them somewhere remote, and then kill them off one by one. I’m paraphrasing, but this was the general advice. A low-budget horror is simple to write, easy to direct, you can get friends to be in it, you only need 1 camera, 1 weekend and 1 location and you can learn how it all gets done.
Now this is good advice. Just ask Amy Holden Jones, Tom Holland or Clive Barker who’s first features – The Slumber Party Massacre; Fright Night and Hellraiser – taught them precisely that.
Or hell, why not ask the always chatty Quentin Tarantino, who did exactly the same single-location pick-em-off cheapie with a crime bent with his debut Reservoir Dogs.
The worlds smallest violin, playing just for the team who had to clean the blood up
This trope has always been terrific horror-fodder. Be it a haunted cabin (The Evil Dead), an Artic Research Centre (The Thing), a distant space-cargo ship (Alien) or a boat (Jaws); there’s nothing quite as simple – or as satisfying – as a mixed group of characters (the hero, the coward, the bombshell, the nerd, the joker etc) and locking them somewhere for a killer/robot/alien/zombie /vampire/ whatever to terrorise them all night.
When George A Romero decided to set aside his advertising job and shake things up (his career, and ultimately the world) embarking on his 1968 zombie horror movie (a script inspired by the 1954 books I Am Legend by Richard Matheson but initially planned as a comedy), he could not have possible known the impact it would have.
Shot with investors’ money who were contacted and hyped up and offered a slice of the profits, Romero and his new production company – IMAGE TEN – gathered $114,000. There was an appetite for “bizarre” cinema and thankfully enough doctors and dentist with savings who fancied a credit, maybe an acting part but more importantly, a slice of the burgeoning cheapie-horror genre.
And armed with cast, crew, cameras, cars and an old Pennsylvanian farm-house, he and his team set up shop and created what Paul McCullough of Take One calculated to be “most profitable horror film ever produced outside the walls of a major studio”
Within ten years the $114k outlay had created between $12 and $15 million at the U.S. box office. Dubbed or subtitled into more than 25 languages and released across Europe, Canada and Australia, Night of the Living Dead grossed $30 million internationally.
Cream cheese was a lot more expensive in the 1960s
Why? Because George Romero, with no more experience, equipment or budget than most amateurs at the time, simply had created a script as tight as a drum and gathered a cast who could play tension, suspense, horror, fear and violence with earnest, straight-faced honesty. In fact, to return to Tarantino who was asked about Living Dead’s success, “They’re amateurs of the best kind, because they love acting. What made Romero such a terrific filmmaker was he was a legit regional filmmaker. And what made it special was the slightly homemade quality to the movie.”
Romero knew (as Spielberg proved with his giant shark a decade later and Ridley Scott demonstrated with his illusive Alien) that keeping the monsters off screen and filming reactions, noises, bangs, screams with merely the glimpse of a creature meant the audience would fill in the blanks.
Low cost meant Romero had no choice but to use every short-cut and slight of hand in the book. The most impressive of these is his reliance on radio and television to create a horrific, blood stained, panicky chaotic Armegeddon outside the four walls that the audience conjoured up in their imaginations. The old saying that “radio has the best pictures” has never been truer. Official sounding reports, stern newsreels, ticker-taping typewriters and on-the-spot interviews suggest hints at a world, just behind the door, just over the rise, that has gone to bloody hell. We don’t see the President, the NASA experts, the survival camps, hospitals or the exploding oil tankers…but we know they’re there and it grips us with a cold hand. Not since Orson Wells recreated a Martian attack on radio with panicked reports and hysterical eye-witnesses on Mercury Theatre Radio in 1938 had media and monsters married with such menace.
“Nobody would have believed in the last years of the 19th Century…”
It wasn’t my first viewing of this, when I set it up with headphones and a laptop on a pub table one Tuesday night. I had 2 hrs to kill before delivering a pub-quiz in my home town of Kingston, so with a pint of Naked Ladies bitter, some caramel cashews and a slowly emptying packet of Camel Blue cigarettes, I snuggled in to enjoy the tension and thrills. But it had been a while since I’d seen it in full.
And it has everything, to be honest. Easy to criticise as relying on “corny tropes,” (graveyards, lumbering zombies, jump scares, torch wielding heroes, feinting dames, sick children) one has to keep in mind that many of the shock and thrill techniques we are now all too familiar from countless rip-offs, were being tried and tested for the first time on Romero’s set.
The screaming hysterical single woman on the empty road, running and crying as she is chased? Rescuers being attacked as they are mistaken for the monsters? Creepy tinkly child-like music box playing eerily against the tense silence?
Buffalo Girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside…
Romero also knew to steal and borrow from the best. There are touches of Hitchcock’s Psycho in the DNA of Night Of The Living Dead, with its dumb-staring stuffed taxidermy looming like woodland witnesses from the walls. The incredible photography that creates death-dark shadows and blinding moonlight as characters shift from dark to light, from yin to yang, from heroics to hysteria and moral righteousness to moral cowardice. The early death of the hero. Hell, even the fruit cellar and skeletal family members nod at Hitchcock’s classic.
Supposed heroes being bumped off? Hands thrusting through broken windows? We’ve seen it all since but little could have prepared 60s audiences for the energy, audacity and originality of this gory, home-invasion romp.
Tone wise it’s about as far as one could get from the thundering, blood red drenched tropical zombie movies audiences grew to know. Shot in black and white (to keep costs down) it has the Pathe Newsreel on-the-spot broadcast quality that adds a touch of “foundy footagey” documentary feel. This is ably assisted as I said by a cast who are playing it dead straight.
The belief that this is found-footage documentary, rather than Hammer House Theatrics, is enriched by the bare bones script as we have – which is all too rarely seen – smart people making smart decisions as the creatures begin to pound and punch the flimsy barricades. This is not a movie of silly risk taking, wandering around in fraternity underwear, exploring the spooky basements, running into the woods or dumb-ass slasher decisions. The cast do what we would do. Abandon a broken car, lock doors, try phone, stay low, hide in basements, try and get news from radios and televisions. Smart people in a terrifying situation, just as it should be.
The tension s what grabs and shocks. It’s far from a “gore fest.” (see below).
In fact tonally, and attitude, the nearest movie I can think of that has the tense, sweaty, shouty, panicky claustrophobia of Night Of The Living Dead is not a horror movie at all, but as one could easily enjoy comparing and contrasting this movie with Sidney Lumet’s single-room legal thriller “12 Angry Men.” Shirt sleeves, coffee cups, sweating, vicious, snarky? In fact if the 12 Angry Men, all shirtsleeves and desk fans and humid macho bickering, was about a dozen guys arguing how to keep zombies out, then you’d have Night Of The Living Dead.
Angry? Maybe. But hell, that’s twelve snappily dressed fuckers too
Essays have been written on its subtext of course. A subversive film that critiques 1960s American society; An insight into international Cold War politics; A comment on domestic racism? Film historian Robin Wood and later critics discussed ‘Night at length as a commentary on repressed sexuality, on the marginalized groups of 1960s America and the disruption to societal norms resulting from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, an idea echoed by Elliot Stein of The Village Voice and film historian Sumiko Higashi. Some see Ben’s death as a direct reflection of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Mark Lager of CineAction noted a clear parallel between the killing and destruction of Ben’s body by white police and the violence directed at African Americans during the civil rights movement, going on to described it as a more honest exploration of 1960s America than anything produced by Hollywood.
Film historian Gregory Waller identifies broad-ranging critiques of American institutions including the nuclear family, private homes, media, government, and “the entire mechanism of civil defense,” while film historian Linda Badley saw that the film as so horrifying because the monsters were not creatures from outer space or some exotic environment, but rather that “They’re us.”
The casting of Duane Jones as Ben in the lead role of course has had another dozen critics earning their crust with insights and commentary on the late 60′ impact of a black hero on the big screen. Romero himself was never trying to make a social point however: “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben. If there was a film with a black actor in it, it usually had a racial theme, like ‘The Defiant Ones.’ Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ‘cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script. Perhaps ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is the first film to have a black man playing the lead role regardless of, rather than because of, his race.”
George Romero. “If you’re thinkin’ of bein’ his baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or white…”
You’ll make your mind up yourself and either hide behind the couch, wince at the gore, yell at the masculine infighting, giggle at the amateur zombies or deconstruct the whole thing for a Social Science dissertation. For me, it’s just a fucking masterpiece. Astonishingly early, astonishingly accomplished. Knife edge and shocking with jumps, shocks and shudders throughout. Horror and nasties kept going, but it very rarely got better than this early classic.
Hooray! Due to a snafu with copyright licensing with reissues and whatnot, the legal wrangling has slipped and allowed the whole movie fall in to Public Domain. So YouTube will give you a fine version here! However for purists, as a picture selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry – deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” a shiny Criterion Collection 4k Blu Ray edition has now been restored through the efforts of the Museum of Modern Art, The Film Foundation, The George Lucas Family Foundation and The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center. So treat yourself.
Oh and the ending? Well story goes in the original script Barbra was the only survivor, having been dragged down into the cellar by Ben. After shooting Ben, the Posse hear her scream, Sheriff Mclelland is about to shoot her when he spots a tear trickle down her cheek, realising she is alive, he lowers his weapon. But, y’know, screw that. We get Romero’s more gut-wrenching choice. If you thought the ending of Darabont’s “The Mist” or “Wolf Creek” left you feeling hopeless? Brace yourself for this one.
Christ no…
Nasty?
Scary, yes. The pounding and the drooling and the slavering and moaning and groaning of the stumbling zombies, all pale moonlight skin, moth eaten clothes and scarred faces all are enough to give sick panic of approaching dread. But if we’re talking “nastiness,” which of course will be bloody, vicious, gratuitous, spurty, gloopy, rapey, screamy helpless stalk and slashing? Nope. Nothing like that.
Well…not nothing. The zombies have a touch of the rot and scars that are gruesome. There is a bloody skull at the top of the stairs, but nothing you couldn’t get in a joke shop or Halloween costumer. But it’s the entrails and grue that the living dead devour and much and drip like a KFC bargain bucket that might be the “ewwww!” for some. The flesh being devoured is meat dripping with Bosco Chocolate Syrup and Pratt & Lambert Vapex wall paint was also used for a lot of the blood splatter. But to be fair, given the beautiful silvery black and white photography, the mess doesn’t resemble anything more gory than a Walls Vienetta.
All this, plus wings, drinks and a side for just $9.99!
Ban worthy?
I mean come off it. Is it suitable for young people? I mean toddlers and teens? Probably not. But then that’s also true of a Swiss Army knife, a carrier bag, a cheese grater or a smart phone. No, I wouldn’t put it on at a kid’s party for 8-year-olds. But then I wouldn’t put on Citizen Kane either. Nothing corrupting or disturbing in a single frame.
What does it remind me of?
As I said it’s got a touch of Psycho, a touch of The Birds. But the “trapped and hunted” strangers is such now a well-worn trope that it rings bells with Assault On Precinct Thirteen, Halloween, Die Hard and every zombie movie from Sean Of the Dead to Scooby Doo.
You’ve got some red on you…
Where to find it?
Hooray! Due to a snafu with copyright licensing with reissues and whatnot, the legal wrangling has slipped and allowed the whole movie fall in to Public Domain. So YouTube will give you a fine version here! However for purists, as a picture selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry – deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” a shiny Criterion Collection 4k Blu Ray edition has now been restored through the efforts of the Museum of Modern Art, The Film Foundation, The George Lucas Family Foundation and The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center. So treat yourself.
“Everybody needs money. That’s why it’s called money.”
HEIST (2001)
Hello. We’re taking a short break before I set up my TV and nestle in with a cuppa , some TUC biscuits, a notepad and George Romero’s 1968 black and white horror zombie cheapie classic Night Of The Living Dead. For a number of reasons.
First up, this movie is one that needs a little respect. Out of the 166 movies on the coming list, some fall firmly into the (summer) camp, marked “drivel.” Only notorious or even discussed because of their banning or reputation, without the Mary Whitehouse Experience, they would have vanished into nothing. Crumbled and faded and discarded into the trash-bag of pulpy nonsense. We’ll be visiting them, of course (I am nothing if not thorough, as no-one who has ever slept with me has ever said). But they are, like reading Chekov, a “tick-box exercise. (That’s a very clever Russian Literature pun. I hope you enjoyed it. Check Off. See what I nearly did there).
Others however are destined to live on forever as some kind of benchmark. Maybe the camera work (Evil Dead), maybe the shock-value (Cannibal Holocaust), maybe the ground-breaking genre invention (Friday The 13th) and so on. Night Of The Living Dead is one of these. I’ll watch it (not for the first time) in a bit and we can have some fun discussing why it is heralded the way it is.
Oh forgive my tone by the way. There are certain tropes in movie writing that the best reviewers and critics can side-step from time to time. However the art (if an art it is) of film criticism comes with its own clichés. Words like sweeping, epic, masterful, visual-feast, “doth-not-an-epic-make”, scenery-chewing and “not without flaws” are bread and marmite to the movie writer. We do our best not to employ them. But nobody, as someone once told Tony Curtis, is perfect.
I want to discuss the idea of “cheap” or “low budget” when it comes to film making. Because it’s a phrase that’s wafted about cack-handledly often enough. As if it explains everything. Or forgives everything. Or allows everything.
Listen. When we watch “Bay Of Blood” or “The Ghastly Ones” is very, very easy to wave away their faults and flaws and lighting and clunky dialogue with a “well it’s a low budget” picture. As if that’s all right then.
The fact is, shut up. C’mon, you don’t know much, if anything, about what movies cost. You don’t. You’ve read headlines. You’ve seen promo claims. Million dollar this, hundred million dollar that. But be honest, it’s almost impossible to understand the amount of cash that needs to change hands to get even the worst 90mins of transparency flickering up on a public screen with audible sound and recognisable colour.
To help understand what we’re talking about, I’m going to share some reading I have done on this. Not much. In fact, one book. But it’s a good one. A very good one. It’s by a journalist you may have, but unlikely to have, heard of. It’s by Joe Queenan.
Joe Queenan is a grumpy American journo’ hailing from Tarrytown in New York. He has made his name and his fortune writing on every subject under the sun for every newspaper, periodical and magazine you can think of. He is best known, I believe, for his movie writing. He is a “take no prisoners” scathing, sarky, high-bar holding critic who has pulled to pieces blockbusters, art house flicks, comedies, horrors, dramas, actors and directors over his career.
The book of his I reference here is called “The Unkindest Cut” and I could not recommend this more highly for ANYONE remotely interested in the practise of film-making. The premise of the joyful romp through amateur movie-making is to put to bed the preposterous claims made by “guerrilla film maker and media darling” Robert Rodgriguez who burst onto the scene with his, ahem, “low budget” western El Mariachi in 1992.
The reason Rodriguez was so hailed was he claimed to have made this movie for $7,000. Now this was the nineties, so for inflation, we’re looking at a claim that people queued at their multiplex and payed their $5 and sat and watched a film that went from script to screen for the cost of what would now be $13,000.
Now this claim had many a person re-mortgage their house, take out a dozen credit cards, sell their prize possessions and come to Hollywood thinking the same. If he can do it, I can do it.
Joe Queenan’s book is a hilarious attempt to debunk this myth. As Joe decides to – with as little money possible, using local friends and free locations and rented equipment – make his own short movie for the same amount. Hilarity, chaos, arguments, over-spends, spiralling costs and nature all appear as Joe’s cheapie attempts to get his crime comedy “12 Steps TO Death” onto, if not a big screen, but at least some screen or other. For the same amount of money.
In a word, a-hahahahahahaha.
Spoiler alert, you CAN’T make a watchable film for $13k. You CAN’T. At least, not then. (the book was published in 1996. Nowadays? With digital and phones and laptop editing? Sure. Maybe. But in the nineties? Never. In the eighties? Nope. In the seventies? You can fuck right off. And the 60’s? Hahahahahahahahaha etc.
So why not? Where is the cost? Why are films so damned pricey to make? Get a camera, get some film, write a story, ask some friends to learn some lines, spend a weekend getting it shot. Stick a microphone on the end of a broom and hold it over their heads. Take the film to Boots (showing my age now). Come home with a reel. Pop into the Odeon and ask them to spool it into the machine. Badabing. What’s the biggie?
Well we’ll discuss this now. Because as we enter into film 3 on my 166 film list, I’m going to need you to understand that “good” is “expensive.” It’s that simple, as Jack Nicholson once said. Are we clear? Are we CLEAR?!
Good (by which I mean remotely watchable) is FUCKING EXPENSIVE.
Sidebar. Quick fact. A big movie. I mean a HUGE movie. A worldwide tent-pole franchise of a glossy SFX blockbuster (eg, Avengers Endgame) has 10,000 people in the credits. Yep. Ten Thousand names. To produce an extravaganza of dazzling Marvel Franchise Blockbuster amazingness, 10,000 people were hired to do some work. Not all big budget actors. Infact very few of the 10,000 appeared on screen. Only 32 actually. 32 people were in front of the camera. Leaving 9,968 folk behind the camera doing their best to make the movie event of 2019’s biggest hit.
So let’s imagine they all did 6 months work. Each. Just 6 months. I mean the movie was in production for YEARS. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s say everyone turned up to the studio to do their editing, carpentry, painting, lighting, make-up, programming, sewing, pyrotechnics, sound and everything else for just 6 months. And then let’s put them all on minimum wage. I mean these people are NOT on minimum wage. But for the sake of the exercise, let’s put them on the now USA minimum wage. Which is $7.25 per hour.
$7.25 x 8hrs x 5 days a week x 20 weeks x 10,000 people = any idea?
Well I’ll tell you. Paycheques for Avengers Assemble would have been $58m dollars. FIFTY EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS. And that’s just wages. Without spending ANY MONEY at all on ANYTHING, your budget is already absurd. To earn this amount yourself, on a £20,000 a year job, would take 2000 years work.
Now. These people need feeding. Catering carts. Travel. Lunch. Coffee. $10 a day each? That’s another TEN MILLION DOLLARS.
Now okay okay okay, I’m talking big movies here. Very few motion pictures have the epic scale or the 3hr 2m runtime. But regrettably, or perhaps not, it is this kind of gloss and quality and sparkling sharpness and slick digital effects and lush look that now passes for “ordinary cinema.” This is what movies are now “supposed” to look like. Hey, even I have been guilty of watching a movie like, say, Spider-Man III (on a budget of $250m) and whined that “it looks a bit cheap.” I am an idiot. A spoiled little tantrummy idiot.
Okay. So let’s bring it back. The shlocky gruesome splattery bloody nasty grimness of Night Of The Living Dead, Friday The 13th, Bay Of Blood, Driller Killer are NOT comparable to Avengers Endgame. Obviously.
The budget of the 1981 classic The Evil Dead for example, was a reported $375,000. In today’s money, about $800k. Or the price of this house in London:
Or this house in Dorset. For fuck’s sake…
This amount of money would have paid for 0.26 minutes of the Avengers. Seriously. A movie with a cost of $208,333 a minute. 30 seconds. THIRTY SECONDS of the Avengers Endgame is enough money to make The Evil Dead.
Blimey.
Why do movies cost so much? Well that brings us nicely back to Joe Queenan and his honest attempt to try and make a 90 min movie, in his home town, with borrows locations, borrowed costumes, free “actors” and a whole bargain-bucket worth of goodwill. Based on Rodriguez’s claim, he figured it could be done for $30,000. And promptly put that amount on his credit card and went forth. An example of some of the “unexpected” costs that befell him. (This doesn’t happen to the TickTock generation with their iPhones and YouTube uploads).
Do you have a camera? Want to rent one? Plus a camera operator? And just one? And a sound man? Here’s some of today;s numbers. And this is just the staff. Not the kit…
Swing Day Rate: $385 to $435
Camera Operator Day Rate: $285 to $535
Digital Image Technician Day Rate: $535 to $785
Gaffer/Key Grip Day Rate: $535 to $635
Director of Photography Day Rate: $1,035 to $2,535
Grip/Electric Day Rate: $435 to $535
Sound Recordist Day Rate: $335-$735
Do you have quality film stock? Need to buy some? Here’s some costing for you:
“A good estimate for a 90 minute movie shot on Super 16 at a 4-1 ratio would be $8,865.00 for film stock if you pay $197 per roll from Kodak.”
By the way, you can’t show that film. It needs to be processed and transferred to the right format.
Oh and while we’re about it…
Development or Scripting:
As the name suggests, the filmmaking cost begins with a script. If you are looking at adaptations or buying scripts, these costs add up here. Usually, the development charge is approximately 5% – 10% of the total expense. It includes the licensing, hiring of the leading casts, producers, and the director.
Production:
While making the film, the production stage eats into the significant chunk of the budgeting pie. Whether it be the salaries of the crew, the equipment, shooting logistics, hiring services, buying insurance, or food, production covers it all. It is the most significant chunk of the film’s cost. It is estimated somewhere between 35-40% of the full cost
Post – Production:
Nowadays, post-production plays a critical role in bringing down the costly production by putting colored screens behind the actor. Those backgrounds are created under the special or visual effects category. The post has become expensive, but it saves a lot of money as a whole. Post-production also includes editing, sound, music, and printing costs. Estimation is about 10 to 15% of the total cost.
Marketing & Distribution:
Marketing and distribution is key to a low budget indie. It needs a lot of dollars to market a film. In today’s estimate, producers spend around 30% of the total cost towards marketing and distributing the film. Many consider not to include this cost in the total cost of production. But imagine if the movie grosses $500000 in profits and the marketing and distribution cost were the same. So in actuals, it just breaks even. The whole economics of moviemaking changes if the cost is not taken into account.”
And on and on and on…
The fact is, Joe Queenan’s little short film (sadly not available on YouTube) that was under-lit, lots of bad-takes, fluffed lines, wobbly shots, wigs and stand-ins and was largely comically unwatchable, ended up costing him $60,000. Because, and I believe I mentioned this, film-making is FUCKING EXPENSIVE.
Okay. So that’s why films without major budgets, studio backing and crew running into the millions of dollars worth tend to have the giveaway signs of cost-cutting. Dull lighting, wobbly cameras, odd focus pulling, iffy make-up, cheapy thrift-store costumes, one-take shots of performances, fluffed lines, hurried shooting. If you;ve ever tried to film your friends on your phone in a way that wasn;t silly and shaky and didn’t need re-doing, then you’ll know what a horrible labour getting a film shot is.
And anyone who’s ever said “do another one,” after a photo or video at a party or wedding (when doing another one is £1000 a second, will understand why sometimes one-take is enough.
Watch “Bay Of Blood” again. They’re doing what they can.
Which brings me to my more interesting point. Performances. Acting. Line reading. Being on screen.
Now. There is an argument here, and a well worn one, that it’s things like scripts and acting that surely have no cost. You know what I mean. Standing infront of a camera, waiting for some clapper loader to yell “aaaaaaand, action!” and then saying the words you’ve learned, doesn’t cost any money.
You know what I mean. Technically. Talk is cheap. Talking is free. It costs no electricity, gas, programming, RAM, lighting. It’s just humans doing that jaw-jaw yacking thing.
So why should “budget” or “cost” have any impact on whether the acting is good?
It’s a fair point. I mean, it’s nonsense. But it’s fair nonsense. Let’s dig in…
Hugh Laurie wrote a marvellous comic spy thriller back in 1996. A gloriously sarcastic boys-own Robert Ludlum-meets-PG Wodehouse romp of girls and guns and conspiracies and exotic locales and derring do. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Jeeves meets James Bond. Jeeves Bond, if you will.
I have many copies of this book and continue to recommend and push it on friends and colleagues as a great beach read.
Anyhoo, why are we talking about British comedy actors’ novels.
There is a scene in the book that has stayed with me for 25 years. The hero, Thomas Lang, is facing a classic brassy femme fetale and she’s spinning him some bad-luck story. Im going to paraphrase, but the dialogue goes a bt like this:
“Sarah, do you know who Meg Ryan is,” I interrupted.
Sarah nodded.
“Well Meg Ryan gets paid millions of dollars a movie to do what you’re trying to do now. To pretend. It’s a very very difficult thing to do, especially up close. And there are only about a half dozen people who could do it convincingly at this range. Tell me the truth.”
Something like that. Apologies to lovely Hugh for mangling his words. But you get the idea.
This idea, of how staggeringly difficult it is to be “convincing” up-close, has lingered. Mainly because it’s a great tense scene. But also, and perhaps more obviously, because it’s true.
Acting is hard. To act well, and I mean really well. To be able to say words that aren’t yours in make-up that feels weird under lights that are too bright infront of people you don’t know in a cavernous room you’ve never been in while being watched by 20-30 people who know, just as you do, that it’s costing $208,000 a minute to film you.
There are probably, like legendary sports stars, only about a dozen people who can do it. And do it over and over again, in character after character, year after year, take after take. On a screen 100ft wide. Every single one completely mesmerising, captivating, gripping, believable and extraordinary. It’s impossible. Honestly. And if you’ve seen TV Dramas or stagey theatre or Soap Operas, you’ll have seen talented people “have a go.” But it’ll be “actory.” Or “stagey.” Or “wooden.” Or “phoney.” Or all the other cruel words we come up with to criticise people who are trying their best to do the impossible.
Point is, if you can do it? And do it well? You can charge the fucking earth.
A quick google search on actor earnings. Will Smith, $40million. Jennifer Lawrence $25million. They’ve given RobertPattinson $3million to play Batman. They’ve given Keanu Reeves $13million for the 4th Matrix movie. Nobody WANTS to spend this much. But actors’ ability to keep us coming back, film after film, sequel after sequel, to watch them 100ft high in painful close-up pretending to be other people and buying every damned second of it? If you are one of the few lucky enough to have this gift, this look and this opportunity? The world is yours.
Or in other words, of COURSE acting in cheaper movies is bad. Of course it is. Good actors are expensive. And they get other work. They won’t work in bad conditions for low wages and long hours in poor productions with no hope of making profit or making an impact. If you;ve got, as the makers of the Evil Dead did, only $375,000 and Director Of Photography cost $2500 a DAY? Well you ain;t bothering Meryl Streep ($15m per movie) or Brad Pitt ($20m per movie) with your jiffy bag full of script.
So. What have we learned.
Well watching these horror movies is going to take some…what? Consideration? Forgiveness? Allowances? All of the above. If one starts up every cheapie slasher or cannibal craving craziness and start kvetching about production values, scenery, lighting, focus, one-take fumbles and shoddy effects, I think one has to pause. Comparing “modern” multi-million dollar productions of the last 20 years that spend more on their catering budget than Dario Argento, Sam Raimi, Tobe Hooper or Wes Craven had to write, cast, shoot, produce, market and distribute their entire picture? It’s not even apple and oranges. It’s apples and…pips. Apples and…shit. Apples and…a bit of dust in a ball you found under the bed when you were reaching for your slippers.
If you can’t cope with the change of aesthetic? No problem. If you have taste buds and likings for the modern movie and just have no damned PATIENCE for the slow, the lumbering, the out of focus, the badly written, the hastily shot, the cheaply lit? Then god bless you. Go forth. The world has plenty of delights to await. Don’t mind us.
Oh, and anyone judging these people? Oh you can piss off. Taste is taste. Life is short. Watch what makes you happy, what makes you laugh, what makes you weep or whimper or wail. No-one is impressed with your snooty film-snobbery. You happen to like those movies, just as some people like Marmite. It doesn’t make you smart or wise or clever or educated. Some people enjoy the cheapy clunk, others find it irritating. Live and let live.
Unless you’re a Video Nasty. Then letting people live is the last of your aims…
So here we go. Next up, I spent about half an hour typing “Blood Rites” into various search engines. Does ANYONE still say “search engine?” It’s right up there with Information Superhighway. But I digress. I tried Google and Bing and even Asked Jeeves at one point, trying to see if this movie was available online. It seemed not to be. At least not in a legitimate “pay us £3 and you can see it” way. No Netflix, Amazon, NOW, iPlayer, iTunes or YouTube.
But then… there it was, nestling in the search results. Under the alternate title “The Ghastly Ones” 1968 (watch full movie) on a thoroughly unofficial site called m.uk.ru/video which frankly couldn’t seem more piratey if it had one leg and a fuckin eye patch.
But hey, I clicked and reclicked and opened and closed and opened and closed and yesses and no-ed and accepted and blocked and on and on. And then there it was. A lurid, red, opening-credit sequence beckoned. Crackly and grainy, probably a tenth-generation-old VHS upload, with the obligatory subtitles.
The Spanish caption read (according to the nice bots at Google translate): “Three married couples are forced to spend the night in a Victorian-era mansion. During the night something horrible begins to threaten them, and a nightmare of horror and death begins to terrorize them.” Yeah, I couldn’t help but feel words like “nightmare” and “terrorize” might be doing a fair bit of heavy lifting here if the trailer (see above) was anything to go by.
But hell, in for a penny. I made a cuppa, dimmed the lights and pressed play.
As I say, we start with JER Pictures Inc Presentation on home VCR made titles which rather establishes our budget and quality, but let’s not judge too soon. Oh no, wait. Let’s judge. We are introduced to Ada and Robert. Two Brideshead Revisited types larking about by the water in starchy 1880’s linens and stiff cuffs. Yep we’re in petticoats, parasols and poncy pratfall territory. Hamptons heads thrown back, pale necks and posh accents, everything’s fucking hilarious. They kiss and snog ineffectually. “Let’s go this way!” They find themselves on the grounds of the old Crenshaw House that looks a little deserted and wouldn’t surprise anyone if it was full of late 19th Century redneck cannibals. But all of this excitement is clearly too much for feeble Ada and she comes down with an attack of the vapours or consumption or whatever seemed to make women in crinoline faint the whole time in Upstairs Downstairs. Robert is more the gung-ho Rider Haggard type so he’s off exploring, leaving Ada in a heap. But poor Richard doesn’t go far before suddenly a be-hatted figure, all dungarees, shoddy dental work, bowl cut and special-needs lurches out, grabbing and stabbing at him with a big old knife. Out comes Robert’s eye in mess of grue and guts, Robert screaming and falling to the grass.
“Ada? Do you have any Optrex in your bag? Ada?”
And then our killer is on top of him, hacking and sawing away with ready gusto like he was carving a soggy yule log. Half blinded, terror stricken and mauled to pieces, Rob is hauled off into the woods by our killer yokel. Blimey! Well Ada is clearly both bored of waiting and stone deaf as she limply wafts after Robert, all handkerchiefs and lace, wondering what’s keeping him. Well she’s next on the list for no reason… and our killer is back, knife a-swingin’ and a-choppin’ off her dainty hand. Down she goes too and now it’s all stabbing and lurching and sawing away at pale legs, pawing and peeling at her wounds. Skirts up, gratuitous bum shots and we cut to credits.
This font is sadly not included in the current version of Microsoft Office.
That, as Wayne Knight probably said to Sharon Stone once, is quite an opening. Credits are swimmingy swoony James Bond effect wobbles in an odd Comic Sansy font that seems more like a corporate training video than a revolting period splatter fest. But they don’t last long and at least let us know that we are up for The Ghastly Ones or Blood Rites, depending on your download or disc.
Titles done away with, lets meet the cast and find out if they are as ghastly as we’ve been promised. Or whether it’s the gurning, knife swishing farmer in the denim who’s the worst of it.
We are introduced to three American couples, one by one. Each as tedious and dull as each other. They are made up of three sisters – Elizabeth, Veronica and Victoria. All pretty much cut from the same flouncy, pearl clutching fiddle-dee-dee late Victorian model. Heels, big skirts, bodices, beauty spots and enormous ringlets, liable to faint or need a lie down at least, at a moment’s notice. Each of these daft ladies is married to a cookie-cutter identikit handsome fellow-me-lad. Waistcoats, marcel-waves, double chins and sturdy britches, they are Richard, William and Donald. Which I imagine you could have guessed.
First up, hello to Richard and Victoria. Poncing about in nightwear with plenty of teasy boob-flashing and pale skin on show, R & V snog and pet and snog some more and bicker about a telegram they have received.
Rick and Vic saved a fortune on lube with their own special thumb technique
The legendary lawyer HH Dobbs – under whom Richard studied at law school – is summoning them to New York. How will they afford the trip? I mean they look pretty comfortable to me, but then it seems everyone was corsets and collars back then. They could stay at sister Veronica’s to save a little dough? Will Richard’s brother Walter give them the travel money? Hmmm, Walter is always attaching strings to his deals. Often, as we’re about to discover, to simply pad out running time…
Because if this sounds like a teasing twist, relax. It isn’t. This entire film is an illogical mess of red herrings, false trails, irrelevant detail and forgotten plot points. Walter’s oddness – which we are about to be treated to – has nothing whatsoever to do with anything much more than the actor Hal Sherwood getting in some hammy camp eye rolling.
Irrelevant Walter is, as we see, something of an oddball. The wealthy one in Richard’s family, his home is all very grand with swags and dark velvet and luxurious oil paintings. Champagne is poured. Walter agrees to lend his young brother the travel money, as long as the couple run some sort of random “rich person” errands (“value a painting for me, pop to Tiffany etc”). Victoria tells Richard his brother has always had “abnormal tastes…” Intriguing? Nope, nothing more comes of this, so forget it. Let’s meet sister number two! As it were.
Elizabeth is an identical Victorian waste of skin. As is setting the tone for this picture, there is much booby and thigh flashing as she and an unseen useless husband (Donald) talk of their identical telegram.
Wisely, Elizabeth prioritised reading legal documents over finding a clean bra.
Why does their late father’s lawyer want to see them all in New York? Something to do with his estate? Donald wanders about off screen, unseen, singing to himself idly. So if he gets it in the eye later, no big loss frankly.
And finally, to New York to meet sister three – Veronica and her dressing-gown-full of twit husband, William. She is at her vanity, puffs and paints and lipsticks and lacquers as she either readies herself for bed or gets glammed up for a night out. It’s not clear and it doesn’t matter. More passionate 15 cert marital snogging, some bare shoulders and a little nipple, we swoop and swoon about the pair while they clumsily reveal they have been married for 3 years.
Darling, don’t nod, you’ll spill the line of cocaine I’ve knocked out on your head.
She is due to have Elizabeth and Victoria descend on their home with their husbands this afternoon (“what are relatives for?”) She is meeting them at a little sweet-shop café at 1pm and then it’s all three couples off to Dobb’s legal offices to discover what the fuck he wants.
So that’s our gang. Our two folk murdered on an island by some drooling halfwit in loose Wranglers, and now three middle-class couples invited to hear about the late dad’s estate. We’ll meet the lawyer in a scene or two and they’ll be off to the island where the killer and two housekeepers (Martha and Hattie) look after pop’s old manor house. And that’s our set up.
In the sweet shop the sisters simper and gossip, all pearl clutching and swooning in hats. Cucumber sandwiches are scoffed and delicate tea is sipped. As oft happens in these capers, they share information they all already know in order to bring us poor viewers up to speed.
Yes I know, I was there. Yes, yes I know. Christ I was there. What are you, mental?
Daddy died about 5 years ago, yes. But the will was not to be read and the inheritance shared until “the three girls are married and settled?” True. It seems, with Dick, Donnie and Bill now in tow, the maidens are all set to cash in. Indeed! Let’s finish these cakes and get over to Dodds. Quite! And hope he’s not being played by some Am Dram crinkly old chap in fingerless gloves who’s been at the Dickens…
Oh. Ah well. Here’s Dodds, and he’s straight out of the Moulde Curiosity Shoppe school. Bewhiskered and muttery, all of about 300 years old, he reveals the will to the three drooling couples. It’s not going to be simple, obviously. Some sort of ‘haunted Crenshaw House’ task we presume. And, well, we’re about right.
“I’m afraid the Death Star will be quite operational…”
The three couples are told to go to the island and stay in the family house. Dad was an oddball, but a rich one, with vast South American “holdings.” Daddy only travelled back to Crenshaw 5 times during his whole marriage, three of those times being the for the brisk conception of his daughters with their otherwise frigid mother. (The other 2 times presumably to do the bins and change the cat litter). There, the couples must – in a slightly pervy dad manner – live in – ahem – “sexual harmony” for 3 days. Nice. If this is done, then day three will see them retrieve a trunk from the attic and share out the estate between them. (By which we must assume the trunk has documents about the estate. Rather than his estate just being whatever crap is in the trunk. A couple of Victorian jazz mags and an old croquet set). Oh, and if for any reason this task can’t be done, the eldest daughter will share things out as she sees fit. Which one assumes is some kind of murder-plot motive it will take the next fifty minutes to get to resolving.
Let’s keep going.
Ah-ha! The Crenshaw place! The six clamber off the boat, all top hats and luggage on sleds, to be met on the shore by…well who’d a thought! Its our murderous dungareed drooling nutjob from about 20 mins ago. Remember him? I hope so, he cut out a man’s eye and sawed some dame’s leg off. This, we discover, is Colin. The sort of weirdo backstairs illegitimate special needs over-acting dunderhead who tantrums and pouts like a 3-year-old. Literally, “I want my teddy!” he yells at one point.
Butlins off-season really doesn’t have the same family fun atmos.
It is now deep winter by the way, which suggests the earlier murder must have been at least six months ago. Or possibly 10 years ago, it’s not made clear. Or frankly, makes any fucking difference as it appears to have been a scene with the actor’s only motivation given as “pad out the run time.” But Colin’s simpering and bag-carrying is monitored and supervised by the two housekeepers who manage the Crenshaw House. Let’s meet Martha and Hatty.
“It’ll be nice to have some other ghastly people about for a few days.”
Both pretty much cut from the same curtain fabric and clearly both avoided the same acting classes, they are busty, frumpy, lacey-collared fuss-budgets of the Upstairs Downstairs mould, and could easily have been played by Victoria Wood and Julie Walters. Or – if this means anything to you – Roy Barraclough and Les Dawson at a stretch.
British comedy legends
As they fuss and bustle the 3 couples to the house, all talk is of the recent plague which bumped off their dear mother Mrs Crenshaw. Ahhh well, very sad. Add to this hoary old set-up, they are now of course trapped on the island with no means of escape as “the boat won’t come for another three days.” Ooooh, everyone says predictably. Colin, in case we’d forgotten he was definitely in the spectrum, stops off to catch a white rabbit and then eat it, live and raw. For this, Colin gets from Martha and Hattie not the first in a very long line of beatings and whippings like he was a stray dog. Nice. Anyway, we can’t hang around here in the snow, let’s get in to the house for a few days and see if anyone makes it out alive…
Indoors, rooms are assigned and the women coo and simper about the wallpaper and velvet. Colin gets yet another beating for putting cases on the bed instead of in the wardrobe, responding like a wounded hound with gooning and gurning and humpy buck teeth in a manner that makes Marty Feldman look like David Niven. No girls, you can’t use this room. Clearly the stuffed teddy bear swinging in a noose signifies it’s Colin’s quarters.
Cue a few minutes of coupley am-dram nonsense. They all gather in a chintzy drawing room, all rustling bustles and brass buttons and sweet sherries and “I say!”
Having forgotten the Monopoly, Donald suggested a threesome.
As per the lawyer’s instructions, they are free and easy with their affections and we get a bit of light petting and cheeky shoulder. Richard and Victoria have been married the longest so aren’t as keen or demonstrative as the randy newly-weds who basically drink and tease and paw and slurp at each other’s necks.
Couples depart to rooms, couples drink more sherry, candelabri flicker, strings swoon, men pace like bad Wilde actors, hands behind backs, necks behind winged collars. The ladies don’t do much more than clutch bosoms and say “dahhhhrling…” a lot. “It’s been ages since we’ve been together,” they repeat to each other pointlessly.
For no clear reason, suddenly Veronica decides to overact and gives it plenty of “cold hand o’er my heart! I’m frightened!” and there is much fussing. Vapours and tincture and broth is administered. Hattie and Martha have had enough of all this city folk nonsense and retire to bed, agreeing to let the 3 couples sleep late in the morning. Suspiciously, Veronica appears to let something slip when she refers to the house as hers, correcting herself to ‘ours‘ with a blush. Hmmm? Might this come to something? (No, it won’t). The evening’s adventures end when the half-eaten dead rabbit is found under the bedclothes, to much hysterical shrieking.
“How could its eyes that burned so brightly … suddenly turn so pale..?”
The obligatory accompanying note reads “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit!” Oh well, off to bed. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix.
Honestly, its that sort of movie.
As we reach the movie halfway mark, we’re finally presented with some kind of plot or motive or indeed character insight. Victoria and Richard dress for bed and talk of young Veronica’s earlier “funny turn.” She has always had a 6th sense. Remember she somehow knew when momma had died even though they were in Philadelphia? Her premonitions have always come true! “It’s this HOUSE!” Victoria cries and starts giving it lots of panting and pouty shouting. It would appear Victoria has her eye on the place. It’s all worth a lot of money. She wants more than her share. After all, she is the eldest! Always took care of the sisters. “I always did without! I want what’s coming to me!” And if this wasn’t enough to get the amateur audience sleuths in the cinema making notes in the margin, she adds “I’d do anything to get what I want!”
Right. So we’re halfway. Two dead holiday makers, three fussy sisters, (one psychic, the other greedy, one forgettable), three hapless husbands, two buxom housekeepers, a killer gardener, a dead rabbit and a warning note. And they’ve only been there for 12 hours. So let’s greet the dawn and see what more is ahead and hopefully discover something more ghastly than the performances.
Syrupy strings lull us into a lush, Gershwinny mood (despite this being about 50 years too early for that). Elizabeth and Donald snog and grope like randy teenagers after three Silk Cut and half a bottle of Lambrini. Or it might be one of the other couples. At this stage it really doesn’t make any difference. A noise? A light under the door? Is that blood? Or perhaps jam? Flinging the door open, Donald sees a bloody cross painted on the door! With a macho, broad-chested fling of the waistcoat and stamp of a sturdy boot, he’s all “stay here! I’ll be right back!” and grabs up an oil lamp, despite it being, what appears to be, about 3 in the afternoon. Donald bumps into Richard on the stairs and, as men will, they both hurry post haste to the crystal decanters and glasses in the study and pour themselves another in a long line of sweet sherries. “My nerves are shot!” They ponder the bizarre events. Dead rabbits? Bloody crosses? Why? “It doesn’t make sense!” The audience, one feels, agrees.
All clues point to Colin of course, as…well we know he’s a murdering loon. But they simply believe he’s loony halfwit. However as he’s the only one in the sketch with any upper body strength and, yes he did eat that live rabbit, he’s public enemy number one.
So now we get some much needed action as the men hunt the house, checking front doors and pantries. A gasp! A lurch! And, crying out for help, Donald hits the floor. Richard spies blood! Heads downstairs to face a figure off-screen. “It’s you! What are you doing up..?”
Who could this be? We don’t know. And don’t care much frankly. But let’s head back upstairs. Bangs and noises bring the ladies out of their rooms to timidly search by pointless candlelight, only to find..? Richard! Oh no! Dead! Hanging upside down. Bare chested, he swings lifelessly. Predictably, women feint a lot.
Dickie decided to hang out in the wine cellar for a bit.
Let’s move to the morning, as Martha and Hattie bicker like panto ugly sisters. (Panto ugly sisters’ joke: Whenever I’m down in the dumps, I always get myself a hat. Oh I always wondered where you got them, etc). Complaining about eating late after last night’s fuss (meal timing appears to be their biggest worry, rather than dead husbands swinging from rafters). They’ve buried the rabbit in the garden and are wondering what best to do about young Colin. “He hasn’t done anything like that in years! But you can’t have your own brother committed to an asylum!” They question whether beating him up as much as they do is helping? “You have to Martha!” But of course, given they chain him up all night, it’s a mystery how he could have been involved. Jesus…
We haven’t had a tasteless, edgy, intermarital attempted rape yet, you’ll notice, so let’s take a moment for Veronica and William upstairs. As they discuss the lack of suspicious sleeping-powder in Donald’s drink and ponder Richard’s death, they begin to bicker in a stuffy Victorian manner. And indeed, a stuffy Victorian manor. This leads Donald – quite out of character – to begin slapping his struggling wife about. Lots of panties, side-boob and bare flesh and complaints of course. Donald merely cracks on with the wife-abuse as it’s the 1800s and that’s what one does before an afternoon’s horse riding or murder it would appear.
Meanwhile Hattie and Martha are summoned by the surviving couples and questioned about creepy Colin and his nocturnal whereabouts. They reassure Victoria that Colin was good and tied up in the cellar all night. Which doesn’t appear to worry Victoria in the way you might think it would. On which cue, in lumbers Colin himself, all fangs and doltish hairdo, clutching firewood.
“Why are we blocking the scene like this? Is something going to come through the window?” “No.”
Is he trying to tell Victoria something? He’s having a go, it seems. But beyond whimpering, twitching and gurning with all the subtlety of Ricky Gervais’s Derek, his message is lost.
Downstairs, Donald is busy fetching and sawing wood for the fire. Martha cajoles Colin into helping him with the persuasive use of a massive fucker of a leather belt across the back, putting Donald’s mind at rest that – while Colin will often get violent, hence the belt – he gets frightened of the electric saw. Well, obviously.
And nobody has been murdered for 10 minutes so let’s despatch young Donald and see how ghastly we can make it. It doesn’t disappoint. Bonked across the noggin by a dark hooded figure, down goes Donald, bringing an end to his wood chopping chores. He awakes sometime later tied to an altar or table or Black & Decker workmate or something, neatly like a bakery box. The hooded figure proceeds to plunge a whopping blade into Donald, stabbing and stabbing making a bloody hole of gore and innards big enough to get a cat in.
This game of Whack A Mole has taken an odd turn, thought Donald.
Donald screams, music thunders and the figure (who, if it is Colin, had definitely got his upper body coordination together momentarily) hauls out innards and grue, Donald’s mouth splashing claret as a saw is taken to his flesh and in a squelch of plastic and papier mache, it gets horribly sausagey and awful.
Being the dullest man on the North East US seaboard, Donald is not being missed by anybody. And nobody catches him bellow out his bloody lungs, so upstairs Martha and Hattie fuss over the turkey lunch. “It will be dried out!”
“I thought it was MY turn to wear the curtains?”
The couples gather (they can’t be waiting for that Donald if turkey quality is to be preserved) so they gather in the dark dining room and whip off the silver cloche to reveal the tasty bird. However, it’s the other type of “foul” and instead they scream at the sight of Elizabeth’s head. Decapitated, lolling and dead-eyed on a bed of mixed greens.
Stick a fork in Elizabeth, she’s done.
Well enough’s enough at this stage. Messages, crosses, rabbits, hanged husbands, decapitated wives and missing Donalds? It enough to have anyone writing to the Daily Telegraph. So cue the sobbing and hysteria and smoking jackets. “We can’t even get off this goddamned island,” someone says, but helpfully a wife is on hand to explain that “swearing isn’t going to help.” Martha knocks and enters, announcing now is the time for the father’s trunk to be fetched. The boat will be here tomorrow for the reading of wills and settling of deeds and to return the remains of the cast to the mainland. Colin and William pretend to struggle with a clearly empty trunk which appears to have just been stuffed in an airing cupboard. Colin of course gets a good belt-whipping from Martha to encourage his trunk-carrying.
“After all this, if it turns out just to be a couple of dad’s old jazz mags and his croquet set then I for one am going to fucking lose it.”
They’d better find Donald if this lark is going to be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Plus where is the firewood? So William and Colin head down to the cellar. But what’s this? As William descends he is followed by a mysterious hooded figure. Ducking out of sight – by which I mean, crouching slightly in clear view of everybody – the figure hides from William as he searches. But hey, what’s this in the box? Pots and plates? Bric-a-brac? Wade Whimseys and china whatnots? A photograph! Dated 1865! An old man cradling a baby! And what’s this written on the back? “HC, my favourite girl, from Walter C.” But…that must mean…presumably something? Hattie? I’d lost interest at this point. Colin’s clearly a red herring; it’ll be one of the mad housekeepers obviously. As I say, Hattie I expect. HC. Oh let’s just get to the end of this thing.
Colin attacks! William barks back at him like a dog, Colin cowering and whimpering. William runs but…no! Attacked finally by the hooded figure, William is impaled against the wall with a glorious pitchfork through the neck, bloody mouthfuls of goo and grue come spilling out as the figure stabs and lunges.
“If you’re popping to Boots, can you grab me some Strepsils?”
Cut to Colin sobbing in Martha’s arms. “They’re mine! They’re mine!” He grunts, revealing the dusty box of pots and plates. And the revealing photograph!
But now the figure is back, chopping off Martha’s hand, sending her collapsing. Colin is chased indoors, up, up the stairs. Victoria and Veronica cower in the bedroom. The figure, a witchy crony face glimpsed beneath the cowl, splashes oil about the stairwell and sets fire to Colin who lights up like a fuckin twig. He topples backwards and finally, hood pulled away and mask removed we see… Well, it’s Hattie, obviously. I mean for heaven’s sake.
And she would have got away with it too, if wasn’t for those meddling Victorians.
So now we need some lumbering, ponderous bond-villain style reveal of all the methods and plots and motives as the girls whimper and Colin smoulders away.
Here it is, in a nut-job Or rather, in a nutshell, explained at length by Hattie. Brace yourself:
41 years ago Hattie was the first born of the Crenshaw family. Momma died giving birth. Dad wasn’t going to go without a bit of further nookie or a shortened bloodline, so he married again. It was this second wife who gave birth to the three girls. But wife 2 grew to hate young Hattie, blaming her for her husband’s reluctance to come home. But now? With everyone out of the way? Hattie will be free to inherit! And who will be blamed for the murders? Colin! ha-ha-ha! There’ll be no doubt poor mad Colin did it! And she can claim she killed him in self defence! This drivel is all explained with wide eyed hysterical mania and Macbeth-style cackling. So much so, Hattie is too distracted to notice a smoking, smouldering, still sizzling Colin clambering up behind her. In a tumble of limbs and chaos, Hattie’s murderous clumsy swing backfires and the blade enters her skull.
She won’t be wearing many “hatties” from now on.
Squirts and splashes of bright red blood ketchup-up the stairwell as Hattie and Colin tumble to a dead heap.
The two sisters collapse sobbing into each other’s arms. A doorbell sounds. That will be lawyer Dobbs. Fuck, they’ve got some explaining to do. But they don’t say this. They just sob and whimper in far, far too much crushed velvet.
Cut to credits.
Is it any good?
Good? Hahahaha. Sorry. No.
On the plus side… well it’s blissfully short. About 71 minutes from neck to nuts. Which is a godsend, as I must have checked my watch thirty odd times during its run time, begging the hands to whizz around a little faster and bring the sorry, velvet-laden crinoline-draped blood-smeared dumpster-fire of cinematic crapola to a finale. But good? No it’s not. Not in any measurable way. I mean it just isn’t. Call it “campy” or “kitsch, call it ”charming” or even “delightfully naïve” if you’re that sort of twit. But it’s just terrible.
How did it come to be so? And what do we know about the man behind the script and lens? Director Andy Milligan (who I should stress, is NOT the OTHER Andy Milligan who is the BAFTA winning wordsmith behind Ant & Dec’s best work) left the army in 1951 to work in dress-making and theatre production, successful enough to scrape enough dollars together to purchase a tumble-down old mansion on Staten Island.
(l) Andy Milligan, responsible for Ant & Dec. (r) Andy Milligan responsible for Pants and Drek
Here, he hooked up with famed sexploitation producer William Mishkin, Milligan picking up a 16mm Auricon camera and cheap cast-off film stock from other productions. The preposterously stuffy, dusty and crumbling mansion became their go-to personal studio and the pair shot 11 miniscule budgeted efforts in its rooms, halls and grounds. Ever tight on costs, Milligan and Mishkin were responsible for set design, building, costumes, scripts and sets. One would imagine Milligan would have also made the bacon sandwiches for the hungry crew at lunchtime, if he’d had a hungry crew. Or indeed any crew.
While a list of some of his previous efforts might sound like a splatter-filled fleshy squirt fest of terrors (Depraved! 1967, Fleshpot on 42nd Street, 1972 and Seeds, 1968 – “Sown in Incest! Harvested in Hate!“), The Ghastly Ones was his first real attempt at horror. Despite the appalling cheapness, stumbling illogical plot, padding, panning and hammy readings, TGO was enough of a gory curio to allow him to follow up with Torture Dungeon (1970), The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972), The Body Beneath (1970), right up to the 80’s with films like Carnage (1984) and The Weirdo (1989).
Milligan Movies – Fun For The Whole Family! Collect Them All!
So, to the script. Look, on paper the story is competent enough and not an un-trodden dramatic path (wills and inheritances and murder plots and “It’s mine I tell you! Mine!” style soapy outbursts with a big sign-posted finale twist. Plus revelations of secret children and evil step moms. It holds up, mostly and is nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times in stagey amateur dramatics and Tales Of The Unexpected dramas. As it stumbles and progresses, the script has nods here and there to reveal undercurrents, a number of characters might be said to have some sort of motive for misdeeds, skull-duggery and skull-peircery with knives and saws and pitchforks and nooses. Fine.
However it would appear from both a painful watch and, just for you viewers, a more recent re-watch and some behind the scenes digging, that production wise, once Milligan had captured the plot on screen, he was at least 20mins shy of a full-length feature. Whoops. He had no choice therefore than to add as much unnecessary canoodling, petting and fondling to extend the length of each scene. And eventually, to nudge it over the 70m mark, to pad out the running time with 2 additional story lines that went nowhere, hints that hinted at nothing and downright plot holes big enough to stuff an antique chest in.
For example, Walter. Remember him? No of course not. But a good 5 mins is given over to the visit to Richard’s “mysterious” brother. He hams and haws and eye rolls and hints at intrigue and mystery. “Value a painting for me! Pop to Tiffany!” And what of Victoria’s reveal of Walter’s “abnormal tastes…” and “attached strings?” Well nothing at all. He is never heard of again and the whole thing is the reddest of red herrings. But not cleverly as we never once are given to think Walter has made it onto the island for a murderous killing spree. It’s just a scene to add 5minutes to the spool.
Which brings us to my favourite piece of bolt-on nonsense, the airy-fairy wafting about of the first five minutes as hopeless Ada and hapless Robert mess about with parasols and spatz before poor lumbering Colin lurches in and gruesomely hacks them both up. I mean what is this? So Colin IS the killer? But he’s NOT the killer! He’s the pitiful patsy who Hattie is going to pin it on. I mean for Chrissakes Milligan, you can’t lead the who-dun-it astray by simply changing your fucking mind about who dun it 5 minutes before the end. A nonsense add-on, pasted into the pre-credit to get a decent running time and baffle the popcorn munchers.
Shooting the damned thing seems to be a clumsy, haphazard badly-lit half-assed attempt to get it all done before lunch, or at least before all the snow melts (night scenes shot in the middle of the afternoon). The cast crowd and barge into each shot which attempts to theatrically frame all nine of them onscreen at once, all elbows and shoulders and faces peeking from under arms. It’s like they’re all standing next to Simon Bates on the balcony as he introduces a 1986 edition of Top Of The Pops.
When he wasn’t warning VHS viewers about bad language, Bates was warning them about bad haircuts and appalling synth pop
“Theatrical” is probably the kindest term I can use for this effort, and I mean it in the worst possible way. Everything you hate about amateur, period costume, shouty, creaky, freezing church-hall productions has been captured. But of course, not captured well. The stagey lighting is so hurried that somehow the scenes are both too dark to see and too bright to focus, so the main feeling the film conjures up, rather than “suspense” is “where did I put the Anadin?”
The too-loud buzzing sound-recording is a multi-directional boom microphone held overhead and it picks up every crease, crush, crack and crinkle of fabric, every chink clink and drink of dinner-wear with an arbitrary uniformity. It’s no wonder the cast appear to be loudly bellowing their lines to each other, as it’d take Pavarotti to be heard over the swoosh, swish and swash of over-cranked velvet and lace.
The accompanying music is a Gershiwnny Manhattany “He Loves She Loves” sort of syrup half the time. The other half being Irwin Allen-ish bonkers hysteria trying and create horror and suspense that simply isn’t there.
I understand from IMDB internet trawling that Andy Milligan had a mother called Marie who was, quote “an overweight, neurotic-bipolar alcoholic who physically and verbally abused her husband and children and served as the basis for scores of her son’s characters when he began making films.” This may explain the casting and direction given to the female actors who do most of their work like Disney Wicked Witches.
But to be fair, the whole cast are so uniformly hammy, hackneyed, scenery chewing, stagey, shouty and amateurish as to make one hide behind the cushion UNTIL a murder happens.
Nasty?
Well. What I’m learning as I embark on this project is that there is a certain “look.” And it comes up a lot so far (well, in the last 2 movies). I confidently expect it to come up a lot in the next few dozen.
It’s this: Imagine you took a lasagne. Mashed it all up with some rubbery entrails. Drowned the whole lot in ketchup. Right? Now hollow out a large fat church candle and pour the mixture in. Paint the candle a fleshy pink. Zoom in close. Chop the candle in half with a big knife so it all spurts and sploshes and jets out like…well, like a waxy candle full of lasagne. If you can get a squeezy washing up liquid bottle in there too, off camera, for some “spurty jets” that’d help.
Perhaps in 1968 this was face-coveringly macabre. But now it’s puerile and silly. It might startle a maiden-aunt or a timid grandad. But certainly no more gruesome than a nasty episode of Holby City or E.R.
For all that, the kills – for which most eager video-renters in the 1970s would have been hungry – are nicely sticky. Dead rabbits are clearly toys covered in corn-syrup; body-horrors are a mess of papier mache and sausages while blood capsules are spat and dribbled. Elizabeth’s dead-head is the hole-in-the-table effect seen in everything from The Muppet Show to This Morning With Richard Not Judy’s “Curious Orange.” But the garden pitchfork in the neck is a particularly fun bit of screamy gore.
“Of course, they’re all SPERM whales by the time I’m finished with them, Stu…”
In fact, the least pleasant moments are the grasping, grappling and bruisy-grips of the “romantic scenes” as married couples squirm and slap each other into semi-consensual humping and the manly face-slapping of “hysterical” women. All of whom are seen largely topless, wandering about in their bedrooms, getting aggressive fondlings from their idiot husbands and shifting under semi-see-through night-dresses. Not exactly the unpleasantness of “Straw Dogs” but an attempt at being ghastly I suppose. It’s sexy, if Kenny Everett and Minder were sexy.
Why do you need that cushion on your lap Richard? Uhmm, no reason mum. No you can’t have it back yet…
Ban Worthy?
Not in the least. A huge drop in quality since our first outing of Blood Feast. No more pairs of boobs than you’d get in Porky’s Revenge or a feature length episode of The Sweeney. Dull periods of swooning maidens and brandy-swigging menfolk. A backwards/backwoods “Egor” like gardener. And a half dozen jumpy stabbings with household equipment that, as I say, are silly rather than gory. As gruesome as the Great British Bake Off “Sponge Cake Mix” episode.
What does it remind me of?
Remember Victoria Wood on UK TV. Her spoof sitcom Acorn Antiques? With all the wobbly sets and banging into furniture and blocking each other’s view and cue-card reciting and shadowy boom-mics and fluffed lines? Well it’s THAT. Exactly like THAT. One can imagine them bickering over screen time with a director in a scarf saying “one more time loves!” But not on purpose. And with absolutely no sense of humour.
“Let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s make the best daytime soap in the history of television…”
Oh and a little bit of this Fry and Laurie Sketch. And, I suppose, the squirty red paint dismemberment of Blood Feast (1963) I suppose. See earlier episode.
Soupy twist, m’colleague…
“Groan With the Wind” meets “Scooby Don’t.”
Where to find it?
If you want to bother, and it’s for completists only. Remember, I’m doing this so you don’t have to, it’s here, if you can wade through the pop ups. https://ok.ru/video/3174539004601
Also available on DVD on Amazon, Ebay and the usual places
Well who’s this cutie? We open in a small apartment. From the snappy décor, stylings, furnishing and amounts of velour, wood and wall-to wall Formica we are knee deep in the 1960s. The whole place looks like Truman Capote got let loose with a Habitat catalogue. And here she comes, a bottle-blonde bomb-shell, all piled-high beehive and Monroe curvy wiggles. She is getting ready for her bath in a manner that only happens when men are typing the screenplay. But – rather than sultry saxophone soundtrack and a feeling of saucy soapy sexiness more befitting the atmos – thundering timpani beats out an impending dummm-dummmmm dummm-dummmm like we were rowing a longship or summoning a Pharoah.
Our bathing beauty flicks the nob of a nearby tranny (what we would now call, turning on the radio). And, as per many a TV detective show, out spools an announcement: “A murder! A mutilated body! Police Request! Women, lock your doors! Stay Inside!” And so on. Our model seems unirked by this and proceeds to busy herself with towels and talc. Off comes the slinky polyester frock to reveal – swit swoo! – a Playtex pointy set of lingerie. Where is Leslie Philips with an E-type jag and a well-timed “ding dong!” when you need him? Climbing into the bath, the timpani still thundering away – we close up on her reading material. Left to one side on the bath to avoid splashing is her choice of book. Not for her, the current 1963 bestsellers: The Bell Jar, The Planet Of The Apes or indeed Dr Suess’s Hop On Pop. No no, our heroine is thumb deep in a leather-bound edition of “Ancient Weird Religious Rites.”
But before she has time to sit back, allow some bubbles to teasingly allow a glimpse of saucy nipple and justify the X Certificate… A shadow falls across the Radox, timpani Frenzy, and dan-dan-dahhhh! It’s a killer! It’s a murderer! It’s what happens if Michael Richards and Charlie Chaplin has a baby! Dark suit, wild eyes and the most preposterous sprayed grey pomp and eyebrows since Parker drove Lady Penelope.
A pizza oven, where you make your own pie! Giddy-up!
She screams! His knife comes down! Cut to his Marx Brothers style eye-rolling as we see her flesh, her blood, all pink and squelchy on the end of his blade. A Rolf Harris Stylophone takes over the two-note plodding soundtrack and we see the poor woman’s remains. She lies, dead, with one eye removed.
Optrex. For tired, itchy eyes. Always consult your pharmacist.
But Chaplin Richards doesn’t stop there. From behind we grimace at the elbow action, back and forth, back and forth as he saws away at something. We can only hope it’s the shower unit. But no, turning he hold aloft her lower leg. First an eye, now a leg, like it were some grotesque game of Operation. But given the woman’s nose doesn’t light up and there’s no buzzer, into the bag the items go and he’s away, leaving us to stare at the stumpy close up of a poor female who will never again soap up a boob or enjoy clunky radio exposition
As my proctologist likes to say, what an opening. Cut to credits! Timpani is back, joined by the brass section as the legend is revealed. We in are in the company of the modest Box office Spectaculars Inc. A Friedman-Lewis’s production. Over the image of the Sphinx – with a nose more missing than if she’d been a member of the Groucho club during the nineties – it’s…Blood feast! Blood spurts and squirts on the screen and we get our cast and production list. And blimey, we’re only four minutes in.
So if that’s our victim and that’s our baddie? Hell, lets meet the heroes. It’s the door to the Homicide Bureau Chief of detectives. In a fixed midshot, we meet our two cops. Detective Pete and his boss, Chief Detective Frank. Shirt sleeves, fags, oiled hair, grey suits and tie clips, they are discussing a murder case.
I’m lookin’ in the want ads, Chief. See if they got any acting lessons going…
No breaks, no clues, no fingerprints. They got nuthin’ and they’re pretty damned well pissed off about it, goddamit. Pouring coffee, hands on hips, chewing cigarettes and sweating in the Miami heat, they can do little it appears, but discuss brutal killings, vent frustration, read their lines off cue cards stuck to the pot plants and request Pete ensure emergency broadcasts repeat every half hour. Their plan appears to be to pace, the room, swear, and hope the killer does it again btu this time with more carelessness. Sherlock and Watson, these chaps ain’t. But they’re on the sides of the angels and our best bet and apprehending Richards Chaplin so we will have to hope and wait.
Now we’re going shopping. Jump to a catering company sign. Yes, it’s the delicious world of “Fuad Ramses exotic catering,” all painted in a mock Egyptian style. And who is this behind the counter of dry goods and tinned meats? Holy Hieroglyphics, its Richard Chaplin. Or as we now realise…Fuad Ramses. The hair is greyer and bigger, the eyebrows thicker and wilder, the complexion tanned and lacquered. The eye rolling more akin to a bowling alley. Tingaling on the bell and its Fuad’s only customer.
“Four candles?”
Or at least, the only one we see, only one we are concerned with and possible the only woman in California requiring Faud’s particular set of skills. Well it’s Dorothy Freemont. Fiddle-de-dee, aint she a well to do dame, with her fancy frock and big old spotty hat. She needs Faud for a special occasion. Her daughter Suzette’s 18th birthday. Faud has come recommended, although Lord knows who by or why, given what we’re about to discover are his preparation methods. Something usual, Freemont wants. Totally different.
At which point Faud gives his creepy pitch. From his delivery it would appear he has spent less time reading Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends & Influence People, and more time curled up in his pyramid with “The Vincent Price Guide To Freaking Customer The Fuck Out“. With creaky, croaky am-dram tones he suggests to Freemont that yes. He can cater for – dan dan daaah, huge pause…unusual affairs! What about an Egyptian Feast? An authentic dinner! The ACTUAL feast of an ancient Pharoah, not served on earth for 5000 years?” Well Mrs Freemont is delighted with this suggestion for, it appears two reasons. Firstly, she reveals her teenage daughter Suzette happens to be studying Egyptian culture. Who’d have thunk? But also because Faud appears to glare and stare at the woman putting her into some kind of Hypnotic zoomy trance for a moment. Is this to secure the sale? TO put her in his power? TO ensure a non-fundable 15 % deposit? It’s not clear. But what is clear is that the plot is set. Freemont hauls herself and her preposterous millinery out of the shop and Faud if free to rub his hands together like he was playing Fagin in a pantomime and then limp theatrically across the store to a backroom lit like a New Orleans photography lab.
Ah-hah. Now this is a food preparation area. The plot thickens, as does, it appears the stew. In a backroom draped with red curtains and flaming torches, Fuad prays to his Egyptian Goddess.
I don’t fancy yours much
A large gold painted plastic statue, heavy with the mascara and draped with blue polyester, Faud stirs a steaming pot of human casserole and chants, “I am your slave oh lady of the dark moon.” Yep, he’s bonkers. But it seems he has a plan to bring this statue gid to life and it involves, we can assume, a recipe which is two parts oregano, one part garlic and eight parts Tampa Bay blonde girl.
Our characters in place, we pick up the pace. Another Miami blonde, all low heels and Alice bands, clicks her way across a parking lot to pick up the daily paper. Handily holding it out at 45 degrees so she can’t read it, but we can, we zoom in to see the splash headline: LEGS CUT OFF!
Not even a pun. Headline writers just aren’t trying these days. “It’ll never stand up in court?” Do I have to do EVERYTHING round here…
nd then a quick montage cut about the town to see other distress commuters reading the same news. It would seem a pathological killer is on the loose and the police can’t find a clue. But let’s see if that’s right…
“A pathological killer on the loose and we can’t find one clue!” yells Chief Detective Frank. Yep, we’re back at the Homicide Bureau. Under harsh studio lights, the cops and chewing and pacing once again, in fresh shirt sleeves, new tie clips and under another scoop of Brylcreem. Have they just found out about the dead girl in the bath from reading the newspaper? It wouldn’t surprise me. But what they do know is that our one-eyed hopalong bathtub beauty belonged to a book group. Is that a clue? Well it’s something. The cops decide to split up and actually do some policework besides drinking coffee and reading tabloids. One’s off to the morgue. The other is going to hang about and see if someone else gets murdered.
Well surprise surprise, someone is about to get murdered. No bath this time. Faud is stalking the classic horror victim – the canoodling kissing couple. They lie in what is either the soft glow of the Miami moon or the piecing glare of a klieg spotlight on the Tampa beach. She’s all capri pants and “It’s getting late, shouldn’t we be getting back…” while of course he’s all quiffy charm and “heyy baby, I’m here…Now…prove you love me,” which is frankly unnecessary. But his aggressive heavy-handedness is short lived as a timpani drum appears and Faud is there.
Just a little off the top. Leave the sides.
He gets a clonk on the head, Looney Toons style, but she is not so fortunate. Organ chords, Phantom of the Opera style, he plunges down upon her, fussing at her neck, all in shadow, blocking our view. Eventually he pulls back and we see…urgh. A close-up on his hands full of dripping innards. He begins to tidy away his kill with a gruesome shot of the poor girl, top of head mutilated, blood and gore splashed over the sand. A beach snake sniffs at the gooey remains.
It’s a little shorter than I asked for…
Cut to the cops on the beach. The greasy boyfriend in a comical Wile E Coyote head bandage is sobbing. The brisk detectives Fred and Pete are all sharp suits, pads, pens and questions. “What do you make of these murders, Frank?” “He took the brains.” They agree whoever the killer his, he’s got a sick, sick mind. Indeed. And now a spare one. And then its snappy procedures as one heads to the parents, the other accompanying the body to the morgue.
But at last a break! Back at the Homicide office, Pete and Frank are knocking back more cold coffee and dragging back more hot cigarettes as the dead girl’s mother has a breakdown, sobbing away. A stoic husband comforts her and does his best to answer Pete and Fred’s clunky questions. No, she was not a gadabout. She went steady. Any clubs or organisations? She had lots of friends. Many folk she knew through her book club. Book club?! This appears to have the sleepy synapses of the cops snapping. A book club! The girl in the bath had a book! This, it appears, passes for a clue. Which it is I suppose, if you only have a 67-minute run-time.
Now we’re back in Faud’s kitchen to see how the casserole is coming, like it were a Saturday morning cooking show. It’s a miracle he doesn’t have a couple of guests at the table supping white wine and saying “so is that just ordinary supermarket brain?” and chucking about soggy bottoms. But no, under the red lamp, with a big iron school dinner pot, Faud stirs the dry ice and entrails, chanting in is creaky Peter Lorre voice about the ancient formula needed for your rebirth.” The statue stands to one side, decidedly unimpressed with the performance.
Another murder? Hell why not. Times ticking on a Faud has a party to cater for in 2 weeks. Now, whether the party meal and the rebirth of an Egyptian god are somehow linked is not clear. Is the party merely another way of sourcing teenage ingredients? In bulk, as it were? Or does the ritual require acolytes to chant and watch and stand around holding twiglets? So far it’s not clear. But what we do know is Faud hasn’t finished shopping. So we’re back in the Miami sunshine as Fuad spies on yet another couple of randy lovebirds.
Wheeling into their apartment complex in a Pulp Fiction style block, a man drunk at 2 in the afternoon, natty captains cap on his head, bombshell beauty on his arm wobbles out of his convertible and takes his lady to her door. He’s not gone ten seconds before Faud cues his local timpani and Stylophone combo and knocking on her door, bursting past and hauling her to the bedroom. As if crossing off an imaginary shopping list (eye, check. Leg? Check. Brain? check) he is now in the market for a nice bit of tongue. A grotesquely pervy gropey fingering then commences as he shoves his digits into the poor girl’s mouth and pretty much gets her face to third base.
Speak up, luv
After far, far too long she falls backwards and Faud hold sup his trophy. About 10 inches of fleshy pink teenager tongue. On the bed, the girl lolls and gurgles and dribbles and makes a horrible mess for whoever has to clean the sheets. I mean that’s never coming out.
Meanwhile, detective Pete and his girlfriend are at their weekly Egyptian history lecture.
This decor is going to look pretty daft once we move on the Tudors…
Yep, you read that right. And in-case this is not enough of a clunky piece of coincidence, Detective Pete’s girlfriend is …Suzette, her of the up-coming birthday party. We need to get that out of the way and we need to get past it. As I say, we’ve less than 80 minutes to get this whole tale told so director Lewis is going to have to simplify his plot strands. But anyway, the cop and the soon to be victim are listening to an elaborate tale of Moses, Israelites and the cult of Ishtar.
Let me take a fast aside here and say that back in 1963 when Gordon Lewis wrote and directed this piece of exploitation nonsense, you could say the word Ishtar without everyone who’d ever subscribed to Variety immediately thinking of the famously flopping 1987, Elaine May directed buddy comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman of the same name.
Never seen it. I s’pose I should. But I bet these two were better in Dick Tracy.
Pre 87, Ishtar was better known as the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon constructed in 569BC. But those innocent days, thanks to May’s reported $40m loss at the box office, are lost in the sands of time.
Ah well. Where were we? Yes, Ishtar. According to this dreary lecture which has Pete and Suzette in its thrall, head tilted like dogs listening to Stockhausen records. This Goddess was worshipped by the Syrian people over 5000 yrs ago. But unusually for the time, but helpfully for screenwriters, it was an evil worship type of love that thrived on violence and virgin sacrifice.
Helpfully, Lewis doesn’t miss an opportunity to gross out his drive-in audience once again so we are in “pop video flashback territory” for a few minutes to illustrate the lecturer’s point.
Debbie McGee pretty much took any work she could get pre- Paul Daniels
As talk grows of slaughter and catching blood in bowls, we watch whispy dry ice and asps squirm over a woman’s half naked body. A knife is plunged into her sternum, deep to the hilt. Blade dripping, a man dressed as an oven ready chicken plucks out the heart and given a good old pummelly squeeze like it were an executive stress-toy. We fade back to the lecture. We are reassured the cult died out by the 2nd of the 15th dynasty but still it is rumoured there are followers of Ishtar today…
See you next week… Round of applause. The crowd mingle, leaving Pete and Suzette to ruminate on the glaring smorgasbord of murder clues which they’re absurdly not picking up on. Pete calls Frank at the station to catch up on any missed events? But nothing. The only clue they’ve got is that the surviving beach boyfriend spoke of seeing the killer’s glowing eyes and grey hair. Not much to go on. Especially if you appear, like these two, to be the worst policemen in the world.
So gallant Pete offers Suzette a fatherly lift home, which is entirely appropriate given their age difference. In fact a great-grandfatherly lift home would be more like it. Pete, randy old goat that he is, decides that the night is too nice and she’s too near the age of consent not to take advantage so they stop off at Happy Day’s “Inspiration Point” or its Tampa equivalent for a little car-based canoodling. “Are we safe?” Suzette asks. And in the most reassuring non-rapey manner, Pete states: You might be safer with the killer than you are with me…” Ffs Pete. A little small talk about how nice they both are, a little side exposition about how they’re both enjoying their Egyptian culture classes. She tells him to stop talking, as if she were Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway, and they’re about to do some harmless tops and fingers (whatever they called that in 1963. Ball the beaver or Make Out with the Melons or whatever.)
Don’t speak, don’t speak!
But of course they interrupted by the car radio. An old fashioned calling all cars bulletin. Another victim, aged 23. She’s in critical condition (and frankly dear reader, I know how she feels). Well that’s ruined their snog, there’s ineffectual police work to do!
At the hospital, it’s a sorry sight. The victim is bandaged up like The Invisible Man, just a nose slit and enough space for a mouth to explain what happened while someone behind the bed plays a church organ.
Early episodes of The Masked Singer had a dark tone for Saturday teatime
Well, she explains, she is Janet Blake. She was attacked by a man with wild eyes! He came from behind a bush… A horrible old man. Kept chanting it was for Eetar! Eetar!” Exhausted by so much plot explaining, Janet collapses. The organist goes into double time. Medics shake their heads. I’m afraid it’s all over.
Eetar? This rings bells with Detective Pete, and the entire audience who by now are screaming at the screen. “It almost sounds familiar…” he muses. For Pete’s sake Fred. Or indeed, for Fred’s sake, Pete. All they can think of is to bring in, quote, “any man over 40 with any kid of record.” Which given the population of Tampa in 1963 was about 700,000 people, is going to take more than just one roomy van. But ah well.
It’s been a few minutes since we checked in with Faud as we assume he stirs half of Janet’s face into his Pyramid flavoured Pot Noodle. So let’s catch him back at the store, opening a letter that’s placing an order for his bestselling book… Ancient Weird Religious Rites. Wait a second! You mean… Faud is the author? Is this how he’s picking his victims? Does this make any sense? Is it important that the people he hacks to pieces have read his book? Does this make the stew taste better? Well it’s not clear.
Dear Jim, please can you fix it for me to meet Michael Richards and Charlie Chaplin
But what IS clear is that someone called Trudy Sanders has written to him for a copy post haste. A quick phone call (actually a tediously long call as, until the push button phone gains ubiquity in about two-year’s time, we have to sit through the whole rotary dial palaver), he finds where Trudy is staying. Let’s hope its somewhere a bit sexy, think the men in the audience who, having had the promise of the bathing blondes at the beginning, have gone limp waiting for something to happen.
Well Lewis doesn’t disappoint and he knows his audience, as Trudy is sat about a swimming pool with other nubile 60s cuties, all lipstick and bikinis, fluffy mules and beach balls, all to the accompaniment of a jolly piano.
One fart and her anal bead was never to be seen again…
But no sooner have we had a few shots of cleavage, midriff and lower bum cheek, than Trudy has dried off and is leaving the party. Cue the timpani of course – dumm dumm, dummdummmmm – and Faud is leaping from the bushes and carrying her away.
Well this is getting silly now. The cops are dragged in to investigate Trudy’s disappearance. They presumably question the 10,000 men over 40 to see where they were in the last 24 hrs, but fail to question Faud or indeed ask him what all that dry ice bubbling in his stock room might be about.
Back in the shrine, we find Trudy’s predictable whereabouts. But for once, Faud hasn’t gone straight for the bread-knife and stock cubes. For he needs fresh blood. And either Ishtar or Herschell Gordon Lewis has decided blood, like fresh cream, is best served whipped. So among the statues and blue fabric, Faud whips and lashes at a chained-up Trudy, dark red blood striping and wiping across her bare back as she screams. And screams. And screams. Faud eventually tires of this trope and catches the running rivulets of red in a silver cup to presumably, act as a nice spicy dipping sauce.
It’s whip to be square…
Ita? Ishtar! Ita?! ISHTAR!!! Like it was a clue on the 1980s game-show 321, a hundred tonne penny drops and – back at the station – Pete suddenly remembers where he’s heard the word. A slow rotary dial and he’s got the lecturer on the line. Ishtar, the blood feast of Egyptian goddess? Fuad Rameses? Author of…Ancient Weird Religious Rites?!” That’s all the crack detective Pete needed. “Alert all cars! Go to caterers! Get Frank Mason over here fast! I think we got our killer!”
We have just 20 minutes more for the cops to wrap this up.
More thunderous church organ as Faud slides dismembered body parts into what appears to be a cold pizza oven. A long pause and then before you can say, “you sure can rehydrate a pizza” (Copyright Bugle/R Zemeckis 1989 All Rights Reserved), out slides a sizzling piece of leg. Faud’s feast is nearly prepared.
A Pizza restaurant, where – like I just said – you make your own pie…
Outside, the cops are pulling up in the sunshine gleaming Plymouth Belvedere’s crawl across baking asphalt and cops pile out, guns at the ready. Man this looks cool. “Hope you got a strong stomach, Frank.” The detectives enter the rear to the sound of bongo and a disturbing organ, discovering the deserted shrine of Ishtar. And talking of disturbing organs, the table has been left somewhat mid-prep. A slow pan down a blood caked woman’s body. Flesh, grue, gore and entrails. Oh, and what looks like a bowl of lightly tossed salad on the side. For the ladies, one assumes. Who ordered this!? The Freemonts! Let’s go!
This is a lot of protein and carbs, Chief. Who IS this caterer? A few greens wouldn’t hurt…
We are at Suzette’s party, which for a young teenager is remarkable staid. Smart and formal, it appears more to resemble some pastel gloved hostesses who have been hired to serve food to a room full of Kennedys.
“A lift through Chappaquidick? That sounds delightful…”
From the kitchen, Faud enters, clapping for attention. You would have thought his spectacular silver hair and gargantuan eyebrows would have been enough. To make the feast more authentic, he needs – predictably – cooperation from a young lady…”
In the kitchen, a desperate Faud convinces a more-than willing Suzette to climb onto the Formica, lie down and chant the prayer to Ishtar. With lots of panto style “Come, my dear…” there is much comic back and forth as she interrupts, sits up, teases and forgets her lines.
Much to Faud’s – and the audience’s – growing frustration. Finally Suzette settles back and closes her eyes, beginning the chant. Cue Faud grabbing up a frankly massive machete. Here we go…
Yes, you can have a cushion. For Christ’s sake…
But no. In comes bumbling mum to check on the coleslaw, catching the act. Screams! Faud makes a run for it, avoiding sadly the macabre frenzy of a bloody party massacre which we were all sort of hoping would be the cherry on the top of this silliness.
As Faud limps Into the squinty sunshine across low rise sprawly parking, the cops arrive at the house. “Suzette! Suzette!” They explain this is all evidence of murder! “Oh dear,” mum says oddly. “The guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight.”
The final chase. Across a stinking beachy city dump, all sandy flies and trash cans, Faud limps away, the cops in warm pursuit. Tossing his knife feebly, he knows the game is up. In an attempt to either hide or escape or take his own life, Faud clambers into the back of a garbage truck (or bin lorry, if you’re reading in the UK). Unaware, the teamster at the wheel cranks the lever and down comes the crusher.
Well I’ll lie low in here for a while. What could go wrong?
While he may not survive, the percussion section does and we get the glorious booming timpani finally once more as the metal lowers. Only his hands and bloody smeared fingerprints are left. Opening the maw of the machine, blood and torn clothes are all that remain. The cops light cigarettes, shake heads and Pete delivers a lengthy pointless explanation of how he managed to crack the case, 66 minutes after the audience had.
Ouch
“Notify HQ that the killer is no more. He died a fitting death, like the garbage he was.” The cops depart, the statue cries bloody tears and someone squeezes red poster paint all over the final credits.
We’re done. Sixty-seven minutes you won’t get back.
Yeah Hersh’ we get it. Enuff already.
Is it any good?
So this, ladies and gentlemen, is apparently where it all began. Not the first movie with a murder, not the first movie with bloodshed, not the first movie with Egyptian sacrifice. Probably not even the first movie with all three of them. However, it you study your literature, read your web pages, check your books and ask Mark Kermode and Kim Newman nicely, they’ll probably tell you: there was once just movies. Then in 1963, all of a sudden, there were “splatter movies.” And cinema, shock and censorship were never quite the same again.
It’s worth I think, despite the rather slight and forgettable nature of Blood Feast’s short exercise in sensationalism and sleaze, taking a moment to put the movie in a little context as we begin our journey. This isn’t going to be the site for in-depth director biographies or extensive filmographies – I’ll leave that to movie students and databases (databi? Ed.). But given we’re starting off at what some might term the birth of an entire genre, the launch of a subculture and the opening salvo in a war with the censors, I don’t think a little artistic archaeology is out of place.
The man, the myth. The mess…
It’s 1962. 36-year-old director Herschell Gordon Lewis is looking for a change. Along with producer David F Friedman, they’re tiring a little of creating batches of “nudie cuties”- the cheap to cast, cheap to shoot, cheap to promote 16mm short films of cheeky bathing-beauty titillation and teases where the only thing more shoestring than the budget are the bikinis. Naughty, cheeky and just on the right side of the censors to be shown at drive-in screenings, it seemed by 1963 the market for “boobs and beachball” cheapies was now flooded with what we would now call “content” by anyone with a camera, a box of thongs, a willing sister and a blow-up mattress.
The “Nudie Cutie.” Yep. It’s that.
It was getting harder and harder to keep their end up (so to speak). What Lewis and Friedman needed was a new gimmick. Something surprising, something fresh, something to get the drive-in crowd excited – something so edgy it would be like nothing seen before in the mainstream. But most importantly, something to make them some money.
Now, remember this was 1963. Despite the term “swinging 60’s” and all its Austin Powers promiscuity, it’s pretty much understood that nothing really swung until The Pill was unpacked at Woodstock, which wouldn’t be for another 6 years. 1963 was a lot more like 1953 than we care to remember. Music was still crooners and bobby socks and 1963 picture houses weren’t showing anything riskier than the family friendly fayre of Son of Flubber, The Great Escape and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
Its mad mad mad mad! It’s not funny. But hell, it’s mad.
So Lewis and Friedman kicked around as many teenager-teasing taboos as they could, workshopping shock upon sleaze upon scandal. Discarded ideas we can now only image included “Con-man Evangelist,” “Nazi Torture Camp,” and something harmless and woke and I’m sure terribly PC entitled “Goona-Goona,” (later to be developed into a provincial pantomime starring Jim Davidson and Charlie Drake). Finally the pair agreed that, boobs and bums aside, what the audiences hadn’t ever seen up close, personal, in-their-face and in bright technicolour was… gore. Offal dripping, gooey, slaughter-house, curdled, fleshy, trembling gore.
Were they right? Audiences had never seen? Surely we can’t expect to believe that Lewis was the first director to think of upending a bottle of ketchup on a shirt and claiming a gunshot wound?
Well that’s true of course. Hammer studios had been dripping bright fake blood from the fangs of Christopher Lee since he donned the cape and Garlic-Bread repellent for director Terence Fisher in Dracula in 1958. Tay Garnett’s 1943 WW2 drama Bataan can stake the claim as the first movie to effectively employ the now familiar ‘squib’ – the small pyrotechnic explosive taped to a stuntman’s chest to ‘pop and squirt’ dramatically simulating gunshot wounds.
Squibs in! The first movie to truly make a splash.
Plus if we’re really trawling through the archives, DW Griffith’s Intolerance has its fair share of clarety-brutality. And that was in 1916. So let’s not pretend that Lewis was the first person to think of showing a little….shall we say…unpleasantness on screen to shock and horrify his audience. Hell, there had been plenty of shock, knives, corpses, horror and blood – albeit a more photogenic chocolate sauce – swirling down cinema’s most infamous plug-hole three years prior when Janet Leigh had climbed into the shower for Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960.
Saul Bass, Bernard Hermann and chocolate sauce. And a generation took baths for a year.
Lewis wasn’t naïve. Sure, a knife wound wouldn’t be enough to turn heads. But if he aimed instead to turn stomachs? But, really turn them? This would be shocking. This would be new. Lewis was enough of a Barnum-Barker to know that gruesome gore would create the word of mouth and “must see” factor that an audience growing bored of knickers and nipples would queue up to revel in and cheer. To watch and then re-watch. To recommend. To dare!
Lewis was also enough of an industry insider to know that, yes, certification and censors were very clear with limits on flesh, on sex, on language and morality. But there were at that time, no official guidelines on…“innards.”
Did Lewis and Friedman have grander aims? Was this a “stretching of boundaries” and a “pushing of envelopes?” An experiment in art? Was this a creative challenge of societal taboos? Were Lewis and Friedman saying something about America’s post war attitude to the slaughter at the Somme? Nope. Fuck that shit. Lewis was a money man. He wanted to create a strip of perforated celluloid that would give him the biggest return on his investment. He had $24,000 of nudie-cutie profits to plough into this project. And whatever would double this, triple this or quadruple this would be what he shot. In his own words, “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an artform and spends money based on that immature philosophy.”
So. Lewis invested in 8000 feet of Kodak film. This would run through a camera for, give or take, 2hrs. So if he allowed every scene just one take, (and a generous second take if the cast or sound man really fucked it), he’d be able to squeeze out a 70m feature. If he didn’t have what he needed in the second take? Well then he’d just have to move on. Lewis wrote the script himself, with what you might now call a masterful understanding of plotting and pacing. One can’t argue that Blood Feast hasn’t a wasted scene. Victim, murder, cops. Victim, murder, cops. Victim, murder, cops. Credits. Shooting took place over a planned seven days in and around Miami Beach’s Suez Motel, but Lewis’s relentless shoot-and-move, shoot-and-move, two take method ensured the whole shebang was in the can in just five days. Casting was a masterstroke of exploitation, savvy, nous and contacts as Lewis knew: if you’re going to get drive-in teens to sit through 73 minutes of fleshy slaughter, Playboy Playmates are definitely the flesh punters are going to want to see slaughtered. So, leaning on his Nudie Cutie cast list, Lewis corralled centrefolds Connie Mason, Christy Foushee, Astrid Olsen and a whole swimming-pool’s worth of busty beauties to keep the crowd leering and cheering.
Aside from just some shapely ladies to succumb to bloody hacking, Lewis needed one or two actual actors. The key role of Faud Ramses fell to performer Mal Arnold, in his first movie role. Now much criticism has fallen at the feet of 30-year-old Arnold who, let’s face it, was challenged in his first role with portraying a 50-year-old Egypt-obsessed murderous cannibalistic psychopathic Miami caterer. A stretch, let’s face it, for which even Meryl Streep would need time in her trailer to prep.
Again! But with less quality!
How much of this hammier-than-honey-roast-ham panto performance of cod-Vincent Price vis Peter Lorre eye-rolling nonsense was Arnold’s choices and how much was an enthusiastic Lewis’s direction of “More! More! Worse! Sillier!” seems to fall generously on the side of the director. The research I could find suggested that Lewis – coming as he did from a non-subtle T&A, soft-core, less is less background – pushed Arnold to google his eyes, stick out his chin, limp around the place and affect a cod Transylvanian accent (which producer Friedman once described as “the worst Bela Lugosi voice anyone ever heard”) means, perhaps, there was a better performance in Arnold he was simply not allowed to give. We’ll never know.
Marketing the movie was of course 99% of the project. As Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin proved with their 1998 piece of crap Godzilla, you don’t need the public to like the movie. You just need enough of them to spend $10 to want to see the movie. The poster promised “Nothing so shocking in the annals of horrors. ” And we have to agree it’s correct, for better or worse, on that count.
You just paid your $10 to see if it could live up to the hype. It didn’t. They kept your ten bucks.
As the prints of Blood Feast moved from city to city, local papers printed angry and shocked letters of complaint. Written, of course, by Lewis and Friedman. The pair posed as furious priests in one town to stir up both the “do NOT see this!” and the inevitable “we HAVE to see this!” fever that you old enough to recall Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers will be only too familiar. And of course no Midwest movie drive in was complete without actors dressed as nurses handing out airline sick-bags to drive-in viewers, with “Blood Feast” printed on one side, and “you might need this” printed on the other.
Natural Born Killers. If they hadn’t tried to ban it, I wouldn’t have bothered seeing it.
Did it work? Were they right? Did Lewis and Friedman under or over estimate the public’s desire to be repulsed, sickened, shocked and disgusted by this tawdry trawl thought cheap scripts, hammy acting, gory offal and thundering timpani? Well, as we said, on a budget of $24,000, records show it pulled in $4,000,000. Yep. A profit of over 16,000%.
Note: Horror has always proven itself as reliable return on investment, mainly due to low production costs colliding with audience must-see anticipation. Famously, in 1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez took three actors and a camcorder into the woods, had them scream about Blair Witches for a week and turned their $50k investment into a worldwide $250m box office. Compare this to the traditional blockbusters that may pull in a headline grabbing $586m gross (Iron Man, 2008) but had to spend $140m to get the damned project into theatres).
Before found footage was everywhere, it was in the woods. And it scared me shitless.
Okay, okay. But what of the movie itself? Well over 60 years later it’s impossible to understand the reaction or impact the very first “spatter movie” had on audiences who had simply never seen anything like it. That is, they’d never seen anything like the 3 or 4 gory murders. The remaining 70 minutes of detective-padding they had to sit through was sadly – and I hate to be presentist about this – exhaustingly familiar and somewhat unwatchably clunky.
We will talk in a later essay you can find here on where money actually goes in low-budget film production. Suffice to say, once you’ve shelled out for sets, props, costumes, make-up, lighting, cameras, microphones, editing suites, negative development, lunches and wages for people to operate all these things for 5 days – plus of course your 2hrs of film stock – you’re not going to have much left to tempt Richard Burton, Lawrence Olivier or Katherine Hepburn out of their trailer. What you might have is enough to hire the hammiest of amateurs to gasp, gawp, put hands on hips (the men) and hands on faces (the women) and read their lines off cue cards. Which is, either charmingly or regrettably (depending on your tastes) what Lewis gives us.
The whole shooting-match has the air of Saturday afternoon television. The stagey acting, the fixed camera, the barked-out clunky exposition as men shout plot and facts at each other – will be familiar to anyone who grew up with the Batman TV show (ABC 1966-1968). “Let’s go’s!” and “Dammits!” and “My god’s!” pepper the perfunctory script as the story hauls itself around as few locations as it can afford.
To the batcave little chum!
Costs are saved with the obligatory signs outside buildings (Homicide Office / exotic catering) before we cut to a borrowed shop or a fake office. As Lewis had only enough film for no more than two takes, it seems he’s risked nothing by experimenting and largely locked the camera, static, in a mid-shot, over-lit the room in a glare of halogen and asked the cast to shout the lines slowly – all so as to ensure he had at least one usable take.
Production values shout “cut cost at any cost.” Which means one can almost glimpse the squeezy-bottle nozzle as red poster paint is squirted all over the credits. No matter what the plot, cast or continuity might tell us, every scene is shot in midafternoon glare and all the cars are convertibles to save on costly lighting. The evening beach scene has been shot in the middle of the night with the courting couple lying in a blinding glare of a klieg lamp like they’re escaping from Colditz. And every effort has been made to pad the 15 minutes of plot into the 67 of run time so telephone calls have the exhausting rotary dial plodding, cars take an hour to park and any script idea is crowbarred in. Including the baffling finale clunker “This feast is evidence of murder!” “Oh dear, the guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight.” I mean what it THAT? Camp? A gag? Light relief? It sticks out like the sort of sore thumb a Miami based cannibalistic caterer might chop off and eat.
The cast are enthusiastic amateurs – Mal Arnold aside – and it shows. The gals have little to do but flick their hair, stick out their busoms, totter in pencil-skirts or bikinis, drown their hair in Ellnet Fixing Spray and then scream on cue. The two cops – the most bumbling of the bumbling variety – slurp coffee, read manilla files and once in a while might click their fingers with a “goddamit chief!” in a way Leslie Neilsen and Alan North had huge fun with in the Police Squad parodies. Arnold really does add as much honey-roast ham as he can as he croaks out his lines, somewhere between Alec Guiness (“Things have been ready for a long time…a long time…”), Vincent Price and, oddly, George Takai.
Oh myyyyy!
The lecturer on Egyptian cults is a stern, po-faced gent from the Howard Cosell school of broadcasting. And if you’ve ever seen the wild-eyed junkie from The Big Bang Theory try and pull of despair and pain in Sheldon’s apartment, you’ll recognise the boyfriend-on-the-beach’s techniques.
The music – Gordon Lewis himself – has the simplicity of John Carpenter, but with none of the class or style. John Wood-Glue, if you like. When drums aren’t pounding out thundering two note heave-ho heave-ho, Rolf Harris appears to take over on a battery powered Stylaphone. And when he’s in court, its off to temple for some dragged out Hassidic cello. Schindler’s Lizst, if you’ll forgive that one.
Do you care what it is yet?
Nasty?
It’s been said that, just as the severed ear of cop Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) in the hands of Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) pretty much made Quentin Tarantino’s career, so the tongue of actress Astrid Olson and its violent removal made the career of Gordon Lewis.
Just a number two back and sides and an inch off the top mate, cheers.
Lewis has huge fun piling the gore onto the gore in order to shock and delight his drive-in crowds. Eyes gouged, legs chopped, brain extracted, tongues wrenched, backs whipped and hearts removed – there is plenty to have the audience squirming. The effects are gruesome – the blood bright and runny, the offal gooey and drippy, the meat raw and squelchy. Yes, once in a while the budget shows. Our first victim’s eye removal is nothing more than half a pot of Umbrol “Household Cavalry” red paint pooling in her eye. Her removed leg is little more than an artic roll or a discarded Mr Blobby costume. The hacked off stump is more “chickeny” than one might expect. Lewis is generous with the red paint (Allegedly red dye and Kaopectate – an antacid and anti-diarrhoea medication made with kaolinite and pectate).
The murders are well lit, in your face, lascivious and – in the case of the motel tongue removal – not a little sexual. More silly than nasty, more camp than carnage perhaps, but certainly Blood Feast earns its place as the very first of its type for pure “check THIS out!” cheek and set a bar the next 5 decades would see directors reach for, skim and – much to the delight of horror fans – clear with feet to spare.
Of what does it remind me?
Well nothing in the canon so far, as we are starting as it were, at movie zero. It is from Blood Feast that the “splatter” genre really grew and movie after movie would take its stalk-n-slash premise, it ancient occult chanting and its helpless blondes and do wild and crazy things. As far as the aesthetic though, glorious gore aside, it has the lovely snappy, sharp suits and sunny sedans of that Saturday cop show era. Hats, skinny ties, cigarettes, palm trees, crunchy gravel, wiggly skirts, beehives and tie-clips, the whole thing is cooler than Mancini with a Martini.
Where can I find it?
Youtube will provide you with a copy after a simple search if you don’t want to commit. But there is also a 2017 release of a shiny Blu-Ray, which – along with a clean print of the whole 63 silly minutes, has features including interviews, outtakes, commentary and “Scum of the Earth” – Herschelll Gordon Lewis’ 1963 feature. Oh and for completists, don’t forget to check out the much more comic 2002 sequel, “Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat.”
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 