Placer sangriento

Organ player wearing grotesque looking mask stalks young women, injects them with heroin, and then hypnotizes them with his organ playing and turns them into his love slaves, before stabbing them with a hypodermic needle the size of a turkey baster and leaving them on a nearby beach.

Mm hmmm.

Really silly looking font for the title; beatniks playing bongos and dancing, then stripping; and buxom babes on the beach provide a few unintentional laughs. Occasionally (deliriously) atmospheric visuals, like killer shown reflected in shattered mirror, and its high contrast black-and-white photography and stark lighting give the flick a certain creepiness, but overall, this is the type of sleazy little flick which can only be watched to wonder what the hell was being taken/ drunk during filming (which couldn't have lasted more than a day or two)

Emilio Vierya strikes again! Or to be more accurate, Emilio Vierya strikes for the first time as this was the first of a series of bizarre horror films by Argentina's most famous (and only famous) horror director. And though Vierya may strike first-time viewers as an Argentinean Ed Wood, there is definitely method to his madness--the cheesy delirium evoked by his films is entirely intentional. A man in a ridiculous monster mask lures female Argentinean swingers partying on the beach with his strange organ music(thus the suggestive alternative title "The Deadly Organ"). He then injects them with heroin to make them his slaves. Why? You wouldn't believe me if I told you, but it really isn't important.

All the ingredients of a Vierya film are there--the free-spirited Latino hippies, the goofy music, the gratuitous nudity, the gratuitous dancing. His two regular actresses--Gloria Pratt and Susana Beltran--also appear. Beltran (who looks a lot like her Italian exploitation contemporary, Rosalba Neri)has the lead in this movie though, with Pratt relegated to a more perfunctory part. Thankfully, this one isn't padded with American-shot sex inserts like "The Curious Dr. Humpp", but unlike "Sangre de Virgenes" it is dubbed into English which is only a problem because instead of giving Beltran a sexy Latino accent, they give her this grating Texas one(!). And "Feast of Flesh", the title this has currently been saddled with by the distributors at Something Weird is very inaccurate as there is no flesh here in the gore sense and not much in the sex sense. The Spanish title "Placer Sangriento" (literally "Bloody Pleasures") isn't any more accurate. Both are bound to attract your indiscriminating gore fans rather than your more refined and erudite fans of bizarro Argentinean horror/sexploitation movies who will appreciate a film like this. I guess this movie really defies ANY title, but I like "The Deadly Organ" the best.

The only horror director of any fame to come from Argentina, Emilio Vieyra ("The Curious Dr. Humpp"), made the first of his low budget genre films with this minor shocker. Mauricio De Ferraris stars as a police inspector named Ernesto Lauria, who must solve the case of a masked maniac who injects women with heroin, and also uses organ music to turn them into zombie slaves.

Don't look for a particularly coherent story with this one, but you can expect a fair amount of black & white atmosphere. You can also enjoy a decent serving of sleaze, a steady assortment of sexy young women, and the creepiness of the villain. The mask he wears may be the most noteworthy thing about him. The performances are not great but they are adequate. The mystery to be solved is not all that difficult to deduce. The music is the work of a man named Victor Buchino, who also composed the song performed by one of our suspects in a nightclub. Pacing is efficient enough, resulting in a movie that wraps up in just over 70 minutes.

"Feast of Flesh" a.k.a. "The Deadly Organ" (as it is known here in North America) is no great shakes, but lovers of foreign B horror may appreciate its sense of weirdness and its ambience.

Five out of 10.

Feast of Flesh (1967)

** (out of 4)

Argentina horror film about a masked killer who stalks women so that he can inject them with heroin and make them his slaves. Originally rated X when it was released to American drive-ins, this thing now is rather tame in its violence, subject matter and nudity but it's a shame the direction is so incredibly poor because we might have had a pretty good film otherwise. The look of the masked killer is the film's strong point but the rest of the film, while interesting, is rather dull due to the direction.

Okay, "Deadly Organ" isn't as wacky as "Humpp" but there are plenty thrills for lovers of weird and obscure films. A spooky guy with a monster mask wrecks havoc on the beaches of Argentina by injecting heroin (!) into helpless young girls. He then plays an organ (hence the title, I thought it was another kind of organ..ha ha) and young zombielike girls come to him. In the film's most outrageous scene two cops interview a heroine victim of who the psycho is BY USING LSD AS A TRUTH SERUM!!?! According to the Mondo Macabro book "Deadly Organ" was made in 1965! The audiences of Argentina must've been pretty shocked by this druginduced gem. Only for the boldest trashfilm fanatics - mainstream Lynch/cultfilm wannabes should stay clear of this twisted little marvel.