The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

          Generated by the short-lived company Tigon British Film Productions, The Blood on Satan’s Claw is something of a companion piece to an earlier Tigon production, 1968’s Witchfinder General. One could also draw a line connecting both of these pictures to 1973’s The Wicker Man. All three movies juxtapose supernatural topics with realistic rural settings, thus providing early examples of the “folk horror” style presently in vogue thanks to such pictures as Midsommar (2019) and The Witch (2015). When these movies click, as is the case with The Blood on Satan’s Claw, ideas that might seem cartoonish in other contexts land with visceral impact because they’re grounded with believable characterizations and environments. Excepting some sketchy makeup FX, it’s hard to dismiss The Blood on Satan’s Claw as mere escapism, and that’s a hallmark of the whole “folk horror” genre.
          Set in 18th-century England, the picture begins with a simple farmer discovering a deformed corpse and summoning a snobbish judge (Patrick Wymark) to examine what the farmer describes as the remains of a “fiend.” Yet by the time the judge is brought to the spot where the corpse was found, the remains have disappeared. So begins a strange series of events bedeviling a small, superstitious village. Among other disturbing occurences, the judge watches his future daughter-in-law succumb to a sort of possession—she even manifests a claw-tipped atrocity in place of one of her hands. As instances of hallucinations, self-mutilation, and uncharacteristic behavior grow in number, the judge begins to accept the grim possibility that evil has taken control of his neighbors, prompting a call for help from outside authorities. Eventually, provocative teenager Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) becomes the nexus of the village’s problems when her transgressions escalate from the sinful (trying to seduce a priest) to the homicidal. By far the most unnerving aspect of film is a trope of Angel leading local children in “games” that involve brutalizing victims for amusement—or perhaps for the pleasure of a master from another realm.
          One could easily argue that director Piers Haggard and screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons misstepped during the climax, which shifts from creepily ambiguous to drably literal, and the makeup FX in this sequence are regrettable. Still, most of what unspools prior to the climax boasts admirable tension and texture. The Blood on Satan’s Claw is filled with great faces, literate dialogue, and vivid locations, all of which create a useful foundation for the whole cinematic experience. And while The Blood on Satan’s Claw is not on par with Witchfinder General—among other shortcomings, one longs for a compelling central character—Satan’s Claw provides a serious-minded alternative to the often silly qualities of mainstream British horror from the same period, notably films from Amicus and Hammer. After all, baked into the gore and suspense of The Blood on Satan’s Claw is a parable about the ease with which bad ideas take root in susceptible minds.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw: GROOVY

Death Line (1972)

          Rarely will genre-picture viewers encounter a harder tonal shift than the transition occurring around the 23-minute mark of UK horror show Death Line, released in the U.S. as Raw Meat. The opening stretch of the movie proceeds like a standard-issue thriller. After a well-dressed gentleman is killed by an unseen assailant in a London subway station, a young couple discovers his body and learns from his ID that he’s an important official. The couple solicits help from a nearby cop, but upon returning to the scene of the crime, the victim has vanished—thus making the couple suspects in the disappearance of a VIP. Thereafter, quirky Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) probes the lives of the couple, American Alex Campbell (David Ladd) and Brit Patricia Wilson (Sharon Gurney). Then writer-director Gary Sherman abruptly cuts to secret catacombs adjoining the subway station, wherein a grotesque creature (Hugh Armstrong) tries feeding pieces of 

the gentleman’s body to another creature, who dies. Enter the world of “The Man,” last survivor of an inbred cannibal tribe evolved from survivors of a construction cave-in that occurred 80 years previous.

          From the moment Sherman introduces “The Man,” Death Line transforms into a depressing meditation on the nature of humanity. Lengthy and wordless scenes reveal aspects of The Man’s dismal existence. We see that he lovingly preserves the corpses of his dead companions, and that generations of mutations have rendered him animalistic, hence his taste for human flesh. Sherman approaches these scenes with a sort of tenderness, even though Death Line gets quite gory during moments of violence, as when The Man impales a victim. Meanwhile, Sherman tracks a melodrama aboveground, because Alex becomes cranky about getting roped into a police investigation, which has the effect of driving away Patricia, who finds Alex’s behavior to be callous. Scenes with Pleasence joking and sniffling as the persistent inspector lend much-needed humor, though the overall vibe is grim.

         It’s not hard to see why the picture has gained a small cult following over the years. While there are myriad misunderstood-monster movies, Death Line employs its subterranean metaphor to good effect while exploring the always-interesting idea that civilized man is never all that far removed from his origins as a savage animal. If one indulges Sherman’s outlandish premise, the suggestion that The Man is merely following his nature comes across with a smidge of emotional heft. And if certain elements of Death Line are bland (such as Ladd’s performance), there’s usually something interesting to compensate. Not only does Christopher Lee show up for an entertaining cameo, but Sherman’s camera captures a whole lot of ’70s kitsch, from Gurney’s shag haircut to loving glances at London’s seedy red-light district. Does it matter that Sherman can’t quite land his ending, which tries to be simultaneously horrific and poignant? Not really. Even with its flaws, Death Line is memorably bleak.

Death Line: FUNKY

Help Me . . . I’m Possessed (1974)

This low-budget shocker’s working title, Nightmare at Blood Castle, suits the mysoginistic content better than the moniker used during a brief theatrical release, since demonic possession may well be the only horror cliché not on display here. Presented somewhat in the Herschell Gordon Lewis style, only with slightly more competent camerawork, Help Me . . . I’m Possessed tells the unbelievable and uninteresting story of a mad doctor, Arthur Blackwood (Bill Greer), performing vile experiments in the dungeon of his castle. Assisting Dr. Blackwood is the requisite thuggish hunchback, Karl (Pierre Agostino). It’s never completely clear what Dr. Blackwood hopes to accomplish, how he finances his activities, or how he has thus far escaped close scrutiny from law enforccment. After all, Dr. Blackwood kills so many “patients” that Karl has a method of dismembering bodies so they can fit into small trunks for disposal. The flick also includes standard-issue subplots about the doctor’s mentally challenged sister, Melanie (Lynne Marta), and a cop (Pepper Davis) who snoops ineptly despite obvious clues of wrongdoing being visible everywhere. Still, Help Me . . . I’m Possessed has a certain watchability (by psychotronic-cinema standards), thanks to florid quasi-Biblical speeches, vigorous bad acting, and extreme vignettes (e.g., a woman getting locked into a coffin with a poisonous snake). Help Me . . . I’m Possessed is bottom-feeding crap, but compared to myriad other execrable films fitting that same description, this one is relatively brisk and eventful.

Help Me . . . I’m Possessed: LAME

The Child (1977)

Horror-flick clichés abound in The Child, a low-budget entry into the creepy-kid genre. Out in the boonies, pretty twentysomething Alicanne (Laurel Barnett) arrives to begin her job as caretaker for Rosalie (Rosalie Cole), the 11-year-old daughter of a nasty old guy who lives in a decaying mansion. (The child’s mother died some time previous, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) Naturally, Alicanne receives warnings about the house (and about the 11-year-old) from a kindly neighbor, and, naturally, she ignores these warnings. All the usual nonsense happens. Strange behavior. Troublesome mysteries. Weird noises. And still Alicanne remains in the house, even as she learns about several recent unsolved murders. Turns out Rosalie has supernatural control over zombie-like creatures, and that she’s guiding her “friends” to murder people whom she feels were complicit in her mother’s death. Inasmuch as it has a steady stream of chase scenes taking place in quasi-atmospheric locations, The Child might have enough shock-cinema mojo to keep undemanding horror addicts entertained. Those who actually want originality, a proper story, or real thrills—not so much. The movie’s shortcomings include distracting dubbing, laughable gore FX, iffy production values, obnoxious music, underwhelming jolts, and weak acting. If only because The Child lacks outright cruelty and misogyny, it’s far from the worst type of ’70s drive-in horror, but that remark should not be misconstrued as praise.

The Child: LAME

Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974)

          Sometimes fate does cruel things to artists’ legacies, as demonstrated by the fact that a strange horror movie about cannibalism was the last project from Laurence Harvey, who both starred in and directed Welcome to Arrow Beach, but died at the age of 45 while the film was in postproduction. That Harvey seems wildly miscast in the film’s leading role only adds to the overall strangeness of watching Welcome to Arrow Beach. Born in Lithuania, raised in South Africa, and educated in England, Harvey was most definitely not an American. So why does he play a traumatized Korean War vet living on a California beach? And why is the sister of Harvey’s character played by English-Canadian actress Joanna Pettet, who looks nothing like Harvey and employs a convincing American accent that accentuates how foreign Harvey’s speaking style sounds given the nature of his role?

          The story begins with hippie hitchhiker Robbin (Meg Foster) accepting a ride from a hot-rod driver, who crashes soon afterward with Robbin in his car. Cops including Sheriff Bingham (John Ireland) and Deputy Rakes (Stuart Whitman) respond to the accident and discover cocaine that Robbin insists belongs to the driver, who is badly hurt. Weirdly, the cops release Robbin and do nothing while she strolls onto a private beach. Then, while Robbin skinny-dips, Jason Henry (Harvey) ogles her through a telescope from his house above the sand. Later, Jason offers hospitality, which Robbin accepts only when she learns that Jason lives with his sister, Grace (Pettet). Yet Grace isn’t happy to meet Jason’s new houseguest, reminding Jason that he’d promised not to get in trouble with girls anymore. And so it goes from there—Robbin ignores obvious warning signs until a frightening encounter occurs, but once she escapes the chamber of horrors hidden inside Jason’s house, her past encounter with the cops makes them doubt her sensational claims about an upstanding citizen.

          Although the movie takes quite a while to get to the creepy stuff, there’s never any doubt where the story is going, since the first scene includes an epigraph about cannibalism. Therefore the picture lacks real suspense, and the overly mannered quality of Harvey’s acting further impedes the movie’s efficacy as a horror show. In fact, many stretches of Welcome to Arrow Beach edge into camp, as when Harvey cuts repeatedly from closeups of his own eyes to closeups of Foster’s character eating the world’s bloodiest steak. Just as unsubtle is the film’s suggestion of incest: At one point, Harvey and Pettet kiss passionately. Since it’s impossible to take Welcome to Arrow Beach seriously, perhaps  it’s best to regard the picture as drive-in junk with a posh leading actor. After all, the stylistic high point is a scene in which Harvey’s character lures a woman into a photo studio, then switches from holding a camera to holding a meat cleaver.

Welcome to Arrow Beach: FUNKY

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975)

          Like George Romero’s disturbing Martin (1978), this low-budget shocker is a vampire movie without vampires. Starring the elegantly pretty Cristina Ferrare, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary has as many weaknesses as it does strengths. On the positive side, the movie is mildly erotic and mildly spooky, with slick photography and evocative locations. On the minus side, the acting is sterile, the pacing is far too slow, and director Juan López Moctezuma lacks the breadth of visual imagination needed to put something like this across. Some viewers will lose interest partway through Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary because so much time elapses between exciting scenes, and it’s true that much of Ferrare’s appeal stems from her fashion-model beauty. Just as her performance suggests a world of emotional experience rather than properly expressing those emotions, the movie as a whole feels like a rough draft. Nonetheless, the film travels an interesting path by forcing viewers to ask whether the lead character is a supernatural monster or merely disturbed.

          Set in Mexico, the picture follows the travels of a painter named Mary (Ferrare), who has a nasty habit of murdering the men and women she meets. Specifically, she seduces them, weakens them with spiked drinks, then removes a hairpin and punctures their throats so she can drink their blood. Yet Mary feels conflicted about what she does, and she’s haunted by visions/memories of the mystery man (John Carradine) who triggered her murderous impulses. The particulars of the plot are neither clear nor significant, but the gist is that Mary falls for Ben (David Young) and tries to end her lethal cycle so she can be with him. Meanwhile, the mystery man chases Mary across Mexico, setting the stage for a final confrontation.

          In its best moments, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary has something approaching an art-movie vibe. For instance, a long lesbian seduction scene features mirrors, striking costumes, and deliberate pacing. In its worst moments, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary feels like drive-in schlock. One crude sequence features Mary writhing atop a lover/victim while the camera pointlessly cuts back and forth between Mary’s face and objects d’art around the room. Carradine’s appearance is especially problematic. In most scenes, his character is obviously portrayed by a stunt double. Moreover, the costuming of Carradine’s character recalls that of the old pulp character the Shadow, right down to the high collars and wide-brimmed hat. In sum, those who avoid this movie aren’t missing much—but those who give it a chance will discover an offbeat experience.

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary: FUNKY

The Body Shop (1973)

At some point during this mindless gorefest, a local cop knocks on the door of the castle-like mansion where a mad scientist performs unholy surgery. The scientist answers the door politely, so the cop makes an inquiry: “You’re not doing anything illegal, are you?” “No,” the scientist says, “I’m a doctor.” Inexplicably satisfied with that answer, the cop says, “Well, I hope I didn’t bother you.” Huh? As goes that idiotic scene, so goes the rest of this unwatchable movie, which is sometimes known as Doctor Gore. Written and directed by J.D. Patterson Jr., who also plays the leading role, the picture concerns a medical man determined to replace his deceased wife with a simulacrum. Aided by his hunchbacked assistant (yes, really), the doctor seduces and murders young women, then cuts up their bodies with the intention of building a new bride for himself. Variations on the same ridiculous presence are nearly as old as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), in which the monster demands a mate, so Patterson doesn’t get any points for originality. Nor does he deserve praise for anything else—from acting to directing to writing, everything he does here is inept. For instance, what’s with periodically cutting to portly country singer Bill Hicks, who repeatedly croons the song “A Heart Dies Every Minute”? And what’s with those dull montages of Patterson, as the doctor, making out with curvy young women? Excepting some quasi-realistic gore, this flick runs the gamut from incompetent to indulgent. Luckily, Patterson only made one more movie, The Electric Chair (1976).

The Body Shop: SQUARE

Blood Stalkers (1976)

          It’s probably best to begin by listing all the things this low-budget horror flick is not. Despite the title, the subject matter doesn’t concern vampires or zombies or any other plasma-craving monsters. And lest any of the following remarks give a different impression, Blood Stalkers is not a good movie by any measure. It’s amateurish and goofy and sluggish, burdened with clichéd characters and trite dramatic situations. Having said all that, Blood Stalkers has tangential connections to Bigfoot, who was very much in vogue at the time this picture was released, and the picture hits its stride as a nihilistic shocker during the final 30 minutes or so. All of which is to say that if you dig the elements contained herein, Blood Stalkers makes for an adequate empty-calories snack.

          The sketchy narrative begins with two couples driving into the Everglades for a vacation. Mike (Jerry Albert) recently inherited a remote cabin, and he’s brought his reluctant wife, Kim (Toni Crabtree), and their friends Daniel (Ken Miller) and Jeri (Celea Ann Cole) along for the ride. Upon arriving in swamp country, Mike clashes with a grubby gas-station proprietor (Herb Goldstein), who gives the standard get-outta-here-if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you rap. Naturally, because he’s a character in a dumb horror movie, Mike ignores the advice. Things get weird immediately thereafter, because three gun-toting slobs, who look less like Deliverance rejects and more like members of a redneck militia, show up at the gas station to wave guns at the newcomers. Again, Mike proceeds despite the clear danger to himself and his friends, which means that logic is not a factor in what follows. After Mike’s group settles into the cabin, they’re frightened by mysterious creatures that are referred to by locals as “blood stalkers,” whatever that means. The siege grows more intense each passing night, with hairy Bigfoot-like monsters eventually putting their hands on members of Mike’s group.

          Eventually, the movie develops a queasy sort of tension because things get ultraviolent, complete with over-the-top gore. None of it makes much sense, but it’s hard to look away from bizarre scenes featuring slow-mo chases and cuts to gospel singers. (Don’t ask.) And while the onscreen Bigfoot stuff is a bit of a tease, the offscreen connection to Sasquatch lore is real. Robert W. Morgan, who wrote and directed Blood Stalkers in addition to playing one of the menacing rednecks, appeared in several ’70s documentaries as a self-proclaimed Bigfoot hunter. He cut a memorably ridiculous figure in those projects, so it’s unsurprising that Blood Stalkers, his sole directorial effort, is simultaneously earnest and stupid. For better or worse (mostly worse), Morgan approached his contributions to ’70s pop culture with fierce commitment.

Blood Stalkers: FUNKY

God’s Bloody Acre (1975)

There’s a decent idea for an exploitation flick buried in here, because the premise is that hillbillies who have lived illegally in the wilderness for an extended period of time fight back once government developers try to clear the land for creation of a park. Alas, the filmmakers avoid the obvious path of making the hillbillies sympathetic, instead portraying them as dimwitted maniacs. Worse, the filmmakers provide the hillbillies with a steady supply of victims by contriving subplots about folks wandering into the woods during the killing spree. To a one, the characters in God’s Bloody Acre are stereotypical and underdeveloped, so it’s impossible to care what happens to anyone onscreen, though of course basic human empathy kicks in once the final survivors of the ordeal seem close to becoming victims. In any event, God’s Bloody Acre represents many of the worst tropes in horror cinema, reveling in violence against women (there’s an endless scene of a young lady getting her throat cut) while reinforcing demeaning clichés about rural populations. Oh, and just for good measure, the picture throws in a little racism, because, naturally, the three black guys driving a Rolls-Royce are violent thieves who rob every white person they encounter. In the spirit of trying to say something kind, director Harry Kerwin manages a few clever scene transitions, and the vignette of a fellow getting chopped in two by a bulldozer blade is nasty. But in all the usual ways for this sort of junk, God’s Bloody Acre is boring, cheap, dumb, and unsavory.

God’s Bloody Acre: LAME

The Severed Arm (1973)

A low-budget horror flick with anemic morality-tale elements, The Severed Arm is less about dismemberment than it is about cannibalism, because even though the topic of consuming human flesh dominates only one scene, the ghastly concept informs the whole storyline. At the beginning of the picture, a dude sneaks into a morgue, hacks an arm off a corpse, and sends the arm in the mail to Jeff Ashton (David S. Cannon). Instead of calling the police, Jeff brings the arm to his friend, Dr. Ray Sanders (John Crawford), triggering a flashback to something that happened five years previous. While exploring a cave with several buddies, Jeff, Ray, and the others were trapped by a cave-in. After two weeks without supplies, they drew straws to see who would sacrifice part of his body so the others could eat. Back in the present, Jeff and Ray determine that someone else who survived the ordeal must be tormenting them, so they enlist the help of policeman Sgt. Mark Richards (Paul Carr), another member of the doomed cave exploration. Although quite substandard in terms of technical execution, The Severed Arm gets the job done as a simple-minded riff on classic Edgar Allan Poe-type themes. Yet stupid excesses at the beginning and end of the narrative undercut the fleeting moments that work. The whole business of sending an arm in the mail is outrageous, and the dual-twist-ending finale stretches believability even further. It’s not impossible to imagine roughly the same material inspiring a decent episode of Night Gallery or the like, but stretched to feature length and juiced with silly attempts at big-screen portentousness, this plot quickly collapses in on itself.

The Severed Arm: LAME

The Redeemer: Son of Satan! (1978)

          Those who enjoy the bizarre horror movies of Don Coscarelli (especially 1979’s Phantasm) might also enjoy The Redeemer: Son of Satan! Fitting the overheated title, this peculiar low-budget shocker has both allegorical and artistic elements, suggesting that writer William Vernick and director Constantine S. Gochis envisioned something deep and metaphorical, rather than just a parade of bloody kills. That they didn’t achieve their goal is almost beside the point. Like one of Coscarelli’s strange pictures, The Redeemer has lots of interesting (if half-baked) ideas, as well as a generally surrealistic vibe. It’s perhaps giving the filmmakers too much credit to say The Redeemer feels like a transcript of a nightmare, since some plot components are straightforward, but I found myself paying fairly close attention simply because I was curious to see whether everything came together in the end. It didn’t, at least not in any way I could recognize, but the journey was somewhat interesting nonetheless.

          Broadly, the story has something to do with a supernatural figure punishing a bunch of people who were jerks in high school by luring them back to the school for a reunion and murdering them, one by one, in elaborate ways. There’s also some weird business about a supernatural child who emerges from a lake, as well as a recurring motif tracking how the moral scales are rebalanced with each successive death. Parts of The Redeemer resemble a standard-issue gorefest, as when a knife drops from a ceiling and stabs deep into a victim’s head. Other parts are symbolic, like the sequences with a killer who wears a skull mask and swings a scythe. And then there are moments that seem not to make any sense at all. (Watch out for a frozen corpse and maggots and other unpleasant images.) The acting is meh, not a big deal given the shallow characterizations, and the fact that Gochis never made another movie correctly indicates the limitations of his skillset. Still, in a cinematic landscape filled with pointlessly ugly horror movies, anything with a hint of serious intent deserves praise for treating the genre as something more than a vehicle for cheap thrills.

The Redeemer: Son of Satan!: FUNKY

Dear Dead Delilah (1972)

          Southern Gothic horror made on the cheap, Dear Dead Delilah is just the movie for people who think Tennessee Williams-style stories would benefit from the addition of sleazy grindhouse violence. Like a Williams story, the picture tracks the adventures of a dysfunctional clan, but unlike a Williams story, the source of familial conflict isn’t psychosexual tension but rather garden-variety greed. The central notion is that a dying matriarch taunts her craven relatives by challenging them to find $600,000 buried somewhere on a sprawling estate. Since whoever finds the money gets to keep it all, the fact that someone begins murdering family members seems perfectly normal to everyone involved, hence their refusal to contact authorities. (It’s a schlocky horror flick—just go with it.) The X factor is newly hired housekeeper Luddy (Patricia Carmichael), a disturbed woman recently released from the institution where she lived for many years after murdering her mother. Is Luddy the killer? Or just another victim caught in the matriarch’s cruel game? Whether you care about the answers to those questions probably depends on your tolerance for a piquant mixture of hammy overacting and ridiculous gore.

          The picture begins with a prologue in which Luddy kills her mom, then picks up with Luddy’s release. She happens upon folks headed to the home of Delilah (Agnes Moorhead), a bitchy invalid who hires Luddy as a caretaker. Delilah loves tormenting her wicked relatives, including drug-addicted Alonzo (Dennis Patrick) and money-hungry Morgan (Michael Ansara). Also in the mix is Delilah’s avuncular lawyer, Roy (Will Geer). Eventually, the blood and body parts start flying, with poor Luddy caught in the middle—or not.

          Given the campy storyline and ugly production values, the appeal here mostly stems from the acting. Moorehead, never averse to cartoonish flamboyance, devours the scenery, while Ansara and Patrick keep pace with florid performances. At times, Dear Dead Delilah gets so emphatic as to seem like a TV soap opera, complete with characters walking meaningfully to the foreground for long monologues or spewing lines like this one: “Don’t talk to me that way, you miserable little opportunist!” Like her character, Carmichael is the element that seems out of place; whereas the other players look normal, she wears such deep rings around her eyes that she looks as if she’s half-raccoon. While Dear Dead Delilah is quite dumb, it’s not impossible to zone out during the drab scenes and mindlessly groove on moments charged with hammy performances and Grand Guignol excess.

Dear Dead Delilah: FUNKY

Criminally Insane (1975) & Satan’s Black Wedding (1976)

          Had its creator been able to express irony onscreen, the trash-cinema oddity Criminally Insane might have become a whimsical shocker bridging, say, the grotesque gore of Tobe Hooper and the wicked wit of John Waters. After all, the story concerns a morbidly obese killer whose victims’ only crime is getting between the killer and food—call it the ultimate snack attack. Despite warnings that Ethel (Priscilla Alden) still isn’t right in the head, her mother brings Ethel home to a small apartment after a stretch inside a mental institution. Then Mom makes the mistake of locking a pantry, the better to curb Ethel’s bingeing. To get the key to the pantry, Ethel stabs her mother to death with a kitchen knife. And so it goes from there. By the end of the story, Ethel has a guest room filled with rotting corpses, and in between murders she gorges herself on whole cakes and other huge servings of food. Considering he spent most of his career making porn, writer-director Nick Millard (billed here as “Nick Phillps”) does a fairly competent job of storytelling, even though his camerawork is ghastly and the performances by his no-name cast are mostly terrible. That said, Alden is so completely bereft of affect that she’s believable as a mindless eating/killing machine. Criminally Insane is cheap and and dull and short (running just 61 minutes), but the perverse premise helps explain why the movie has attracted a small cult following. Director and star reunited for Criminally Insane 2 (1987), and a new team generated the remake Crazy Fat Ethel (2016).

          Alas, any promise Millard showed of becoming a quirky schlock auteur dissipated with his next project after Criminal Insane, the wretched Satan’s Black Wedding. An incoherent supernatural thriller featuring exactly one passable scene, Satan’s Black Wedding follows Mark (Greg Braddock) through a quest to determine whether his sister committed suicide, as authorities suggest. We, the audience, know that she was compelled to slash her own wrists by a creepy priest, Father Daken (Ray Myles), who is also a Satanist and a vampire. As the movie progresses, Daken and those in his sway commit various gruesome murders while Mark learns that his late sister and a friend were writing a book about Satanism. How all the pieces hang together is never especially clear, since Millard’s discombobulated storytelling resembles a sleep-deprived stream of consciousness, and the way composer Roger Stein randomly plays piano, as if his hands intermittently spasm near the keyboard, doesn’t help. Eventually things resolve to that one competent scene, a finale during which Daken explains his twisted master plan. Too little, too late.

          FYI, Millard’s last ’70s effort, .357 Magnum, is purported to be a crime thriller; although the movie couldn’t be tracked down for this survey, reviews suggest it’s incrementally more palatable than the director’s other ’70s fare.

Criminally Insane: LAME

Satan’s Black Wedding: SQUARE

1980 Week: Prom Night & Terror Train

          John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (1978) cast a long shadow over the 1980s, providing not only the template for the so-called “slasher movie” subgenre but also introducing a new shock-cinema star in Jamie Lee Curtis, the second-generation actress previously stuck in a middling TV career. Although Curtis soon transitioned to a successful run in big- and small-screen comedy, she reached her fright-flick peak during 1980, starring in two shockers and playing a supporting role in Carpenter’s The Fog. Produced in Canada and released in August 1980, Prom Night continues the Halloween trope of setting bloody stories on holidays and/or special occasions. Prom Night also borrows the basic structure of Halloween, with the survivor of a gruesome childhood incident wreaking havoc years later.

          Specifically, the movie begins with an effective prologue of children playing a nasty version of hide-and-seek inside an abandoned school. The game leads to an accidental death. Six years later, the children associated with the incident have become teenagers, and a vengeful killer stalks them on the night of their high-school prom. Prom Night has an attractive look and a fairly rational approach to characterization. Curtis is not only appealing and confident in her leading performance, but she’s also quite sensuous, foreshadowing her ascension to sex-symbol status a few years later. Unfortunately, Prom Night has significant problems. The filmmakers spend a good hour setting up the characters and story, then devolve into repetitive chase scenes and murders. Curtis’ character doesn’t really do anything, at least not until the final showdown, and top-billed actor Leslie Nielsen disappears from the movie about halfway through. One’s ability to enjoy Prom Night also depends on one’s tolerance for disco (Curtis has a big dance number) and for dubious twist endings. All in all, Prom Night is better than the usual slasher fare, but that’s not saying much.

          Released in October 1980 and also produced in Canada, Terror Train is in some ways a quintessential slasher film, simply because it hits so many familiar tropes. The shocking prologue. The confined setting. The endless string of attractive teens who die while attempting to have sex. The weird killer with a twisted agenda and a thing for outlandish costumes. The wizened mentor/protector character played by a familiar Hollywood veteran. And, naturally, the final-girl standoff. It’s all quite dull, except perhaps for the digressive scenes featuring real-life stage magician David Copperfield as an illusionist. The setup goes something like this. One night on a college campus, pranksters led by arrogant med student Doc (Hart Bochner) trick a dweeb named Kenny (Derek McKinnon) into believing he’s about to get lucky with hot coed Alana (Curtis). Instead, Kenny ends up in bed with a corpse. He freaks out so badly that he lands in an asylum.

          Years later, Doc, Alana, and their classmates celebrate their final year in school by hiring a train for a nighttime excursion through snowy wilderness. Carne (Ben Johnson) is their friendly conductor. One by one, partygoers are killed in horrific ways, so Alana realizes that Kenny must have escaped to seek revenge. Set entirely at night, Terror Train has more atmosphere than logic, but the acting is adequate and the finale is exciting. There’s also quite a lot of eye candy. (Watch for future Prince protégé Vanity as a scantily clad coed.) Make no mistake, Terror Train is often grotesque, repetitive, and stupid—but at least it has a fair amount of action.

Prom Night: FUNKY

Terror Train: FUNKY

Beast of Blood (1970)

After unleashing gory sci-fi mayhem in The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), director Eddie Romero and star Josh Ashley reteamed for this sequel, which is also known as Return to the Horrors of Blood Island, among many other titles. The picture begins with Dr. Bill Foster (Ashley) heading back to civilization after his adventures in the first picture. Alas, one of evil Dr. Lorca’s creatures is on the same boat trip, leading to a slaughter and an explosion. Bill survives and resolves to visit Dr. Lorca’s chamber-of-horrors island once more. Tagging along is leggy reporter Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall). The purpose of the return visit is somewhat murky, though it presumably has to do with Bill proving he didn’t invent the story of what happened to him. In any event, the outcome is predictable. Upon returning to the island, Bill receives a chilly welcome from native inhabitants who don’t want anything to do with Dr. Lorca and his grotesque experiments. Bill’s arrival prompts attacks by mercenaries and monsters, leaving many natives dead. Yet Bill presses on, again for reasons that are never particularly clear, although he finds time to have sex with Myra and to rebuff the advances of a busty native guide. The real weirdness happens in Dr. Lorca’s lab, where he keeps a man’s body and head alive separately. The head, resting in a jar and connected to wires but made up to resemble a vampire that’s been badly burned, taunts Dr. Lorca. Suffice to say that’s more interesting to watch than the sequence of Bill leading an expedition into a haunted mansion, where Myra falls through a trapdoor into a small chamber occupied by an irritable cobra. Boring and stupid, except for a few fleeting moments when it’s insane and stupid, Beast of Blood is shoddy even by the low standards of the many Filipino shockers that Ashley and Romero made together.

Beast of Blood: LAME

The Corpse Grinders (1971)

Covering satirical terrain so familiar as to be trite, The Corpse Grinders compounds its lack of originality with rotten acting, direction, production values, writing, and pretty much everything else. There’s a reason Ted V. Mikels shows up on lists of the worst directors ever, because while it’s true his pictures are odd, he occupies a queasy nether region between eccentricity and incompetence. His characters and themes are peculiar, but not genuinely perverse, and his filmmaking is generically poor. Anyway, the central joke in The Corpse Grinders, which aspires to be a comedy/horror hybrid, involves the transformation of dead bodies into cat food. Creepy grave robber Caleb (Warren Bell) steals cadavers and sells them to the proprietor of a pet-food company, who then runs the bodies through a meat grinder and packages the resulting bloody pulp. Consuming the meat drives cats mad, so they attack their owners. Although it’s not impossible to imagine some version of this premise being wickedly entertaining, getting there would require the comedic skill of, say, John Waters—or at least Roger Corman, whose contributions to the repurposed-corpse genre include the classic A Bucket of Blood (1959). Suffice to say Mikels is not on the level of those luminaries. To his credit, The Corpse Grinders has some kicky flourishes. Caleb’s demented wife spoon-feeds soup to a doll, the proprietor uses ASL to communicate with his one-legged cleaning lady, and so on. Yet these flourishes are not enough to compensate for this very dull picture’s shortcomings, especially since the tinny score sounds as if it was lifted from some old-timey shocker. Inexplicably, Mikels returned to the material by making The Corpse Grinders 2 in 2000 and The Corpse Grinders 3 in 2012. One assumes that Mikels’ death in 2016 ended the cycle.

The Corpse Grinders: LAME

Blood Freak (1972)

          This one’s a turkey. No, not in the sense of being an absolute cinematic failure, although that’s true, as well—the monster described in the title is a turkey, or more specifically, a dude wearing a giant turkey mask over his face. Welcome to the strange world of Blood Freak, an atrociously made horror flick with heavy elements of Christianity and reefer. If you think those things don’t belong in the same movie, much less a creature feature, then you’ve identified what makes Blood Freak unique. Cowritten and codirected with spectacular incompetence by Brad F. Grinter, who also appears onscreen at periodic intervals to provide bizarre narration, Blood Freak is a whole lot of things at once. In some scenes, it’s anti-religion and pro-weed, and in other scenes it’s the opposite. Similarly, the movie’s attitude toward casual sex changes like the colors of a mood ring, because the protagonist is just as likely to call a loose woman a tramp as he is to sleep with her. And we haven’t even gotten to the whole were-turkey business or the grimy scenes of the monster slashing women’s throats so he can drink their marijuana-laced blood.

          The movie begins clumsily, with Grinter’s voiceover accompanying shakily filmed scenes of a motorcyclist approaching a woman whose car crapped out on a Florida highway. As Grinter remarks: “A pretty girl on the side of the road—who could resist? Certainly not Herschell!” That would be our hero, Herschell, played by Steve Hawkes, who shares writing and directing chores with Grinter. A big dude with an Elvis pompadour, he seems to incarnate a different character in every scene, because the script is so bad the filmmakers never decide whether Herschell is a rebel, a swinger, a zealot, or whatever. In any event, meeting the girl on the road leads Herschell to a collective of pot-smoking partiers, and he scolds his new acquaintances for their wanton ways. Yet soon afterward, he becomes a pot addict—at which point the filmmakers confuse the symptoms of heroin addiction with the habits of heavy pot smokers. Herschell makes bad decisions and sacrifices his morality because he’s just gotta have that demon weed. Among his drug-induced choices is taking a job for scientists at a turkey farm, who task him with consuming turkey meat they’ve injected with chemicals. Hence his transformation into a were-turkey who prowls the Floridian night, draining fellow addicts of their pot-infused plasma. All of this leads to a big story twist about three-quarters of the way through the running time, but the twist renders the story even more nonsensical.

          It’s hard to identify the weirdest aspect of this flick, though a strong contender is the way Grinter and Hawkes seem to perceive their bloody, low-rent saga as an important social message about the evils of—something. Another contender is the vignette of a chain-smoking Grinter reciting narration, which he appears to be reading for the first time, until he succumbs to an epic coughing fit. Together with the many out-of-focus shots in the picture, the inclusion of this awkward moment suggests Grinter and Hawkes had so little money (or aptitude) that they included every frame they shot. FYI, Blood Freak received an X-rating during its original release, presumably because the kill scenes are so nasty—murder most fowl, if you will.

Blood Freak: FREAKY

Eaten Alive (1976)

          The best horror filmmakers realize there’s a lot more to disturbing audiences than gore—fictional worlds populated by weird characters often make viewers more uncomfortable than onscreen bloodshed. Consider a pair of early Tobe Hooper movies. His breakout hit, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), imagines a remote pocket of the Lone Star State where insane cannibals prey upon innocent visitors. His follow-up, Eaten Alive, presents a rural hotel where the proprietor is a psychopath who kidnaps people, slaughters them with scythes and other instruments, and feeds their bodies to the gigantic alligator he keeps in a pond behind the hotel. Whereas many horror pictures frighten viewers by inserting a chaos agent into the normal world, these Hooper films drag normal people into chaos.
          That said, there’s a massive difference between these two pictures. Shot on location and featuring a no-name cast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an immersive nightmare. Shot on soundstages and featuring several Hollywood actors, Eaten Alive is fake on every level, and therefore much less effective. Other problems include a slow-moving script, threadbare characters, and the vulgar intrusion of gratuitous nudity. Nonetheless, there’s a certain compelling derangement to Eaten Alive. After all, the first scene features a pre-Freddy Kreuger Robert Englund as a redneck who introduces himself to a prostitute by saying, “Name’s Buck—I’m rarin’ to fuck.” Later, the movie includes a woman stripped to her lingerie and bound and gagged for days; a young girl trapped in the crawlspace beneath the hotel, with the psychopath coming at her from one direction and the alligator coming at her from the other; and various persons impaled, stabbed, and swallowed in grisly death scenes.
          Nihilism hovers over this flick like a dark cloud.

          Yet it’s the bizarre throwaway scenes that make Eaten Alive unsettling, more so than the ho-hum creature-feature moments. In one bit, a weirdo played by William Finley, known for his work with Brian De Palma, engages in a masochistic conversation with his wife. (“Why don’t you just take that cigarette and grind it out in my eye?”) In another scene, the hotel proprietor tries on various pairs of glasses while reading porno mags and ignoring the pet monkey that’s dying in a nearby cage. The strangeness extends to the actual filmmaking. Hooper often bathes his sets in garish red light, so characters seem as if they’re in hell, and the editing lingers on lurid images—the dying monkey, a nubile young woman stripping—so the whole movie has the air of deranged voyeurism.

          Neville Brand’s leading performance is obvious and silly, but his character is so grotesque that Brand’s work gains a sort of unpleasant power, and onetime Addams Family star Carolyn Jones adds a peculiar quality with her small role as an alternately courtly and cross madam who wears men’s clothes. The performances are hardly the point, though. As a straight-through narrative, Eaten Alive—which was inspired by the crimes of a real-life killer—is a dud, too campy and episodic to maintain real suspense. As a journey into an otherworldly headspace, it’s fairly effective.

Eaten Alive: FREAKY