NOTE: This is, for lack of a better word, "fancier" than most of my reviews. I'm out of college in less than a year and I'm trying to get my foot in the door for potentially writing for some kind of horror zine (e.g. Fangoria, Rue Morgue, etc.). I'm taking a couple of my reviews here and rewriting them to send out to some people. This is the first review I've written to send out. If anyone would care to comment on the review itself and not just the movie itself, I'd very much appreciate it.





What do you get when you take the gleeful gore-play of The Wizard of Gore, the absurdity of Pink Flamingoes, and the remorseless sadism of Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, toss them all in a blender, and hit puree? A little concoction of camp and carnage as Blood Sucking Freaks (1976), a cult classic beloved by many and hated by plenty. Over the years, the flick has been no stranger to flack, having been banned, boycotted, and stamped as one of the worst films of all time. Nevertheless, as is often the case with horror/exploitation films, it has secured a nice warm spot in the hearts of horror fans who have praised it for its over-the-top campiness, macabre sense of humor, and shameless celebration of all that is tasteless.

Blood Sucking Freaks harkens back to the origin of all theatrical carnage: the Grand Guignol. Between late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, the Grand Guignol theater in Paris specialized in seemingly real but nevertheless simulated torture and execution pushed to the very brink of gratuitousness. Such debauchery also happens to be Master Sardu’s line of work in Blood Sucking Freaks. Unfortunately, the stars of his Theater of the Macabre are all unwilling participants in what is a completely genuine torture show; they are all kidnapped by Sardu’s assistant, Ralphus, locked up, and subjected to sadistic, often humiliating torture before their ultimately fatal fifteen minutes of fame on stage before a oblivious audience.

With Eli Roth and Rob Zombie inspiring younger generations of horror fans to explore the exploitation days of yore, it is no secret to anyone in the horror community at this point that women take the brunt of abuse in these films. I’m not here to play surrogate for the IMDB forum squawker laying a guilt trip on anyone who enjoys this stuff (I wouldn’t be writing a review for Blood Sucking Freaks if I didn’t love these films to death) but facts are facts: pick a random film off the Video Nasties list and chances are most of the victims will be missing a Y chromosome.

But never have I seen so much female abuse in an exploitation film as Blood Sucking Freaks and for someone who was born after most of the release dates without access to a big brother’s horror collection, I’d like to think I’ve seen a lot of exploitation films. Among countless forms of torture that appear throughout the film, a handful of women in this film are literally reduced to the level of furniture. Barely fifteen minutes into the film, you’ve got a woman taking the place of a dinner table and another woman used as a sitting stool who’s mouth Sardu comments would “make an interesting urinal.” Before the credits role, you even get a human dartboard, complete with red and blue rings painted on her posterior.

I have to admit, I was a little shocked at first. The amount of naked people in Blood Sucking Freaks so early on brought back memories of what is perhaps the film’s tonal opposite, Salo: 120 Days of Sodom (anyone who’s seen this one can probably guess these memories aren’t exactly fuzzy). Then came the infamous mad doctor scene. I would say this freak looks like he’s had a little too much nose candy but considering Sardu keeps him locked up most of the time, I’ll settle for just plain old bonkers. Anyway, by the end of this scene, the loony doc’s singing like an Italian barber while he’s shaving a girl’s scalp. The next thing you know, he’s drilling a hole in the top of her skull. Then what does he decide to do? Stick in a straw and turn her head into a cranial slushee.

This scene sets up the tone of the film perfectly because in the end, its bloodshed is always outmatched by its goofiness and, of course, the occasional bad pun. By the time Sardu’s pumping currents of high voltage electricity into a woman through a pair of nipple clamps hanging off her chest, it’s obvious Blood Sucking Freaks is going to be considerably darker than Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste or Dead Alive but all three seem to share the same splatstick sensibilities and sheer delight in excess. Blood Sucking Freaks seems to put mean-spiritedness and general political incorrectness on a higher pedestal than the gross-out factor of Jackson’s or H.G. Lewis’s films but as the scenarios grow increasingly outlandish, it becomes all too apparent that it’s not meant to be taken seriously. That’s when the fun begins and with an ending that features what is without a doubt the most unappetizing “meat” sandwich in the history of cinema, it’s not an experience you’re likely to forget.