Blood Sucking Freaks (1976)

Last night I went on Tubi looking for a grindhouse movie, and damned if I didn't find one in Blood Sucking Freaks. This 1976 film fully delivers as exploitation horror, depicting various means of torture including thumbscrews, guillotines, and electrocutions. And, delivering as promised on its title, the film features an especially memorable scene involving a mad physician drilling into a woman's skull and gleefully sucking out the blood and cerebrospinal fluid with a straw. He gets his comeuppance, though, as the good doctor is torn apart after being thrown into a cell full of long-captive nude women who have turned feral. He's an outlier, as the victims in this film are almost entirely women in the nude, and so the misogyny is pervasive and undeniable. 

The violent vignettes are tied together by a very loose plot in which a demented dramatist named "Sardu" attempts to gain exposure for his Grand Guignol-style act. To this end, he eventually kidnaps a famous ballerina affiliated with the Kennedy Center (the one now chaired by President Donald Trump) and brainwashes her with his sadomasochism gospel. As he subjects her to assorted forms of psychological torture, his assistant Ralphus—a little person with an impressively tall afro—dances and claps with a leering grin. If it's not already obvious, Blood Sucking Freaks is a wholly rebarbative experience. That said, the film maintains a goofball tone all throughout, which by turns helps mitigate the mean-spiritedness (a bit) but also amplifies the carnivalesque madness. 

Yet Blood Sucking Freaks also contains some genuine flashes of artistry. The film culminates in the ballerina giving a public performance in which she elegantly kicks a bound critic to death, which makes for a rather sublime and unexpected viewing experience. Where else but in a 1970s grindhouse movie are you going to see a ballerina leaving a theater critic in a bloody mess? 

When I heard that name "Ralphus" given to Sardu's assistant, I must confess that I thought of World Championship Wrestling, where a schlubby bald man of that same name served as the personal security guard of future WWE legend Chris Jericho back in the 1990s. In the obligatory post-movie Googling, I learned that Jericho, now running out the clock on his career in AEW, is a huge fan of Blood Sucking Freaks. In fact, Jericho considers Blood Sucking Freaks one of his favorite movies, and he's even written a song about it. I find this to be a very telling revelation. It's one thing to appreciate a film like Blood Sucking Freaks as a product of a unique cinematic ecosystem at a particular time, but it's quite another to say it's one of your favorite movies. I mean, the movie involves nearly constant sadomasochistic violence against captive nude women, the dad jokes flying as liberally as limbs. I would ask Jericho, Just how much has this film shaped your sensibilities as a person and a performer? Perhaps the answer would explain some of the questionable gimmicks, storylines, and projects Jericho has attempted in the long sunset of his career.

Chris Jericho, singing for his band Fozzy
(Credit: Lisa, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

As a further aside, I'll note that when I heard one particular swell in the musical score as the mad physician is introduced, I was reminded of hip hop artist Necro, whose track "Evil Shit" uses a portion of the organ music from Blood Sucking Freaks to great effect. Having revealed my enthusiasm for exploitation movies, professional wrestling, and Necro's raps in the course of this brief article, the reader may now be posing serious questions about my aesthetic sensibilities.

Execrable or not, I have no choice but to appreciate Blood Sucking Freaks, as it is an archetypal grindhouse movie. In fact, were I compelled to identify a single movie as representative of exploitation horror as a whole, I might pick Blood Sucking Freaks. With just one screening, it has forced itself into the mix with movies like I Drink Your Blood and Maniac that could also win the ignominious distinction of quintessential grindhouse horror flick. But with that, let me be clear: I'm not saying Blood Sucking Freaks is one of my favorite movies, or even good. Unlike those other aforementioned grindhouse classics, I'm never going to watch this turd again.

Blue Money (1971)

Blue Money tells the story of a man named Jim who directs adult-oriented movies in early-70s California, a time and place where it is still illegal to make pornography. As such, Jim is perpetually looking over his shoulder while filming, as the threat of police raids is omnipresent. The mother of his child urges him to get out of the business, as she sees the pornographic art form as, rather poignantly, "dead space." Meanwhile, Jim's working on restoring an old houseboat in hopes of getting away to the sea in his life after porn. Oh, and he's also pursuing an extramarital affair with a European woman who's recently made her debut in his movies. Apparently, she's attracted to his quasi-European, French-Canadian sensibilities (Jim is French-Canadian, for whatever reason). 

The movie is terrible, as can be expected of a Crown International release. Alain Patrick, the actor playing Jim, delivers his lines in a muttered, off-hand fashion often resembling that of Tommy Wiseau in The Room. Although Patrick's French-Canadian background makes these difficulties with English forgivable, some of the lines are ludicrously misspoken, e.g. his demand that his crew "pipe it down." You puzzle over the fact that Blue Money's director didn't demand a retake to make "pipe down" happen, until you find out that Patrick was also the director (again, like Wiseau). It's surprising that producer Robert Chinn didn't show a little more investment in getting Blue Money into a more polished form, especially since the film is effectively telling Chinn's life-story. Chinn is perhaps best known as friend and frequent director of choice for pornographic legend John Holmes. No doubt, Chinn and Holmes dealt with the ever-looming threat of police raids as they made their films. But only fragments of that angst and desperation show through in Blue Money.

The film is still interesting, however, as a cinematic ethnography of early-70s sexuality. In this era, pornography existed on a grey market, and audiences could still be impressed by relatively innocent depictions of sexuality on camera. A softcore flick such as Blue Money no doubt looked titillating to much of its 1971 audience, who (unless they'd been hippies), were coming out of a comparably buttoned-down 60s, and were still a year shy of 1972's Deep Throat, which made hardcore pornography mainstream and "theatrical," in some sense. Porn lurked in the shadows, and for that reason even softcore depictions of its hidden culture and ostensibly liberated ethos would have enthralled audiences. And although a hardcore version of Blue Money does exist, even the Crown International version's softcore sequences would have been compelling to the 1971 crowd. I think, for instance, of the scene where Jim pulls his European paramour into a motel room shower fully clothed, gradually taking off her garments to reveal some brief nudity. This doubtlessly looked like libertine behavior to half the people in the audience for this film. You can almost hear the viewers' thought process: imagine it—pulling a fully-clothed girl into a shower. Wild! Perhaps we might liken early 70s cinematic sexuality to the public's first encounter with video games in the later 70s and early 80s. At first, it must have been rapturous to move around blocks on TV screens with the turn of a dial. In that regard, a film like Blue Money is sexual Pong. Bare breasts in a shower were likely enough to make this poorly scripted, shoddily directed film a memorable viewing experience.

But the directorial effort is not entirely awful. Later in the film, Jim is forced to remove his work-in-progress boat from the location near the marina where he's been shoring it up. At this point, Patrick includes a shot of a mother cat determinedly carrying a kitten by the scruff of its neck to the frames on which the boat rested. Apparently, the mother cat had nested her newborn litter in or around the boat, presumably not in a diegetic mode. I guess the incidental image impacted Patrick enough that he felt he had to include it in the final cut. And I suppose the image does parallel that of his significant other perpetually carrying their child in the domestic scenes. But the image struck me as irreducibly agonizing. I hate to be the bearer of darkness, but litters rarely survive in their entirety, and that's the case even when they live in relatively secure environs like farms or loving households. Being out in the no-man's-land of the marina, those kittens would have had even less of a chance, to say nothing of the mother. And those that do survive these kind of environs probably aren't going to amount to much more than alley cats, fighting for every scrap they ever get in their brief and tumultuous lives. And yet nature and instinct dictate that this mother has to parent with determination, no matter the odds against her and the litter. We hear that a hitter in baseball is an all-star if he fails seven out of ten times, but in all honesty, a mother cat is a hall-of-famer if she manages to keep 20% of her litter alive for more than a few months. We know that hers is a losing battle and a lost cause and all those other stock phrases, but still the mother feline goes full bore. (I wish I could take such an approach with my writing.) In that sense, the mother cat is also working in a "dead space." As with the pornographer and porn performers, little will come of the mother cat's efforts. She produces things that last a few months and then are gone and forgotten. It all serves a brief issuance of sperm and then is done. Though it leaves me crestfallen, I appreciate that Patrick took the time to film that cat scurrying with her young. With that second or two of footage, he acknowledged the perpetually unacknowledged, remembering what's inevitably forgotten. This is the only lasting image in Blue Money.

Forget the bare breasts and the sex, softcore or hard—it's the picture of the mother cat that endures in its capacity to compel. Watch Blue Money, then, if only to see these two or three seconds that provide a thematic fulcrum for an otherwise banal and ham-fisted picture. That single image saves this film from becoming The Room.

2000 Maniacs! (1964)

I just watched 2000 Maniacs! and by god is that a prescient film. It's redneck horror at its most carnivalesque.

Herschell Gordon Lewis looks eminently prophetic as his 1964 film sets a template for a subgenre of horror that would thrive in the 1970s. Texas Chainsaw Massacre would give us the male remnants of a family of cannibalistic rednecks living just off the main road. The Hills Have Eyes would give us an extended family and/or clan of inbred hicks cannibalizing wayward travellers. Both of these films are better made and more artistically sophisticated than 2000 Maniacs!. But Lewis's film is more demented and visceral: after all, it gives us not a family or a clan but rather a whole town of Southerners, all 2000 of whom are berserk and bloodthirsty and cannibalistic, at least when dealing with Northerners.

And so the film presents us with the multifarious maimings of our Yankee protagonists, making way for a tide of that orangey blood that was a hallmark of Lewis's films. Oh, sure, there's dismemberment and cannibalism, but for me, the piece-de-resistance comes when the locals cajole a Yankee man into a barrel under the pretext that they’re going to roll him down a hill in good fun. This is a risky enough proposition to begin with, but then the yokels gleefully proceed to drive nails through the barrel. By the time the Yankee gets to the bottom of the hill, he's no more than a shredded, red-orange rag. The rednecks rejoice. They have collaborated successfully on a slaughter.

And in these carnographic, set-piece scenes, after the violence has been wrought, Lewis provides us time and again with panning closeups of the faces of the mongrel herd. The vibe is reminiscent of a story that appeared in EC’s Vault of Horror but a decade before, specifically issue 34 from 1953. In this yarn, the supervisor of a psychiatric institution is placed in a casket by inmates. Through a square window in the very top of the casket, all the unhinged inmates peer in, prodding and poking and gaping at their captive. And in 2000 Maniacs!, we get comparable images of the deranged visages, with their gap-toothed smirks and their moon-eyed leering.

The psychiatric holding-tank, then, is the South itself, and every single son and daughter of the soil can be counted as one of the inmates. They betray an unabashed giddiness as they mutilate. They exude joie-de-vivre while they deprive their Northern countrymen and women of their lives. This is inestimably jarring.

So while Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes are better films, hands down, the former more artistic and the latter far more tightly plotted, 2000 Maniacs! is more horrifying. To stare into that joyous, murderous, and cannibalistic Southern horde is to stare into the faces of our present-day countrypersons. It is to stare into the faces of the Trump supporters and, more recently, the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. Sorry Leatherface, but real-life horror doesn’t wear a mask.

And while the film sort of cops out at the end by suggesting (spoiler alert) hallucinatory or supernatural causes for the town with the eponymous population of 2000 sadistic rednecks, the implication is very real. There are people like this in our country, not just thousands of them but millions of them. They are the abscess on America that will never die. Worse yet, they are a cancer that might just kill you—that might just eat you alive.