I really like bad movies. Not the boring bad movies that come out all the time, but the really, really bad ones. The ones that make you wonder about the people behind their creation, the ones that get you to yell things like, "What the hell?!?" while watching them. Sometimes they take me back to a little unfinished project in the memory banks that I had a hand in, a horror film called Crawler about a giant worm eating people. We certainly had a lot of fun working on it, but we knew we were shooting for bad.
This weekend I took some time to watch a movie that dredged up those fond memories, a total piece of junk called Blood and Lace. Oh, Sweet Lard, what a movie! This one, which came out in 1971, had me yelling and laughing more than I have during a movie in a while. Heads up to the five or so people who might watch this in the next hundred years: SPOILERS are a-comin'.
The movie starts with what can only be called a Hammer Cam sequence, where a hammer that looks like it's from a kid's playset seems to be fastened directly to the camera as it moves around. (Hammertime joke is required, no way out of it.) I would guess the idea was to make the viewer think it was in the hand of the killer and we've got this POV shot to show what they are seeing, but if that were the case the killer would be holding that hammer up to their face and jutting it out from their cheek. The thing never budges, so there is little to make you think it's in a hand, it's stuck to the camera, which doubly defeats the purpose of the shot. Then the killing starts, but instead of showing the hammer being wielded by a human being, we are again watching some mechanical pivot contraption swinging it in a wide arc, intercut with images of the victims with that '70's paint-like blood on their faces as the hammer rests gently against them. No, it's not hitting them, that's pretty obvious. The now cam-hammer may be an attempt to keep us from guessing who's wielding it, but again it just takes you far from the idea that it's a human at all. Oh, and the sounds from the victims make it seem more like they are enjoying a nice lunch than being killed. Fucking gold, I tell you.
What comes next really takes it to another level, a dubbed scene where the main character, the daughter of the deceased, is voiced by the woman who most know as Rocky the Flying Squirrel from Bullwinkle. I am serious. I immediately recognized it, being such a cartoon loving geek, and could not believe what I was hearing. I was suddenly in love with this insanity. However, love fades, in this case because that was the only scene dubbed in this fashion. From then on the actress had the nerve to revert to her real voice.
This 18 year old character is then told that she must remain a ward of the state until she is 21 so she tries to run away. She is chased by a creep in a car, very poorly, who turns out to be Vic Tayback, a local and very greasy detective. If you liked him in the TV show Alice, well, I don't know what to say. He totally sucks here. The scene where he talks to her in the car while taking her back to the hospital seems like a rehearsal full of broken dialog and throwaway "ah well, just a rehearsal" moments. And to add to what is already a gross and creepy movie, helped by that heavy dose of typical grime common to movies from the 1970s, dude actually starts showing a romantic interest in the poor "girl".
She is then sent off to some home full of kids, where, before she arrives, we see one of the residents attempt to flee, pursued by Len Lesser, that uncle guy from Seinfeld, who does what anyone would do when chasing down a runaway teen and grabs a meat clever on his way out the door. At this point I should mention that this particular screening was brought to me by the Bosley Hair Club, which is so damn appropriate when you look at these actors. He manages to chop off a hand of the escapee before the clever boy crawls under a bush and dies, evading capture.
Well, from there you get dead kids kept in a freezer and the info that the local doctor is running some scam feeding kids into this nightmare, which is run by poor Gloria Grahame. Slumming is too kind a word to use here. At one point we see a shot of her shadow on the wall talking to someone we don't see who doesn't respond and you have to know what's coming. When she later says that her dead husband always advised her on how to run the home the movie simply catapults the later reveal right over the wall of Surprise Stadium. Oh, she's kept his body around? Yeah, we knew that movie. You blew it.
Shit, what else...creepy and questionable romantic urges running up and down the age scale from 16 to 21..oh, and the sudden introduction of some flanneled apparent burn victim running around the grounds that really keeps you guessing because why the hell is that even necessary, what with multiple killers already running around and not burned?
Well guess what? No? Yeah, no surprise, it's Vic Tayback being really clever detective-wise, running around pretending to be a killer who is after our heroine just to make her bolt and see what happens next. You wouldn't have guessed except that the bad rubber mask he wears, which he shrugs off as stage makeup, looks really Taybacky.
But we're not done yet. Even though anyone would know from the start that the heroine is the one who softly bludgeoned her mother with a toy hammer in a robotic fashion, being chased by what is supposed to be the possible murderer makes her confess. Vic then removes the mask and shows us all what an amazing cop he really is.
Then we go straight to hell as Vic offers to keep her guilt covered up if....ugh...she marries him! Just typing it..yeah, gross. Bad enough yet? One more: Vic lets slip a bit of info that reveals...though he doesn't know it...that he's the girl's father! She cackles an insane laugh and so do the filmmakers, as we are dragged with them into the most disgusting cesspool anyone could have ever imagined. Those fuckers! The end.
Oh, folks, if the people who had a hand in creating this magical medium could only have seen this, they'd have shitcanned the whole idea and pledged themselves to Jeebus for the rest of their lives. It's just that disgusting.
Seven and a half thumbs up! Don't ask where.
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