Blood and Lace (1971)

In a font that you can almost read....almost...

Just a few weeks ago I sat mesmerized in my car at the Riverside Drive-In as "Blood and Lace" unspooled across the giant screen, and as each scene happened it got progressively more insane. I went into "Blood and Lace" entirely unaware of what it was about, so I was a blank slate.  "Blood and Lace" wrote all over me in crazy, schizophrenic lettering that made no goddamn sense.  If you want to experience that for yourself, stop reading this right now and go watch the movie. Meanwhile, I've got to vent.

Released in 1971 by American International, "Blood and Lace" features a wacky cast of actors you've most likely seen in lots of other things, the most recognizable being Gloria Grahame (her most famous role being that of Violet Bick in "It's A Wonderful Life"). Vic Tayback is here too, several years from becoming Mel Sharples in 1974. The lead is Melody Patterson, who had been seen on television in the series "F Troop". Out of nowhere is also a young Dennis Christopher ("Breaking Away", "Fade to Black", and a zillion other things), and there are several other character actors who worked a lot on TV.

"Blood and Lace" takes us into a cheap, artificial world reminiscent of a Harry Novak picture, populated by characters you think you understand until you realize that all of them are out of their friggin minds, especially the ones you initially think are the most normal. It opens with a murder sequence that is not entirely unlike the opening of John Carpenter's "Halloween", an extended point-of-view shot of a prowler lurking around a dark house, entering a door, removing a hammer out of a drawer, and then wandering through the house to the bedroom of a sleeping couple. The killer hammers the woman in the face until she's dead, and hits the man a few times, too. Before the man is finished off, the killer sets the room on fire, and we see the bludgeoned man roll out of bed and try to escape.

"A girl fight in our underwear? No problem!"

The murdered woman was Edna Masters, a small town prostitute, and the man was her latest customer. Edna's teenage daughter Ellie (Melody Patterson) is placed in the care of a social worker named Mr. Mullins, who has her temporarily placed in a hospital--a nurse runs in after Ellie wakes up screaming from a nightmare and seems more annoyed than concerned, turning angrily to Mullins and saying "You've got to get this girl OUT of here." This was really my first indicator that this movie is not playing with a full deck--a nurse is angry at a teenage girl whose mother was just viciously murdered with a hammer to the head?  Ellie tells Mullins she wants to be on her own and seek out the father she never knew, but all she really knows about her father is that he was the first man who ever made love to her mother. Mullins tells her that since her father is unknown, legally she's an orphan and must be treated as such.After she tries to run away, Mullins reports her to the sheriff, Calvin Carruthers (Vic Tayback), and Carruthers chases her down and returns her to the hospital. Carruthers knows who she is, and his interest in her is already apparent--Ellie is taken aback when Calvin tells her he recognizes her from when she was a child and attended the theater he worked in. He is now the sheriff, and intends to keep an eye on Ellie while handling the investigation of the death of Ellie's mother. Ellie claims she saw a man run out of her mother's bedroom the night of the murder, but she claims she didn't see the hammer in real life, only in her dreams. Calvin warns her that the man who killed her mother might be after her.

But Calvin's intentions for Ellie are not entirely innocent. He meets Mullins for a drink in a bar to discuss Ellie, and Mullins tells him he intends to take Ellie to a private home for children run by a woman named Mrs. Deere. Calvin admits to Mullins that he is interested in Ellie as a potential wife because he considers her good "breeding stock", despite the fact that he is much older than she is.

"Have you gone crazy? Walk in the grass in my bare feet? Why it's ten miles up to Mount Bedford!"

"These young men and women are supposed to be children?"

Once Ellie gets to the Deere Youth Home is when things really go off the deep end. Mrs. Deere is a villain of the lowest caliber, an icy witch queen who hates children more than Miss Hannigan did--and does all the things Miss Hannigan probably did in scenes that were cut from "Annie" for being too batshit crazy. Mrs. Deere's world is seemingly on the brink of falling apart--her husband has been dead for a year, leaving her to run the orphanage with only the help of her skeezy handyman Tom Krege (Len Lesser). Oh, and it doesn't help Mrs. Deere that she is certifiably crazy. She subjects the children to Draconian rules, and when the rules are broken she tortures and abuses them. If they try to run away, she and Krege hunt them down and kill them, but not wanting to lose the income they bring, their bodies are kept in a large walk-in freezer in the basement. Mrs. Deere is hoping she can keep convincing Mullins that the kids are still alive and just "sick" when he visits, and she distracts him with sexual favors. But Krege suddenly blackmails her for more money, and Ellie arrives and starts snooping around to uncover her secrets, and Calvin shows up at the orphanage threatening to conduct a police search of the entire premises. In one of the movie's strangest scenes, she confides to her dead husband about how how her crazy world is imploding--of course she keeps his dead body in the freezer along with the others. Mrs. Deere reveals to Ellie (who still doesn't see the big picture) that modern medicine can work wonders with transplants these days, and that one day people who have died will be restored, so this is her grand plan. There's a great scene where she puts one of the dead frozen kids into an infirmary bed and talks to her while she's doing it: "Lucky I got you to the freezer in time, you could have bled to death!"

The fact that these crazy events occur at all is part of the strange fascination of the movie, and all movies like it. The orphanage is appropriately isolated, to remove the more obvious question of "Why don't the kids just run away?", but an even better question is "Why don't they fight back?" None of the "kids" in the orphanage seem to be under the age of 15, and most of them actually look like they're in their mid to late 20s. The movie itself suggests that the "kids" are wards of the state until they're 21, as if they're prisoners in the orphanage, but they're way too old to be as helpless as the movie portrays them. The psychotic personality of the movie is never more apparent than in one of my favorite sequences: Mrs. Deere cruelly torments a girl she's been keeping locked in the attic as punishment for an attempted escape. As the girl languishes from thirst and begs for water, Mrs. Deere drinks a glass right in front of her and tells her how good it is. Then the scene immediately cuts to Ellie having an idyllic, sunlit walk through a field with the resident stud of the orphanage, while romantic music swells on the soundtrack.

Gloria Grahame and Len Lesser are both great as Deere and Krege. They're two capable actors playing these bizarre roles, and they really play well off one another. Grahame has several scenes where she talks in a babytalk voice to the kids while she's actually tormenting them, and there's a great moment when she reveals to Ellie how jealous she is of anybody who is youthful and beautiful. Obviously her appearance in this kind of film was in the tradition of older movie queens who found work in horror films late in their careers, like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Veronica Lake, Shelly Winters, and most of all Geraldine Page, whose performance in "What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?" seems to be the one from which Grahame drew the most inspiration.  Her final scene is also one of the ones you'll take away from "Blood and Lace" even if you hate it: after seeming to have all her problems solved when Krege winds up mortally wounded and Ellie takes off running, Mrs. Deere drags Krege's body into the freezer where she tells the dying man "We just have to chill your blood to stop the bleeding." But before she can leave the freezer, the thirsty girl appears in the doorway with revenge in her eyes, and slams the door shut on her, locking her inside. Just as the door closes, Gloria Grahame does this crazy thing where she grimaces in horror, screams like a daffy old bird, and jumps up and down. This was surely more acting range than was required from her when she played Bedford Falls' town hussy, Violet Bick.

The cheap atmosphere in "Blood and Lace" has a lot to do with the music and audio mix, too. Although released in 1971, the soundtrack uses hokey old-fashioned library music similar to "Night of the Living Dead" to an alarming degree. Another thing that I can't go without mentioning is the fact that Ellie's first scene, where she wakes up screaming in the hospital, is entirely and awkwardly dubbed, and Ellie's voice is dubbed by none other than famed voice actress June Foray--yes, the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel. That voice comes out of Ellie her first scene in the movie. The cinematography in the movie is another matter. I found it to be extremely exciting and effective, despite the fact that there wasn't much talent in the special effects department--the opening hammer murder should have been extremely shocking, but is instead unrealistic and laughable. Nonetheless, that lengthy point-of-view opening, the one that reminds me so much of "Halloween", is well constructed, and it's easy to see how Carpenter may have been inspired by this and determined to do it better by editing his scene so that it appeared to one long unbroken take, something "Blood and Lace" has no ambition or inspiration to do. As if a Michael Myers reference wasn't enough, a shadowy figure joins the plot as a disfigured man brandishing a hammer stalks Ellie at the Deere Youth Home, and the character bears a strong resemblance to future horror icon Fred Krueger. The bleakness of the sets is what reminds me of Harry Novak, with not much appearing to have been created just for the film, and there's a certain lurid appeal in watching a cheaply produced movie like this. The lighting is interesting as well, especially the way all the scenes inside the freezer are bathed in a monochromatic blue.

I haven't revealed the final plot twists in "Blood and Lace", and it's not because I don't want to talk about them. I think I would even be forgiven for doing so, because knowing them doesn't diminish the enjoyment of "Blood and Lace" in the least. Most of them you will see coming, and maybe some of them you will not. But I don't feel right talking about them, simply because the final moments of this movie revealed something so strange I could hardly comprehend it as a plot point, something so far from left field that it truly stunned me, the final blow in a movie during which nothing really seemed to make sense at all and where every single character turned out to be totally nutso.  In fact, "Blood and Lace" reminds me a lot of "Don't Look In The Basement" in the way it's full of insane characters who don't seem to have a firm grasp on reality, and their attempts to keep for themselves a little haven where they can act out their obsessions without being disturbed by the outside world.

Straight On Till Morning (1972)

1972 was a banner year for movies about naive young women looking for love and finding it with a deranged serial killer.  And by "banner year", I mean I can think of two.  One of them is "The Folks at Red Wolf Inn", and now I've discovered another one.  "Straight on Till Morning" doesn't have any cannibalism, but it does feature a similar scenario of a somewhat childish young lady who wanders right into some psychopathic shenanigans and doesn't even realize it until it's way out of control.

Strangely, "Straight on Till Morning" is a Hammer film, yet it has nothing of what one would expect from a Hammer film--no Count Dracula, no spooky castle, no Christopher Lee, not even a single damn cameo for Peter Cushing. The studio must have been trying to evolve, as it was starting to leave period films behind and even began setting its Dracula films in contemporary times (this was the year of  "Dracula A.D. 1972"). I still wonder if they knew what they were getting into when they greenlit "Straight on Till Morning", which not only avoids the tone and visual tropes of most horror films, but also has the most ADHD visual style that I've ever seen outside of a Russ Meyer film. The director, Peter Collinson, frequently layers two or more scenes and then cuts back and forth between them in short bursts of dialog and visuals,  resulting in a fragmented narrative. The effect is strangely disorienting at best, and fucking irritating at worst. It's almost as if Collinson just assumed you'd be either stoned, tripping, or both when you saw this movie in a theater in 1972, and he decided to mess with your mind by twisting it and then trying to bend it into the shape of a soft pretzel.

Getting comfortable in this movie's world is out of the question, so the beginning of the film can be a bit of a mystery to the first time viewer. From what I was able to piece together later in the film, Brenda (Rita Tushingham) is a young woman living with her mother in a part of England that resembles a large prison complex, with no visible plant life anywhere. She is a little bit wacky, writing stories where she is a princess and is rescued by a handsome prince. She tells her mother she is pregnant, and because she's pregnant she must leave home and go to find a suitable father for her child. I'm not quite sure what sense this made at the time, but it turns out it doesn't matter--Brenda's not pregnant at all. After flying the coop, she insinuates herself into the local party scene and starts living with a young woman named Caroline (Katya Wyeth).

"So like, I was thinking, I just can't help feeling like I'm stuck in a 70s nightmare, man!"

Despite her best efforts, the plain-looking Brenda can't get any real attention from anybody with a penis, so she resorts to doing what any other young woman who wants to get pregnant would do: she kidnaps a man's dog, with the intention to bathe it, pretty it up, and return it to him as a means of making his acquaintance.  Unfortunately for her, the man is Peter (Shane Briant), who happens to be a serial killer. It seems that Peter is also looking for love, it's just that he has a problem with pretty things: he kills them. When Brenda shows up at his door with his dog, he sees through her little ruse and gets her to admit right away that she wants to have a baby with him. Kind of like hiring a new maid, Peter tells her she can move in as long as she does all the cooking and cleaning, and we'll see about that baby. Oh, and he doesn't really know who she is, since she gives him a phony name and he decides to make up his own and call her Wendy. Since Wendy/Brenda's "not pretty", maybe she has a chance of being the love of Peter's life.

"Straight on Till Morning" is clearly not playing with a full deck. It's more like a demented romance, where strange motivations drive the characters in ways that are hard to relate to. Even though it doesn't make much sense, I really got into the way the story unfolded. The lack of any real graphic violence doesn't do anything to diminish the uncomfortable atmosphere the film generates, especially in the scene where Peter brutally kills his dog, which Brenda has unwittingly "ruined" by making it pretty. Flashbacks to Peter's other women reveal that he's done this many times before, which leads me to wonder where the hell he's getting rid of these bodies, and how the walls in his row house must be completely soundproof to mask all that screaming. Peter's homicidally crazy, but Brenda is a little crazy, too, so the lurid quality of the film is like watching two unstable people who are living in a fantasy world.

I wasn't certain if the downbeat story arc and twisted subject matter alone would make me consider "Straight on Till Morning" a 70s Doom film, but I knew for sure when I heard that title ballad on the soundtrack--YES, an actual 70s Doom song! There's also the crazy editing, which is either arty or eye-gougingly annoying, take your pick, but there's some interesting cinematography to look at. The outdoor city settings are bleak, and Collinson likes to film his subjects as far removed from nature as possible. You get the impression that the film's world is a never-ending wasteland of concrete, cookie cutter buildings, where only the interiors have any character at all. "Straight on Till Morning" is like an oddball person on the bus who sits next to you and starts talking whether you want like it or not. It invaded my space and made me uncomfortable at first, but I caught myself actually listening and wondering where the hell it was talking about.

"So tell me, that flag in the background--is someone in this far-out flat a member of the Bear community?"

Let's Scare Jessica To Death (1971)

There ain't a better example of prime 70s low budget horror than "Let's Scare Jessica To Death", the kind of movie that doesn't show you as much on screen as it does in your own head, making implications and suggestions while never really stating exactly what is happening. It's strange that the movie's title and ad campaign seemed to position it as an exploitation shocker. While it's definitely low budget, it doesn't have much in common with the grindhouse movies that it was undoubtedly paired with at the drive-in. On the surface it's a movie about a ghostly vampire who inhabits an island community, but at its heart is a story about a likable, fragile woman who knows she is losing her grip but can't do anything about it.

Happy Jessica / Losin' It Jessica

The film opens and already we're treated to a hallmark of the 70s Doom genre....the flashback moment! Here is Jessica, alone and despondent, sitting on a rowboat in the middle of a lake wearing nothing but her nightgown. How did she get there? Well, the helpful watery dissolve takes us back to the beginning, when we see Jessica, her husband Duncan, and their friend Woody traveling in a big black hearse. Woody is kind of a hippie, Duncan is a bald guy who looks pretty uptight for a professional musician--he's leaving behind a position with the New York Philharmonic in order to get Jessica away from the city. Jessica has just spent some time in a mental institution, and her doctor has finally released her. Duncan has taken his life savings and purchased a farmhouse on an island in Connecticut.

Jessica's fabulous nervous-breakdown pad.

Jessica's breakdown is not entirely behind her. She is haunted by voices in her head, and we hear them whispering to her even from the very beginning, when she is in a graveyard doing tombstone rubbings and sees a strange girl watching her. "Don't tell them, they won't believe you." Jessica doubts her own sanity after her breakdown, and she assumes that Duncan and Woody do, too. When they arrive at the farmhouse, Jessica sees another strange girl on the porch. The others see her too, and Jessica seems relieved. "I really did see something!" she smiles. It seems like all she needs is for someone to sneeze in the wrong direction and she'd go teetering over the edge again.

Hi I'm Abig-errr, Emily. Yes, Emily. My name's Emily.

They discover that the girl in the house is Emily, a young drifter who was squatting in the house because she thought it was abandoned. She gathers her things to clear out, but Jessica feels bad for her and asks her to stay the night. That evening consists of some dinner-eatin', guitar strummin', and spirit summonin'. Yes, Emily suggests that they hold a seance, never a good thing in a movie whose very title suggests that someone will be scared to death. Nothing happens during the seance, but it sure creeps Jessica out.

More things begin to happen to Jessica that make her question her sanity, but there really does seem to be something weird going on. An antiques dealer in town gives them the lowdown on their new home's bizarre history; he reveals that the three subjects in an antique photograph that Jessica finds in the attic are none other than the Bishop family, Abigail Bishop and her parents. Abigail drowned on her wedding day, and is rumored to roam the countryside as a vampire. Could this explain why Emily looks exactly like Abigail? Is this why the town seems to be populated entirely by old men with bandages on their bodies?

Boy, caring for this orchard is murder.

Of course it doesn't take much to figure out that not only is Jessica losing her mind, Emily is the long-dead Abigail, insinuating herself into their lives. However, it's Jessica's breakdown that really delivers the chills. Zohra Lampert is great as Jessica, who is likable and friendly, but slowly drawn back into whatever madness she was suffering from. It's no wonder, seeing as she's being attacked by vampires, but is it really happening to her? Or is she just imagining everything? Either explanation is just as bad.

I first saw "Let's Scare Jessica To Death" on TV as a kid. I think it was on the CBS Late Movie on Friday night, but I can't be entirely sure. I do remember the introduction for it, with the super-serious, deep voiced announcer saying the name of the movie like it was the most terrifying thing you'd ever see. Well I admit I was just a kid, but the movie still gets under my skin. It has a very heavy atmosphere, full of whispering voices on the soundtrack, bizarre old men, dead pet moles, and spooky houses. As a kid I had no concept of a mental breakdown, and the fact that Jessica is trying to turn her life around and recover makes it all the more compelling to see her losing her grip.  Zohra Lampert delivers a very physical performance, often based on simple facial expressions and subtle moments rather than the screaming and terror that other horror heroines are usually called on to project. She really gets us inside her character's head, aided by the film's bizarre audio mix that often loops her own inner thoughts over footage of her face reacting to the weirdness going on around her. Just as good is Mariclare Costello, who is very scary and sexy as Emily/Abigail, just like a good vampire should be. She gets her own whisper track, too, a menacing one.

A terrific and scary moment is when Lampert and Costello are sunning on a raft and suddenly Costello pushes Lampert in the lake and seems like she's trying to drown her, and Lampert feels powerless to try and stop her. The sequence is even more uncomfortable because Costello keeps touching Lampert intimately and trying to kiss her, combining the attempt on her life with sexual advances. The vampires in the film are not the kind that need to avoid sunlight, there's more of a similarity between them and the helpless disease victims that David Cronenberg created later in films like "They Came From Within" and "Rabid", or the living dead cannibals in "Messiah of Evil": ordinary-looking people who suddenly want to bite or scratch you so you'll be just like them. But by the time the movie comes full circle and we wind up with Jessica again, floating all alone on that rowboat in her nightgown, the fact that the movie was about vampires is somehow forgotten. Although there's nothing in it that'll scare you to death, this movie left me with an uneasy feeling that lasted a long time after the credits rolled.

The Baby (1973): Dig it, baby!

By today's soulless standards, the glorious 70s were mostly tacky and cheap, but oh did they have style to burn. Never have I seen this represented in a horror film quite as well as I have in an obscure little gem I just discovered. I intend to ramble on for a moment or three about a repulsive, seductive, and absolutely essential 1973 descent into insanity titled The Baby.

Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) is a pretty social worker who takes on a new case when she visits the oddball Wadsworth home. Mrs. Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) lives with her two strange daughters, Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Alba (Susanne Zenor). There's also a son in the home: the 21-year-old Baby (David Manzy). There is no man in the home, and Mrs. Wadsworth doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of them. Well, what am I saying, Baby is a man if he's 21, right? Well, no. Baby is kept in an infantile state by the rest of the Wadsworths, who dress him in diapers and oversized baby clothes, make him sleep in a crib, and never teach him to talk or walk. Although Ann doesn't catch onto it right away, the family inhibits his development through negative reinforcement, such as zapping him with a cattle prod whenever he does something that a baby wouldn't do.

Bringing up Baby.

Ann immediately accepts Baby's situation, as does seemingly everyone else in the movie. Nobody ever seems to stop and say "Hey wait a minute, why is this man acting like an infant?", a fact that becomes twenty times more astonishing after a scene where the strange family has a house full of party guests who also accept the fact that her 21 year old son acts this way. Ann is no different, as she talks baby talk to him and raves about how 'cute' he is. Actually, he is extremely creepy and looks like he's acting more like a dopey dog than a baby. Mrs. Wadsworth is a tough lookin broad who reminds me a lot of Suzanne Pleshette, especially when she talks. At first she seems to like Ann, but when Ann starts hanging around a lot more than she has to, the whole family gets suspicious of her.


Ann herself isn't exactly playing with a full deck, it seems. She lives in a big, beautiful house with her mother-in-law, and even Germaine wonders how Ann affords her beautiful wardrobe on a social worker's salary. Her husband is nowhere to be seen, and Ann can't seem to figure out if he's alive or dead, since she tells different people different things. When Ann starts talking to Mrs. Wadsworth about putting Baby in a school where he might learn how to develop past the infant stage, she immediately pulls the plug on Ann, calling her supervisor and getting her thrown off the case. Ann reacts with her own fury, declaring war on the Wadsworths and vowing to 'rescue' Baby.  You might think you can see the twist ending coming, and you may be on the right track, but I doubt you'll totally get it until the weird, wonderful and unquestionably bizarre final moments of the film.



I guess The Baby is technically a horror movie, although it's definitely the psychological type as opposed to more typical horror elements. There is a disturbing tone running through the whole thing, including themes of incest; not only does a babysitter wind up in a sexually provocative situation with Baby, Germaine is seen going into Baby's room and getting into bed naked with him. There are a few scenes of graphic violence, but they aren't going to please any gorehounds. The Baby reminds me a lot of one of my other favorite 70s Doom flicks, Don't Look In The Basement, crossed with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. There are elements of other movies here too, including a party scene that echoes Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with its crazy lighting and far out music.

Beyond the Valley of the Baby

Aside from having a great script, The Baby also benefits from a solid cast full of cult movie favorites. Fans of obscure horror films will recognize Marianna Hill from Dead People (aka Messiah of Evil). Alba is played by Suzanne Zenor, and some of you might recognize her from the 70s TV revenge comedy The Girl Most Likely To. I'm not sure of the actress's name who plays the babysitter, but she's a dead ringer for Joy Bang, also from Dead People. Michael Pataki appears as a swingin' guest at Baby's birthday party, and Ruth Roman is absolutely showstopping as Mrs. Wadsworth. She's as scary as Mommie Dearest, and you wouldn't want to cross her, would you?

The sets and art direction are top notch. Kitsch is king in The Baby, with all sorts of wild period clothing, furniture, and lighting dominating the movie. The music is memorable too, coming off as cheesy at first, but really getting under your skin the longer the movie goes on. The uncomfortable themes in The Baby might turn off some viewers. But if you're in the mood for something really strange that you've never seen before, you can't go wrong with this one. It's absurd. It's insane. And it's absolutely classic, unadulterated 70's Doom!!