Pigs (1972)

When it comes to 70s drive-in movies, there's crazy, then there's pig crazy. In "Pigs", an absolute riot of blood, murder, incest, and 70s doom, the craziness is of the swine variety. Although I love it, I also feel bad for people who were lured into thinking it was about killer pigs. There are pigs in it, and they eat bodies, but that's kind of like someone getting ahold of "Silence of the Lambs" and retitling it "Cellar" and making it seem like it's about a killer basement.

Lynn practices her stab-aerobics routine.

Written and directed by the prolific character actor Marc Lawrence, who starred in several hundred movies and TV shows, this one seems to have been tailor made for his daughter, Toni Lawrence. 

Lynn discovers she does not have enough pocket change to pay the toll rates for "beyond the grave".

As the movie opens, we learn that getting a baby is kind of like going grocery shopping. A voiceover, presumably from a maternity nurse, states "Here's your baby daughter, Mr. Hart!" and we see a proud, happy papa leaving the hospital with an infant wrapped up in blankets. No actual mother is in sight. A flash-forward series of images explains that the baby grew into a young girl whom Daddy liked to feel up, that is until one night she murders him with a kitchen knife. Her name is Lynn, and she is seen talking to a psychiatrist, asking where her father is. Apparently she forgot about stabbing him to death. She insists to a doctor "It's a lie!", prompting the shrink to commit her -- this is done with a large rubber stamp that marks Lynn's file COMMITTED -- and sign her up for immediate shock treatment. Conveniently for Lynn, a slutty nurse seduces an old fart doctor right there on the ward, leaving her nurse's uniform behind alongside her car keys. Lynn steals the uniform and the keys, somehow instinctively knowing which car belongs to the poor nurse, and she's off and running. She is accompanied by her own 70s doom song that encourages her to keep on drivin', cause someone is waiting for her down the road to take her in.

"I told you someone was waiting down the road, dearie."

That someone is a scary-looking nutcase named Zambrini, who we meet just as he is feeding a freshly-exhumed corpse from the local cemetery to the pigs that he keeps penned up behind his house. In an important soliloquy and plot exposition, he explains to the corpse that the pigs once stumbled upon a drunk guy sleeping it off in a field and ate him. Of course the thing to do was to encourage their appetite for human flesh instead of just killing the damn pigs. Lynn shows up at Zambrini's "diner", which is really just a farmhouse set back in a field with a large front window. Somehow when characters step inside the door, it becomes a diner (movie magic at work!), and sooner than you can say "Alice Hyatt", Lynn is hired as a new waitress at the farmhouse diner.

Zambrini shows Lynn to her room without saying more than a few sentences to her, and in a moment of intense foreshadowing, Lynn opens up the bathroom medicine cabinet and finds....A STRAIT RAZOR! Pretty soon the locals come sniffin' around, and Lynn meets Sheriff Dan Cole, who tells her that not only is the registration expired on "her" car, it's a missing vehicle. For some reason, Dan does not seem to think this is unusual, and doesn't report it. A sleazy customer named Ben comes in and tells Lynn that Zambrini was a circus performer who fell off a high wire (or something) and was pronounced dead, only to reawaken at the morgue. How's THAT for a circus trick? Ben begs Lynn for a date, and when she finally gives in, he drives her into the middle of nowhere in his pickup truck and tries to rape her. Dan drives by in his squad car, immediately sensing that Ben is up to no good, but darn that laid-back sheriff, he just lets it slide and drives Lynn back home. Lynn pays Ben back by inviting him into her bedroom the next night, putting on a sexy strip show for him, then slashing him to death with Zambrini's razor. Zambrini walks in and comforts Lynn, then disposes of the body by feeding it to those handy pigs out back, you know, the ones that like to eat corpses? A beautiful friendship has begun.

"SHOULD I have kept on driving?"

Although the focus of the film is Lynn and her stabby ways, there is also an implied supernatural element. Zambrini's closest neighbors, two elderly spinsters (played by Catherine Ross and Iris Korn), seem to suspect what Zambrini is up to, and they believe that whenever Zambrini feeds a new corpse to the pigs, another pig appears in the pen, the reborn embodiment of the tormented soul that's been fed to the animals. They and Lynn also experience auditory hallucinations of pigs snuffling and squealing around their bedroom windows.

Don't look at me, I didn't know what that shit was he was feeding us.

For a cheap drive-in screamer, "Pigs" is ambitious in the way it attempts to develop Lynn as a character, and Toni Lawrence carries a few difficult scenes extremely well. Periodically throughout the film, she makes phone calls to some disconnected phone number and thinks she's talking to her father; Toni has this multilayered life that she's created for Lynn, where she sometimes appears normal on the surface, but she'll give this sneaky look before slipping off to the payphone to make one of her imaginary phone calls. She's got this secret life, and she's found a secret place to carry out these strange impulses. Another scene features her playing with her hair and staring off into space while Sheriff Dan questions her, and while he seems frustrated by the fact that she won't either look at him or answer his questions, this apparently isn't enough to set off enough warning bells in his thick head. He's a classic 70s tool who's too dumb to connect the dots, and ya gotta love that.

"Zambrini! Bring me the cleaver!"

Aside from the low budget, the worst thing "Pigs" has going for it is its very slow pacing. It takes a long time to get going, and really it never takes off running. It just smolders in its own doomy atmosphere, until an admittedly gory finale where a body is dismembered and fed to the pigs on camera in a series of rapid-fire cuts. In terms of low budget cinema, it's not as technically proficient as the films of S.F. Brownrigg, and not quite as over the top as an Andy Milligan movie. There's a very interesting angle, though, in depicting the way Lynn makes her escape and manages to fall through the cracks and disappear by finding an isolated, rural location. The spare dialogue during certain portions of the film also gives it an effect that is either hypnotic or boring, depending on the viewer. There's a little bit of humor in the way the old ladies are depicted, as well as some fun at the expense of the throwback locals that Lynn encounters in her new job as the local diner sexpot, but you have to admire the way the remainder of the movie tells its sick story straight-faced.

Although "Pigs" is the title by which it is most commonly known, this film was released with so many other titles it's amazing. It was first released in 1972 as "The 13th Pig", after which it was re-released as simply "Pigs". Later it reappeared as "Blood Pen", "The Secret of Lynn Hart", "Daddy's Deadly Darling", "Roadside Torture Chamber", and "Daddy's Girl". But even more strange and confusing was when the film was reissued with a newly-shot opening scene depicting Lynn as possessed and receiving an exorcism, which fails when Lynn kills her father. This version was released as "Lynn Hart, the Strange Love Exorcist", often shortened to simply "Love Exorcist". On home video, it also was known as "Horror Farm" and "The Killers".

There's got to be a Monday after.

In this sick world, there are two kinds of people: those who came out to the annual Drive-In Super Monster-Rama (belatedly view the lineup here), and those who wish they did. I only got to go on Saturday night, where vampire movies from the 70s reigned supreme. The Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania is the perfect place for it, surrounded by trees and very spooky all on its own. But throw in four 70s drive-in movies in a row, and your geek-o-meter might just reach stratospheric heights. I know mine sure did.

Of course you can still GO to drive-ins, they do exist. Finding an appropriate movie to watch at the drive-in is another matter. Who really wants to see "The Time Traveler's Wife" from their car? Even cheapo horror remakes seem wrong for it. They're too glossy and the people in them are too pretty. The movie needs to be cheap, sleazy, and/or just plain bizarre to make it worthwhile to me. The Monster-Rama solves this by digging up 35mm prints of horror flicks from days gone by and stringing them together with battered trailers and retro intermission reels featuring animated hot dogs. This year they showed a great refreshment stand ad that was clearly modeled after the trailer for "ALIEN".

Ah, but what of the actual movies they showed? This year's lineup was definitely inspired, and included a few flicks that I was watching for the first time ever. Here's a recap:

The Vampire Lovers (1970): Who knew a movie from 1970 could be the very definition of lesbian vampire porn? Ingrid Pitt plays Carmilla, a sexy vampire gal who hails from a vampire family, the Karnsteins, all decapitated or otherwise deceased except for her. She likes to reinvent herself every so often, kind of like Madonna does, only Carmilla not only changes her hair color, she slyly changes the letters of her name around so as to throw smart people off her trail, alternately being known as Mircalla and Marcilla. No matter what you call her, she's very into ripping off the blouses of nubile women and kissing their boobs. She goes about insinuating herself into a household with one particularly sexy young woman, Emma, and when Emma's dad goes out of town, it's time to step up the lesbian seducing and biting. Unfortunately for her, Peter Cushing arrives and chops off her head before she can change her name to Carmalli.

Next up was The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula (1974), which was the last Dracula flick made by Hammer Studios. You know you're out of ideas when you start to come up with crazy ideas like the one for this movie, which involves a family of martial-arts experts who enlist the help of Professor Van Helsing to rid their small Chinese village of vampires. Yes, it's a kung-fu Dracula story, with Peter Cushing literally the only link to the glories of Hammer's yesteryear (Christopher Lee got one look at the script and decided to sit this one out). This movie was an incomprehensible mess, apparently re-edited from one that made slightly more sense than this did, but I still enjoyed watching it, and it was mercifully short. There were a couple of kung-fu brawls, most of them involving the living vs. the undead, and then it was over.

The third flick was The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), and much to my happiness, the print that was shown here actually had the movie's alternate title on it, Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride--there's something about alternate titles that really turns me on. This one does have Chris Lee in it, as well as Peter Cushing, playing the Dracula and Van Helsing roles once again. Dracula finds himself resurrected, apparently by a Satanic cult, and he takes up residence in a high rise office building that's been built on the site of the church where Van Helsing killed him in the previous film, Dracula AD 1972. This time, the Count uses his new Satan-worshipping friends to enact his latest scheme: commission the development of a new strain of bubonic plague, then commit suicide by wiping out all of humanity with it. The original title is the one that actually describes the movie, of course, since Dracula does not get married in it and one thinks that a wedding ceremony would be the last damn thing on Dracula's mind. Some Satanic rites, however, are right up his alley. Actually, if you thought a kung-fu Dracula movie was weird, how about a James Bond/Dracula movie? Well that's kind of what The Satanic Rites of Dracula is. Oh, and it has Joanna Lumley in it, aka Patsy Stone. She gets the movie's best line, when she's rescued from a basement full of chained-up vampire chicks. One of her male rescuers recognizes one of the imprisoned vampire girls, and when he goes to unchain her, Joanna wails "Oh, STOP HIM! She's a VUM-PARR!"

The final drive-in masterpiece was Vampire Circus (1972), little-seen and only recently issued to home video. I remember catching it on late night TV as a kid, and as you might expect, there is a circus in it made up of vampires, not that the dimwit villagers who visit the circus catch on soon enough. I mean, even though the circus people turn into bats and leopards right in front of their eyes, why on Earth should the villagers suspect them of being vampires? Hmmm? The print for this one was elderly and had turned pink after many years in storage, I would presume, but sitting outside under the dark sky with crickets chirping in the woods on either side of me, I didn't care. Part of the reason was that it was getting to be 4am and I was more concerned about falling asleep. But that was always part of the fun of going to the drive-in, too. Could you or would you stay up for the second feature? Only geeks like me would actually want to sit through second features like Don't Look In The Basement. Come to think of it, maybe I'll get lucky and the Monster-rama will include THAT on one of its lineups for next year! I can only hope.

Frogs (1972): Death by Ridiculous

I'll admit I have unconventional taste in films--which is an obvious attempt to make myself sound cooler than the people who might say I like movies that suck. I don't deny that "Frogs" could actually be the most straightforwardly ridiculous movie that I adore, and if you don't believe me just go check out some of the comments left on the "Frogs" IMDB page.  "Frogs" merits a meager 4.1 out of 10 rating, which isn't "Manos Hand of Fate" level, but still pretty low. Nevertheless, I love "Frogs" like a magnet loves your fridge, and I find it to be frightening and disturbing in a number of ways. Prepare to hear me out.

"Are you planning on staying a while? We have a few drains that need unclogged."

The setup: Sam Elliott (sporting the world's most noticeable trouser snake) is a "freelance wildlife photographer" named Pickett Smith. Through a boating mishap, he ends up at the island estate of Jason Crockett, played by a very cantankerous Ray Milland. A house full of guests allows for plenty of victims when the local wildlife starts to turn on human beings, somehow driven by an intelligence and understanding that they couldn't possibly possess. Gruesome death results: a hired hand is discovered dead, bitten by snakes. A man goes into a greenhouse and is followed by hordes of lizards, which knock over bottles of poison, creating a cloud of noxious gas that asphyxiates him. A woman dies after being hounded by reptiles and bitten by a rattlesnake. A woman gets stuck in the mud and is killed by an alligator snapping turtle. The death list grows!

Grandfather, please try not to call it a trouser snake in front of the children.

It's hard to know what to do with a movie like "Frogs" today, since so many films have come after it that showed similar images. There was a time when a character's death really was enough to shock an exploitation audience, but "Frogs" stands apart from most films of its time for a simple reason: this 1972 film takes great pleasure in lingering on dead bodies, showing us a series of characters who have been brought to a disgusting, undignified death.

As a child, "Frogs" was the first time a film showed me gruesome death on screen, and it takes an approach to dying that isn't typical of other period films (excluding more underground gore films and "Night of the Living Dead"). I had seen characters in movies die before, but it was usually in a shootout or some other form of action that made it seem almost noble or glamorous. The people who die in "Frogs" do so most horribly. Although obviously the movie is unrealistic, if you accept the fact that it is unrealistic and look at what's really happening on screen, it is deeply unsettling. The victims in the film are indeed killed by harmless animals, but not only that, their deaths are unusually agonizing and drawn out.

Especially effective is the protracted stalking of Iris, a daffy lady who chases after a butterfly into the marshes, then gets cornered by a bunch of snakes and lizards. The director isn't concerned with what is killing her, or how realistic her motivations are for wandering into the swamp alone with a butterfly net. The horror is not expected to come from the fact that a group of unintelligent animals could somehow work in unison to murder a human being. Rather, what's unsettling is how she gradually disintegrates, her fear causing her to lapse into animalistic appearance and behavior. Her hairstyle falls, ratted out by the vegetation she crawls through, making her look like a madwoman. Her clothing becomes filthy, and in the most excruciating moment, she trips and falls into a marshy pit of filthy water and emerges covered in leeches. Finally, completely demoralized, terrified, and drenched in silt and bloodied by the leeches, she is bitten by a rattler and very quickly dies. We see the moment of her death, and her corpse turns color to a deathly oxygen-deprived bluish hue right before our eyes. To me, this is one of the most horrifying deaths in horror movie history, even if it's also one of the most stupid--check out the stand-in mannequin arm that the rattler really bites!

There's a disjointed feel to "Frogs" that the film's low budget and glaring continuity errors help to emphasize. There is a moment when Smith finds one of Crockett's employees dead, lying face-down in a marsh in an unnatural position, with snakes crawling over him. The actor playing the victim is moving ever so slightly, although we're not sure if he's breathing or if the snakes slithering around his neck are making it move. Then Smith rolls him over to face the camera, and we get a look at his face, horribly bloated and off-color. In a series of cuts that most likely represent bad continuity, his eyes go from tightly shut to a hideous, wide-open death stare. The "bad" cuts, however, lend a hallucinatory quality to the scene, and suggest something even more horrifying: although we saw him lying face down in a wet marsh and covered by reptiles, it seems as if he was still barely alive, languishing from the snake venom, and Smith arrived just in time to see the moment of his death. How horrible to end your life paralyzed by snake venom, lying there with them while they bite you and slither over you possessively. That open-eyed death mask that his face becomes is probably the first image of a dead person that I ever saw in a horror movie, and it remains one of the most gruesome.

In another particularly outrageous and bizarre moment, a character accidentally shoots himself in the leg and, rendered immobile, is attacked by an army of tarantulas that descend from a nearby tree. An unexplained combination of vines and Spanish Moss begin to bind the man while the spiders bite him and cocoon him with webbing. As his struggling starts to slow and his death approaches, the last image of him is a horrifying one: his face, nearly buried in Spanish Moss, being covered with waves of spider webs. The movie tries to make some kind of overall statement about pollution of the environment, but it's these small images in "Frogs" that stick with you.

Judy Pace sez: "My boyfriend's dead? I am OUTTA here!"

The humans in “Frogs” make it easy to root for the animals. Ray Milland's family of the “ugly rich” seem to take pride in their roles as exploiters and destroyers of both people and the environment. Frustrated by his inability to control the blooming frog population on his small private island, Milland has reacted by increasing the use of poison until all the local wildlife has been affected. His relatives are similarly reptilian in their disregard for ethics; Milland’s daughter, Holly Irving, complains that the family fortune has been slightly diminished because of costly environmental regulations forced on their factories. Irving’s husband, David Gillam, encourages his own son to engage in a fist fight; Milland’s grandson, Adam Roarke, is the most arrogant and aggressive character in the film, driving his speedboat while drunk, picking fights with other men in his family, and pathetically longing for the glory days of his youth when he was a football hero. Only Joan Van Ark manages to avoid the selfish pitfalls of her own family, projecting an innocence and sweetness that earns her a place as one of the film’s survivors. Elliott is a free-spirited, environmentally conscious photographer who gently tries to persuade Milland to mend his ways and exist in harmony with nature. Judy Pace’s character helps detail the social implications underneath the film’s surface; a spunky fashion model/designer who is dating one of the rich family’s sons, she brings a sense of social consciousness; she reminds the black servants of wealthy, white Milland that they have no need to be loyal to their employer when their lives are in danger. Her rejection of Milland is more in line with the rebellion of the animal life on the island, although it's suggested that she and the servants are attacked by seagulls while attempting to escape. We never see their bodies, just their bloody, abandoned luggage. I prefer to think they survived, perhaps injured, but alive. 

The movie has a very strong atmosphere, thanks to some great cinematography and a bizarre electronic score by none other than Les Baxter. The settings are otherworldly at times, beautiful at others. If you can get past how far-fetched the movie is (and scores of sentient human beings cannot), the biggest liability is the acting, particularly by Ray Milland. He didn't like being in this silly movie, and apparently he was channeling this into his character. The director can't get what's necessary out of him, although it's too bad Milland couldn't see into the future and realize that he would appear in Amando De Ossorio's embarassing sock monster movie "The Sea Serpent". It may have helped him to take "Frogs" just a teensy bit more seriously.

"Oh, great. Milland is covered in amphibians again."

The fact that Spanish Moss and vines don't move on their own doesn't really matter to me, because at heart, "Frogs" is a fantasy--a particularly lurid fantasy about the revulsion that many people have for animals of this kind. Spiders, snakes, insects, frogs, these are all things that make all kinds of people recoil in fear and disgust, and...why? There is no logic to that fear, because these things are generally harmless to human beings. "Frogs" is a fantasy about what the world would be like if our unfounded fears were reality. I don't know if "Frogs" would ever be considered a work of art by anybody, but I know that I like it.

Corpse Eaters (1974): Eat At Joe's

Behold, the one image from the film that doesn't give you the urge to squint.

We all have our movies that we keep coming back to, and one of the ones I like to revisit a lot is Bob Clark's 1972 film "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things". It's a humble but weirdly effective zombie film before zombie films were a huge thing, with lots of fantastic imagery. The performances were a little grating, but there was a humorous aspect to it took the edge off of that, as if it wasn't to be taken too seriously. Although the zombies don't arrive until far into the movie, once they do it's pretty awesome. Two years after its release came a Canadian film with a similar plot involving a small group of young people who decide to hold a Satanic mass inside a vault in a dark cemetery, provoking the rise of zombies who eat human beings. Produced by a Canadian drive-in owner as a moneymaking feature for his own drive-in, "Corpse Eaters" debuted at the Hiway 69 Drive-In, and... well that's about it. An obscure oddity was born.

It is the early 1970s. We can tell this because the sideburns are long and the clothing looks like it was made out of fabric cut from curtains and bedspreads. The location: the Happy Halo Funeral Home. A mortician named Bill is working on a fresh corpse, when his creepy boss comes into the lab to ask him to work late. The boss mortician looks more than a little bit like Angus Scrimm as "The Tall Man" from Phantasm. Phantasm was a much different movie, though, because you see, in Phantasm you could actually see what was going on. Corpse Eaters is much more coy; the filmmakers knew that to truly engage the audience, you must constantly obscure your film in darkness and tight closeups that rarely allow the film to familiarize the viewer with any visual information.

But I digress...Bill is working on a corpse when Creepy Mortician (he doesn't have a name) tells him that a new job is coming in that night; some guy who seems to have been mauled by a bear. Hmmmm. Creepy Mortician decides to get in his hearse and drive around while Bill does his thing, delivering a voiceover monologue about death before driving right back to the mortuary. Why was he driving around in the hearse think-talking to himself? Never mind. Together they put the finishing touches on the 'bear victim': cottonballs stuffed into the oral cavity. I once heard that artists never really know when the work of art is completed.

Immediately we are plunged into flashback. You will not know this just by watching the film, because there is no real communication going on between the director and the viewer. But take my word for it, you are watching a flashback, and think of it as a pre-Tarantino gesture in cutting edge filmmaking. We witness two frisky young Canadian couples on a day trip via motorboat. Richie and Julie are the "dirty" ones, while Alan and Lisa are the "other" ones. (HINT: Richie is the corpse in the coffin in the introduction--the 'bear mauling' victim!!!!) Together they jaunt out to an island, where they lay down on a blanket so Richie can take off Julie's top and spray a can of Canadian beer all over her Canadian boobs. Readers, I doubt that any of you boob-lovers are going to be turned on by Julie's boobs, but have at it if you are. You get to see them for a nice long time in a scene that goes nowhere; Julie and Richie roll around a little and when Alan doesn't get any action from Lisa, he tries to turn it into a three-way. Julie is having none of that, however, so instead they all go swimming. Naturally!

Afterwards, they plot their next adventure. Bored of "the rock concerts" (?), Richie comes up with the perfect evening: they'll spend the night in an abandoned graveyard and get high on some of his pot. Lisa, the spoilsport that she is, tries to talk everyone out of it, but she's dragged along by the rest of them. The graveyard spooks her out, and things go from bad to worse when they go into a vault that's been left standing open.

Richie, always the instigator, decides to perform a black mass, something he learned from his uncle, who was "always drawing circles". Lisa warns against it, seeing as the uncle "did disappear mysteriously enough". Off the top of his head, Richie's able to recite from memory some words he heard his uncle say. The words just happen to be a Satanic incantation to raise the dead, and before you can say "children shouldn't play with dead things", there are a few dead things wandering around the cemetery. Richie goes outside to investigate a noise, leaving us in awkward silence with some super-tight closeups of Lisa, Julie and Alan as they wait for him. You know how it is when nobody knows what to say. When Richie comes back inside, he's followed by a gang of the hungry dead, who lunge at our heroes. Alan wards off the zombies with a shovel and protects Lisa, but Richie is severely injured. It's curtains for Julie, proving once again that if you show your boobs in a horror movie, you're as good as dead.

Anyway....

Lisa and Alan drag Richie back to the car and speed off. "What about Julie??" Lisa begs, to which Alan replies "Forget her!" Meanwhile, back at the vault, there's some corpse eating going on as the zombies chow down on a bunch of cherry jelly that's suddenly all over Julie's body. Yum! As Alan speeds down the road, the film cuts back and forth endlessly: speeding car, zombies eating Julie, speeding car, zombies eating Julie, speeding car, zombies eating Julie. Do not try and suggest that the makers of Corpse Eaters didn't make every attempt to give you your money's worth, because to say that would be unfair.

When they take Richie to a conveniently nearby hospital, the doctors are at a loss to explain what attacked Richie. They also don't seem to understand the meaning of "emergency", taking their sweet time to get cleaned up and prepped for surgery. It's no surprise when they're unable to save Richie, partly because they are doofuses and largely because we already know Richie winds up as a corpse in a coffin at the Happy Halo Funeral Home. One doc breaks the news to Lisa and Alan, causing Lisa to collapse backwards onto a chair. "Lisa!" Alan shouts, to which the doctor says "Oh she's just in shock, that's all, she'll be alright." Just like it would happen in real life, they put Lisa to bed for the night in a nearby room, while a scary nurse (who resembles a transsexual Howard Johnson's waitress) gives her a sedative to help her sleep. Meanwhile Alan, who still hasn't bothered to remove his blood-soaked tank top, tries to explain to the doctors what happened. Needless to say, what doctor would believe that a group of crusty-faced zombies came along and ruined a perfectly good Black Mass?

"This is Nurse Bobbi....I borrowed your razor...."

In the tradition of all good horror movies, we have a spooky dream sequence as Lisa sleeps. She sees dead people, visits Richie in the funeral home, and sees him rise out of his coffin and kiss her full on the mouth. Did I mention that Richie is supposed to be Lisa's brother? Guess we know how it is in THAT family. Richie leaves blood all over Lisa's mouth, causing her to wake up and bite Alan's neck open. Then she attacks the tranny nurse and stabs her with scissors for about five minutes until she wakes up for real and realizes It Was Only A Dream.

Meanwhile, back at the funeral home, Creepy Mortician is drinking himself blind in his office. I honestly can't blame him, I'd be an alkie if dead people were my business, too. Especially if I looked like Angus Scrimm. So while he's up there getting plastered and falling asleep on his desk, shadowy figures are moving downstairs in the funeral home. Who could these strange visitors be? HINT: If you were a corpse eater, where would you go when you were hungry? A funeral parlor is like a fast food joint in that sense. That's right, Creepy Mortician stumbles down into the viewing rooms and finds our dusty, corpse eatin' zombies chowing down. Richie is also rising up out of the coffin, perhaps signifying that corpse eating is contagious and the graveyards of the world will no longer be safe.

This is where things get a little sketchy. The editing goes haywire here, and the zombies appear to pull out The Wannabe Tall Man's eyes. But then we see him being dragged into a barred room and put into a strait jacket, eyes mysteriously intact, babbling about how he's not insane. The end. What exactly just happened here? We don't want to believe it, but not only did Corpse Eaters pull off the "It Was All A Dream" trick, it also doubles back on itself and pulls the "It Was All In the Mind Of A Crazy Person" stunt!! How many films can you say that about?

Well, fortunately Corpse Eaters doesn't ask for too much of your time, as it only runs a little bit over an hour. It's nobody's idea of a "good" movie, although it could be a rather enjoyable one. The filmmakers don't take it too seriously, and they insert an amusing gimmick into the mix: at the beginning of the film, we see a respectably-dressed balding man sitting in the theater, minding his own business, until he sees something on the screen so horrible that he gags into his handkerchief. This is the signal, viewers, the signal that something terrible is going to happen. A voiceover that sounds suspiciously like a Canadian version of Jack from "Will & Grace" warns the audience that when they see the gagging man and hear the special ululating "buzzer", this is the time to look away from the screen to avoid seeing something that might upset your stomach. Because ya know, I can see how someone with a weak stomach might accidentally wander into a film titled Corpse Eaters.

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!!