BLOODSUCKING FREAKS
I can't believe I rented this from Blockbuster!

  I don't know what kind of sick fuck the filmmakers had in mind for their target audience, but I can't deny staring in dead-eyed hypnotic fascination at this movie, marveling at the sheer baseness of it all, wondering if it could sink lower, and how.  I mean, yikes, how long until we have a midget sexually violating the mouth of a woman's severed head?  (answer: oh, about an hour in)

Sardu's Theatre Of The Macabre in Soho is basically an onstage torture show, where Sardu (Seamus O'Brien, stabbed to death not long after filming) and his midget assistant Ralphus (Luis De Jesus, who would be seen a few years later playing an Ewok, also now dead) torture and murder naked young women for an audience who thinks it's acting.  At one point in the film, Sardu says that he will be hailed as a genius when he takes this pointless, plotless exercise in sadism and attaches a plot and some music.  Possibly with this in mind, writer/director Joel M. Reed (who also gave us the way-beyond-idiotic Night Of The Zombies) has attached a gaunt plot regarding a football hero whose world-class ballerina girlfriend (Viju Krem, she's dead too!) has been kidnapped by Sardu and is being brainwashed into performing for him.  (and he's so confident that his brainwashing will succeed, he's even put an announcement of her imminent performance in Variety) Note how nobody yet has called Joel M. Reed a genius.

What can I say?  This movie wallows in depravity like nothing I've ever seen; it might've been disturbing if the gore weren't so terrible, and it might've been funny if its jokes were halfway amusing. (as Sardu and Ralphus watch a woman torn apart by a rack, Sardu quips "This will go far beyond every stretch of the imagination!"  Before Ralphus goes onstage, Sardu tells him to break a leg, to which the response is "Whose, master?")  As it is, it's just kind of there, a twisted train wreck of a schlocker that so cheerfully ejaculates every excess imaginable onto the screen that it's like the cinematic masturbation of Patrick Bateman, although Bateman could have probably afforded better effects.

It's all here, kids.  One woman has all her teeth pulled out so that she can't bite when she's being forced to fellate her tormentor; but once he's done with the dentistry, he decides that he'd rather suck out her brains through a straw.  (an inspiration for Starship Troopers, perhaps?)  One girl is put in a guillotine and made to hold the rope in her mouth, and caned (on the bare buttocks, natch) until she cries out in pain, sealing her fate.  Sardu inspects the face of one girl and says "Her mouth will make an interesting urinal." (whether she's expected to swallow or just let it all dribble down her chin is a detail we're mercifully spared)  A woman is tortured with electric nipple clamps until she calls Sardu "master".  More naked women are used as furniture, dart boards, and backgammon betting chips, one finger at a time.  There's also this big cage full of naked, feral women in the basement (the door to which appears to always be open), because Sardu and Ralphus get the bulk of their cash from shipping white slaves around the world.  (their own assistants are black - if this is a point trying to be made, I'm missing it)  And that's just the 91-minute version I saw ? I hear there's a longer one that runs 105!

The plot's what you expect - tacked on to give this thing some semblance of a point.  Our heroine refuses to dance, so Sardu says "this is what I'll do to you if you don't dance" and murders/tortures various women while she watches.  Eventually, a rival dancer is kidnapped and her legs sawed off (and she's still crawling around bleeding to death days later) - finally, THIS is what makes the stupid bitch decide to dance.  I mean, fuck, it's not like he was asking her to drop an H-bomb on Minneapolis.

Despite his frequently dopey dialogue, O'Brien projects a strong sense of charisma as the nonchalantly cruel Sardu, his voice reminding me a bit of Vincent Price.  Nobody else is of any consequence, really, just there to die or to make us boo and hiss, if we care.  I think I'd respect this movie more if it really was just Sardu's torture show, without the marginal plot, regardless of Sardu's jokey plan to have himself hailed a genius.

Yep, Reed has crafted a film that's every bit as stupid and incompetently made as Night Of The Zombies.  At least there's a scene of topless kung-fu ballet, which I don't think you can see anywhere else.  Also known as The Incredible Torture Show, and Heritage Of Caligula.  If this movie could be taken halfway seriously, I'd feel dirty.  But as I said before, if a movie wants me to take it seriously, it's gotta earn it, and all this movie earned was...this!

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