Thursday, November 14, 2019

Bloodsucking Freaks




Bloodsucking Freaks (The Incredible Torture Show, Sardu: Master of Screaming Virgins)
1976
Director- Joel M. Reed
Cast- Seamus O'Brien, Viju Krem, Niles McMaster, Dan Fauci, Alan Dellay, Ernie Pysher, Luis De Jesus, Alphonso DeNoble, Illa Howe, Carol Mara, Ellen Faison, Helen Thompson, Linda Small, Lynette Sheldon
            
   Master Sardu (O’Brien) runs a sex slavery / snuff ring. He has women kidnapped and tortured by his demented servant Ralphus ( De Jesus). Some he sells to important rich people. Most he uses in his “art” show. He tortures the women with Skinnerian behavior modification until they become mindless servants who will do whatever he says, including letting him torture them to death. He then publically executes them in front of a live audience who are told that it’s just special effects. The crowd oohs and ahs and claps, not realizing (or admitting to themselves) that they’ve just witnessed murder.
            
    Sardu gets ambitious and kidnaps an eminent ballerina (Krem) to use as the showcase in a special show that he has planned, along with a critic who has panned his “art.” Her boyfriend, a celebrity football player, hires a crooked cop to find her. Along the way we are exposed to torture, cannibalism, necrophilia, mutilation, and dismemberment.
            

    This movie brings up the old question, is it art or is it porn? This question comes up with a lot of films from the 1970’s especially with the works of JessFranco, but also with films like The Devil in Miss Jones. However, in these cases, the presence of graphic sex is what creates the debate of art or porn. Bloodsucking Freaks features copious amounts of nudity, as all of the girls are featured in various stages of undress. The problem though, at least as far as trying to classify this movie, is not the sex, but the combination of sexual imagery with violence, especially sexual violence towards women.
       
   
     Any good horror film should elicit an emotional reaction. This is why the combination of sex and death usually works so well in horror; it creates a combination of feelings that normally aren’t experienced together in daily life. The question with Bloodsucking Freaks is whether this is art designed to produce such a reaction, or just something appealing to our basest, sickest desires. This is one of the oldest examples of the so-called “torture porn” genre (Two Thousand Maniacs! came out a few years earlier), and it’s obvious to see how it influenced later films like Hostel, Human Centipede or Serbian Film. However, Bloodsucking Freaks is so outlandish, and at times silly, it doesn’t have the same sinister feel as those films, which makes it a little easier to take.
            

     The concept of the film is actually pretty clever. Sardu’s audience enjoys watching sexual torture, but they keep their consciences clear by telling themselves that it’s all just a show. In that respect, we the viewers are much the same as his audience. The film’s reputation was helped (or hurt, I’m not sure) by the fact that it’s lead actor Seamus O'Brien was murdered by burglar a few years later. If the film had been handled by someone like David Cronenberg you’d have a well-respected horror story; a deep psychological examination coupled with body horror.  What we got though, is a pretty graphic example of exploitation and a movie that is still controversial today, but as one of the characters proclaims, “Who am I to say what’s art and what isn’t?”




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