Review of Blood Sucking Freaks (1976) by Diana S — 22 May 2010

Well, I got behind again. And it's just been a bizarre movie week.

[b]The Pit[/b] is a strange little horror movie about a boy who gets revenge on those who have tormented him by feeding them to the creatures he finds in a large hole in the woods. If that weren't creepy enough, the movie also has the boy, who's about 12, hitting on his live-in babysitter, talking to his teddy bear and sending sex notes to the librarian. This isn't so much scary as funny and weird, but the production is pretty terrible.

[b]Bloodsucking Freaks[/b]. I'm still at a loss as to what to say about this. Netflix called it a cult horror classic, so I had to rent it. Then Tycho said to watch it with friends while drinking or I'd just feel dirty. So I took his advice. But I still feel a bit dirty. The "plot" revolves around a theater of the macabre where people are actually killed on stage though the audience believes it's fake. Master Sardu (Seamus O'Brien "The Happy Hooker") is an S&M freak who leads the show and desperately wants to be Vincent Price. He's assisted by Ralphus (Luis De Jesus "Samurai Dick"), a gleeful midget who revels in the torture as much as Sardu. The scenes of torture are interspersed with Sardu and Ralphus playing games with their hostages. Human darts, backgammon where they bet fingers. Also, there's more naked women than you can shake a stick at. So, I didn't hate the movie and sometimes I laughed through my desire to vomit. But I would never watch this again and can't recommend it to anyone.

This is my second viewing of [b]28 Days Later[/b]. After we first watched it in the theater, I had a nightmare that I had to kill my fiancee with a pair of scissors through the eye because he had the rage. Horror movies don't often give me nightmares, so I am especially impressed when they do. But this led to an ongoing debate between me and the finance that if I were a zombie, he'd let me make him a zombie so we could be together. And I say that's silly because it's not like we'd be ourselves. We'd just be mindless creatures hungry for human flesh. So I would kill him if he were a zombie. Then he gets mad.

But, as for the movie. I found it equally tense the second time around. Director Danny Boyle ("Millions") creates and eerie London landscape as the main character wakes up in the deserted hospital, with no idea the plague that has ransacked his country. Though the creatures in this are not zombies in the technical sense, they behave in much the same way. And this is the first time they are fast. Fast zombies are much scarier than slow shambling ones. Also, the army base was a good twist.

And then there was [b]Doogal.[/b] Sometimes the voices in an animated movie are distracting. That was one of Doogal's problems. The movie was also filled with pop-culture referencing dialogue, which I usually enjoy a la Gilmore Girls. But here it felt flat. The animation was fairly good, but the story was pretty humdrum. Though, if I were a five-year-old, or really, really stoned, I probably would have enjoyed it.