Review of Blood Sucking Freaks (1976) by Krista B — 21 Mar 2009

Blood Sucking Freaks is the greatest of all z-grade exploitation horror films. It plays like an unholy missing link between Tod Browning, H.G Lewis, and Eli Roth films. Browning's obsessions with dialects of mystification/ demystification and theatrically, Lewis's grotesque misogyny, and Roth's torture imagery are on display here. Much of it, too, is played for laughs.

It's a wonderfully perverse film that jokes around with theatrically in fun ways. Though he may be rolling around in his grave at the suggestion, much of it reminds me of the aforementioned theme that pervades Tod Browning's films. Though they lack the visceral and dramatic impact of his best and most famous work, lesser known Browning such as The Mystic (1925), The Show (1927), Mark of the Vampire (1935) and his final film Miracles For Sale (1939) play around with cliches about the supernatural precisely by demystifying them. Consider the dramatically horrible but intellectually perverse denouement to Mark of The Vampire. I will not give away the spoiler, but it takes the twist ending to an almost surreal extreme, almost taunting spectators with the idea that "revealing" reality will be always be deeply disappointing. It's better to believe in the comfort of mystifications, or is it? Those comforts, as The Mystic makes clear, are themselves another form of cheating and conning people.

Blood Sucking Freaks, in a brilliant opening, plays with similar ideas. Dr. Sardu and his dwarf put on a Grand Guignol theatrical performance in a setting that could only be described as off-off Broadway (this in fact may be one of the jokes in the film.) In short, they torture and dismember women for a disbelieving audience. The catch, of course, is that Dr. Sardu actually torture for real but the audience is "comforted" by the theatricality of it. In many ways, this serves as a precursor to David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Recall the question asked in that film, why would anyone want to watch a scum show like Videodrome? I suppose with Blood Sucking Freaks the question becomes, "why would anyone want to a theatrical performance of a dwarf eating a woman's eyeballs?" It's not real of course.