Blood Sucking Freaks (1976)

Originally Released As: The Incredible Torture Show



In a nutshell: A slave ring run by a guy that looks like Gene Wilder’s creepy uncle and his midget assistant uses some of its “recruits” as part of a twisted stage show that involves presenting torture and death as “art”. Typical chick flick.

This movie is the grandpappy of torture porn (Hostel, Saw, etc.), but with a super low budget and all the visual sensibilities that the late 70’s brought us. Looooooooow budget. So low that all the torture and murders scenes come off as unintentional camp. Quite a few actually occur off camera, keeping the budget to the low 100$.

Dialogue/Acting: mostly awful, and not a good awful like a Troma production, where the script is self-aware and luxuriates in its awfulness. There were a few Troma-worthy groaner puns sprinkled sparingly throughout, though. One came at the end of a scene where Sardu (Gene Wilder’s uncle) played Ralphus (midget assistant) in a game of backgammon and they used the freshly chopped-off fingers of a couple of nekkid slave girls as wagering chips. I can’t even remember what the bad pun was, I just remember groaning.

Ralphus is a super excitable little guy in this pic. Most of his emoting involves a big shit eating grin (that did not happen in this movie, this isn’t Salo) and him bouncing around like a hyper 8 year old on Christmas morning. He was happy feeding the almost-feral and cannibalistic guard slaves in their cage, happy head-bonking the slaves trying to get out of their cardboard (?) shipping containers, happy just to bounce around sporting his bushy little van dyke beard and white guy afro.

Why is this movie called “Blood Sucking Freaks,” you ask? Well there is a scene that involves a demented doctor that Sardu uses to tend to his “product”, where the doctor does some unnecessary surgery and sucks some blood and viscera out of someone’s head with a straw. So there you go.

I think this movie has the highest disparity ratio of nekkid bodies to total lack of erotic content that I have ever seen. Really. Maybe I am jaded, but with all women in the movie who weren’t audience members at Sardu’s show getting naked, one would think at least a respectable portion would be respectable. A series of disappointing presents.

There were a few fun spots in this picture, but there was too much unrewarding crap in between. A budget would have helped: sets, effects, script, acting talent, skin talent. This movie might improve with a lot of booze and a large group of people.
2 Georges.