Blood Frenzy

Blood Frenzy (1987)

Dir. Hal Freeman

Written by Ted Newsom

Starring Wendy MacDonald, Tony Montero, Lisa Loring, Lisa Savage, Hank Garrett, Ash Monica Silveria, John Clark

            Back when my friend Tommy first started to work at a major American auto manufacturer, the old company man who was responsible for acquainting the new hires with the finer points of their incipient careers made a remark which has haunted him ever since. This poor trainer was trying to impart upon the his wards the benefits of teamwork, and, clearly trying to speak to the youth of today (this was in 2008 or so), he told them something to the effect of, ‘you know, you need to stick together. Like the Ramones. If the Ramones hadn’t been able to work together, they’d never have been successful.’

            Well, of course Tommy knew this was well intentioned, and he didn’t say anything. But deep in his heart, he knew this was a filthy lie. First of all, the Ramones were never successful. Influential, perhaps, but never successful. And secondly, he knew that they were most certainly not able to work together, because he also knew the original Ramones were the four absolute worst people on Earth. And moreover, they were each uniquely despicable and dysfunctional in conflicting ways almost precisely calculated to cause the maximum possible amount of friction: Joey Ramone was an obsessive-compulsive, sanctimonious prima donna control freak; Johnny Ramone was a ultra-right-wing Ayn-Rand-reading narcissistic sociopath; Dee Dee Ramone was a debased, drugged-up degenerate junkie, and Tommy Ramone was a drummer. The four cornerstones of human misery. If Sartre had known Hell would be these other people, he would have died a much more religious man.*

            I mention all this, because the wikipedia plot description of the 1987 slasher BLOOD FRENZY sounds almost zen-like in its simplicity: A psychiatrist takes a group of her patients out into the desert for a therapy session. They are stalked by a killer. That’s it, that’s the entire plot description as of this date in 2018, and frankly that’s such an entirely succinct and comprehensive plot description of this particular movie that I, for one, feel no obligation to expand upon it. But what that plot description doesn’t really get at is that this “group of patients” being carted off to the desert for a therapy session (???) makes the Ramones look like a barbershop quartet composed of Gandhi, Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and Jesus. There are six of them, to start with, something so perverse even The Ramones wouldn’t have dared. And each is more powerfully repellent than the last. Fortunately it’s easy to tell them apart, because they are all defined by exactly one personality trait, and that trait will establish every single interaction they have throughout the entire course of the movie. They are, in descending order of tolerability,

• An ex-Vietnam soldier with extreme PTSD (Tony Montero, MURPHY’S LAW, TV’s Falcon Crest)
• A non-functional drunk (John Clark, JAGGED EDGE)
• A frigid basket case (Monica Silveria, no other credits)
• A very committed nymphomaniac (Lisa Savage, “woman at picnic” in FOREVER YOUNG)
• A bitchy lesbian (Lisa Loring, Wednesday Addams from the original Addam’s Family)
• And the world’s most intolerable asshole, who if he had survived, spoiler, would almost certainly be a high-ranking official in the Trump administration today (Hank Garrett, DEATH WISH, THE SENTINEL)

(Or, as the video box describes a few of them):

            They are led by arguably the greatest monster here, their psychiatrist Dr. Shelley (Wendy MacDonald, MAYHEM, LEGAL TENDER). Sure, on the surface she seems much less unendurably annoying than her patients, but come on Dr. Shelley, what the fuck were you thinking setting something like this up? Your plan is to drag the six most infuriating people on Earth to an isolated desert location and just, like, camp there while they argue and push each others’ buttons until someone snaps and starts murdering them?

            If so, good plan, because of course that’s exactly what happens. I question if this is standard evidence-based psychological practice, but considering the people involved here, that’s maybe a plan I could get behind, and possibly even something I would argue should be covered by Medicaid. There may be more efficient ways of slowly killing off the six most infuriating people on Earth, but this way gets the job done. Slower than one would prefer, but still effective.

In point of fact, we already had strong reason to believe that BLOOD FRENZY would not entirely limit itself to being an unsentimental exploration of the complex ways in which mental illness expresses itself within a group setting, because we watched a pre-credits sequence wherein a little kid murders his or her drunk dad with some sort of cruel-looking garden instrument over a disagreement involving a jack-in-the-box. Since we don’t see the kid’s face (it appears to be a female child, but they could always be SLEEPAWAY CAMPing us) we have to assume it’s one of the nuts embarking on this little psychological adventure, which sets up an agreeable And Then There Were None scenario which plays nicely off the fact that every one of these people is unpleasant enough to be a likely suspect.

            As for how that scenario plays out, there’s good news and bad news. The good news, and the film’s biggest shock, is that BLOOD FRENZY is actually a reasonably well-assembled production, as far as this kind of thing goes. It looks and feels like a real movie, albeit a cheap one, with perfectly adequate, baseline professional cinematography (by Rick Pepin, who went on to become a prolific producer of sub-SyFy level crap you’ve never seen), editing, (Ruben A, Mazzini, CYBORG), music (John Gonzales, no other credits), and visual effects (John Goodwin, THE THING[!]). I mean, it’s never more than adequate, but it feels like fucking LAWRENCE OF ARABIA compared to something like WINTERBEAST. This was by no means a sure thing, and may even be something of a minor miracle considering the stark fact that BLOOD FRENZY is the sole non-pornographic film in the oeuvre of prolific porn producer and director Hal Freeman (STIFF MAGNOLIAS [seriously], and most, but not all of the venerable CAUGHT FROM BEHIND series, specifically everything but parts 5 and 21-23. I don’t know if he was sick those days or what).

 Freeman, hoping to diversify, believed in this one so much he apparently financed the whole thing himself,** which maybe explains why they put enough elbow grease into it that it looks like something you could show in theaters without overwhelming shame, which was certainly neither necessary nor expected (as far as I can tell, it never was). The acting all around is terrible, of course, but terrible in that particular broad, cartoonish 80’s way which makes these no-budget vehicles more entertaining and charming than they would have been in any other era. Everyone in the cast is game to play their one character trait to the absolute hilt, cheerfully hamming it up enough that the wait for the killings to begin isn’t a total dead zone (Loring, in particular, goes full-on Nic Cage to enjoyably campy effect).

            The bad news, though, is that the wait for the killings to start is way too long. You’ll notice I began this review by talking about the characters --always a bad sign in a slasher-- and that was an unfortunately appropriate place to begin, because although there is eventually some murder, the movie spends an ungodly amount of time sitting around with these bozos before the ax comes down. After the pre-credits stinger, it’s nearly 40 minutes before the next kill, which would be too long a wait even if these weren’t, again, the six most annoying people on Earth. I appreciate the actors’ general high levels of energy and enthusiasm, but we didn’t come here for the story, Mr. Freeman. You would think a porno producer would be even more keenly aware of that fact than your average genre hack, but an easy 15 of the movie’s almost 90 minutes could have have been comfortably excised without sacrificing a single frame of any real value.

The acting is bright enough and the editing is crisp enough that it’s never exactly draggy, but the script, supposedly based on a story by Ray Dennis Steckler (THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES)*** but written by Ted Newsom (who seems to have oscillated between porn [CAUGHT FROM BEHIND 2: THE SEQUEL] and horror [EVIL SPAWN] before gradually segueing into horror retrospective documentaries [FLESH AND BLOOD: THE HAMMER HERITAGE OF HORROR]) seems overly-committed to packing red herrings into its whodunnit structure, to the detriment of the film’s overall momentum. Whodunnits are a legitimate part of slasher standard operating procedure, but obviously in a movie like this, the real draw is the kills, which is unfortunately where BLOOD FRENZY comes up short. There are ultimately enough kills to qualify as a “frenzy” from a technical standpoint (that’s a few more kills than an “incident,” and a few less than a “massacre”), but the movie takes a real long time to get going, and most of the kills are pretty lackluster, simple stabbings or throat-cuttings which don’t make for any giddy highs to offset the plodding narrative (the best kill, a bravura flying pickax impalement, is reserved for the killer, which is an interesting move that probably speaks to Newson’s relative inexperience with the genre).

With too long a runtime and too few showstopper kills, BLOOD FRENZY doesn’t offer a lot of reason to seek it out over the approximately 900,000 other 1980s no-budget slashers you could choose from. But if, like me, you are doomed to watch every one of them after being cursed by an easily offended warlock, you could certainly do much, much worse. It has a cast of colorful --if obnoxious-- characters, a solid production, and enough goofy twists and turns and vicious killings to just barely meet your minimum standards for an acceptable 80’s slasher. And, all things considered, that’s a lot better than you’d have any right to expect from the movie’s pedigree. Considering what they were working with, these guys really came together to pull this one off. Maybe somebody gave Freeman a pep talk about the Ramones.

* How bout that, I bet you weren’t expecting a Sartre joke in this review of 1987’s BLOOD FRENZY.

** Or so says co-producer Claire Cassano in Francesco Borseti’s 2016 book It Came from the 80s!: Interviews with 124 Cult Filmmakers.

*** Again, so says Cassano; Steckler’s name appears nowhere in the film or on IMDB.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	Seven People Walked Into A Private Hell... No One Is Walking Out. Actually it’s eight if you count the audience.
TITLE ACCURACY	The judges have ruled that seven kills is technically a “frenzy.”
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, though Freeman is something of a icon, as his appeal of his conviction for, essentially, pimping (hiring actresses for adult film) resulted in the landmark 1987 Supreme Court case People vs Freeman which effectively legalized pornography in California. Man, Freeman had a busy year in 1987, especially considering he directed 12 more movies that year after completing BLOOD FRENZY.
NUDITY?	Yup, but only a small bit, considering who we’re talking about here.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	A dispute over a jack-in-the-box seems to have started the problems here.
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Probably, but I’ll be damned if I can point to a specific example
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never attempt therapy by driving the six worst people on Earth to an isolated location from which there is no escape.