An Orgy of Sick Minds: The Heritage of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS
NOTE: This article has been written to accompany a screening of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS hosted by me—McBeardo! #1!—on Saturday, October 8 at midnight at Facets Multimedia in Chicago.
Bone up here now and be there then.
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You won’t believe the eye.
Nine minutes into Bloodsucking Freaks (1976), a giddy dwarf on stage in a theater hacksaws through the wrist off a screaming nude blonde. He removes her hand, kisses it and holds it aloft in triumph.
The well-dressed audience in attendance applauds.
“Now the eye, Ralphus!” instructs the saturnine Master of Ceremonies, and the dwarf reaches into the weeping victim’s ocular cavity, plucks out her meaty, dripping peeper, and pops it into his mouth. Then he chews it up and swallows it—right on camera.
Again, the hoity-toity audience applauds.
As stated: you won’t believe it.
But there it is.
And so a line is drawn in Bloodsucking Freaks that the movie itself repeatedly crosses by way of chains, chainsaws, whips, thumbscrews, starvation, brainwashing, brain-siphoning, and an unholy host other atrocious demonstrations of man’s inhumanity to man (or, more specifically, man’s in humanity to naked woman) beyond what even the most grossout-hardened and/or legitimately perverse filmgoer could conceive.
Believe me. I tried. As a sixteen-year-old horror fanatic in 1985, when I first saw Bloodsucking Freaks on VHS, the movie surpassed my darkest hopes and even my most uncomfortable fantasies, besting the only occasionally shared contents of our collective psychological sub-cellars that one would normally pass off as a “sick joke.”
Bloodsucking Freaks is sick, and it’s funny, but unlike the best-known products of the studio it launched—New York’s unequal parts despicable and dismissible Troma Entertainment–this movie is no joke.
Our hero, as it were, is Sardu (Seamus O’Brien), an elegant, highly histrionic older gentleman in warlock garb who runs The Theater of the Macabre in Manhattan’s Soho district, then a burgeoning enclave of artists and performers on the cutting edge (pun, here, intended). Ralphus (Luis Dejesus) is his midget assistant and constant companion.
To secure performers for their nightly extravaganzas, Sardu runs a white-slavery ring. Virginal young women get delivered in crates, kept nude and unfed in a basement cage, and then are procured as needed for grotesque sexual tortures, both on stage and off.
Sardu and Ralphus use these bedraggled slaves as furniture and, in one rib-tickler of a scene, as a dartboard. While gentlemanly quaffing steins of beer, they toss darts at a target painted on one girl’s anus. Then they play backgammon using severed fingers.
Among the theater’s human resource suppliers is The Doctor (Ernie Pysher), a mad dentist who we watch yank out a woman’s teeth with pliers and then drill a hole into her head, into which he inserts a straw and sucks out what the goop inside.
Between such sensory-overloading set pieces, Bloodsucking Freaks’ plot hinges on Sardu kidnapping snooty critic theater Creasy Silo (Allan Delay) and famous ballerina Natasha D’Natalie (Viju Krem). The dancer’s boyfriend, NFL superstar Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster), and the NYPD’s Sergeant John Tucci (Dan Fauci) pursue her disappearance into the pits of Sardu’s diabolical dominion.
Writer-director Joel M. Reed cites plasma-sopped exploitation pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore (1970) as Bloodsucking Freaks’ jumping-off point.
He has also pointed out the gangbusters business that “Prince of Puke” John Waters’ Pink Flamingoes (1972) had been doing throughout the decade.
To make an impact in that cinematic milieu of taboo-shattering box office triumphs, Reed deigned to push further and pummel harder than anyone ever had before—or (almost) since.
As mentioned, Bloodsucking Freaks is no easy parody (the immediate, damnable bastion of horror filmmakers who doubt their ability to make an effective horror film—later Troma providing numerous execrable examples), but it is loaded with guffaws, and even studded with satire.
Creasy Silo is based on notoriously nitpicky New York Post theater reviewer Clive Barnes, Tom Maverick is a send-up of New York Jets phenomenon Joe Namath, and Natasha D’Natalie is a stand-in for ballet star Natalia Makarova, then the toast of Manhattan.
There’s also a moment when Sardu is negotiating a slave girl deal by phone with a kinky weirdo who’s plainly supposed to be Henry Kissinger. Bloodsucking Freaks is audacious enough that, were it to be made today, he’d be selling Barack Obama live ingredients for a cannibal cookout.
Aside from Reed’s odd skills on display here in crafting a well-paced, consistently effective film (they’re odd because if you ever see his handful of lesser-known works, you’ll understand how this one was a fluke), the performances elevate Bloodsucking Freaks further still from mere geek show to something unforgettable.
Delay, Fauci, and McMaster (who appeared on the ABC soap Edge of Night) are great, as is Krem, a real-life fashion model who convincingly pulls off her deadly pas-de-deux.
And then there’s Sardu and Ralphus.
Seamus O’Brien gives one of the great high camp performances in all of cinema. It’s impossible to watch Bloodsucking Freaks and not believe that this lanky, crystal-eyed, effete weirdo doesn’t exist, that once the cameras shut off that somehow this ghoul just took off his sorcerer robe and went home.
O’Brien starred in the long-running Off Broadway institution The Fantasticks throughout the filming of Bloodsucking Freaks. His only other movie credit is The Happy Hooker (1975). After Sardu, whatever body of berserk work might have lain ahead of him got snuffed out during a knife fight with a burglar in 1977. Remarkably, O’Brien was only 41 when he died.
As with Chaka the monkey boy on TV’s Land of the Lost, the one instantly identifiable character in Bloodsucking Freaks is homicidal half-pint Ralphus. Luis De Jesus danced as
a space alien in funk group Parliament Funkadelic’s lavish concert productions and, later, donned an Ewok costume for Return of the Jedi (1983).
His most celebrated non-Ralphus film role, however, is playing the title character opposite porn star Vanessa Del Rio in the 1971 hardcore loop, The Anal Dwarf.
The media hubbub of the past decade surrounding so-called “torture porn horror” on the order of Saw, Hostel, and Human Centipede has always begged one question: where were all these tight-asses and tsk-tskers for the previous three decades since the dawn of Bloodsucking Freaks?
Granted, Saw and Hostel come from Hollywood and played at multiplexes, but Bloodsucking Freaks has always been around.
Troma released it to grindhouses and drive-ins twice, first in 1976 under the title The Incredible Torture Show (T.I.T.S., get it?) and then again as Bloodsucking Freaks in 1984. For the rerelease, the militant feminist group Women Against Pornography demonstrated outside the 42nd Street theater where it played. They were tipped off well in advance by Troma’s publicity department. Pickets sell tickets.
Bloodsucking Freaks then lived on as a teenage VCR litmus test in the ’80s, often paired with the shockumentary Faces of Death, and as an arthouse midnight movie. England banned it outright, listing the film high among the verboten “Video Nasties” (a controversy kicked off by Faces of Death in the first place).
In the 1990s, Bloodsucking Freaks turned up again in a popular bootleg video series of Caliugla cash-ins. Amidst a renaming frenzy that saw Nero and Poppea (1982) issued as Caligula Reincarnated as Nero, and Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977) as Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler, Bloodsucking Freaks came out under the moniker, The Heritage of Caligula: An Orgy of Sick Minds.
That is my favorite title of anything, ever.
I am a fan of the Saw series and the first Hostel (Human Centipede is a just an amusing concept tailor-made for the present cultural reign of Internet nerds; the movie isn’t even necessary), but they each address issues beyond the mere carnage on screen. So, too, do the recent spate of almost unbearably intense and cruel horror films from France—in particular, Inside (2007) and Martyrs (2007).
Not so Bloodsucking Freaks. Yes, there is one chilling moment, when the cop decides to go dirty, that conjures the dread of the kindly gas station attendant turning out to be Leatherface’s cohort in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
And perhaps there is something deeper to be read in the upper-crust decadents of New York Society traveling to a dank art colony for polite consumption of murder and dismemberment.
The theatergoers in the movie think Sardu’s heinous spectacles are all fake. We know that they’re real—except we know that we’re watching a movie that we know is fake, so what’s “real” isn’t really real. But maybe we’re reacting like it is. Or maybe not.
Regardless, the power of Bloodsucking Freaks is in its own joy of relentless bombastictransgression. A movie where Ralphus gets head from an actual decapitated noggin should only close, as this one does, with a parting shot of a naked nubile biting into a severed penis placed in a hot dog bun.
With relish.
