Blood Shack (Ray Dennis Steckler as Wolfgang Schmidt, 1971/1980?/1977?)

Though many consider Blood Shack to be a bad film or a so-bad-it's-good film, I propose that Blood Shack exists on an alternate timeline where the values and aesthetics and definitions of "bad" and "good" not only don't exist but have never existed and will never exist. Blood Shack is everything and nothing. Blood Shack is.

But what is Blood Shack? Directed by Ray Dennis Steckler (maestro behind such singular works as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, The Horny Vampire, Sex Rink, and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher) under one of his many pseudonyms, Blood Shack is only 55 minutes long, a highly unconventional but considerate running time for a feature film, and, by many accounts, was filmed in 1971, though the copyright says 1980 at the beginning of the film and 1977 at the end. Blood Shack resists our conventional definitions of time and chronology. Blood Shack has so much to teach us if we give ourselves over to it. But what is Blood Shack, you ask again.

If you see a faded sign at the side of the road saying 15 miles to the Blood Shack, well, stay away fools, 'cuz the Chooper rules at the Blood Shack. Yeah, that's right. The Chooper. I didn't mean The Chopper. My finger didn't accidentally hit the "o" key instead of the "p." The Chooper. Two young men and a young woman are not the stay-away type of fools because they drive a pickup truck to a barren desert landscape containing nothing much except for a dilapidated water tower, a beat-up old house, and an even more beat-up old house, the latter abandoned. The young people know the 150-year-old legend that anyone staying in the abandoned house will fall victim to The Chooper, who apparently got the nickname from all the chooping he was doing all the damn time, but that doesn't stop the young woman, who decides to stay in the house overnight. The two men get cold feet and leave her there, even though a shirtless weirdo is leaning on a shovel staring at them. As soon as the young woman is on her own, the shirtless guy warns her off the property. "The Chooper will get you," he keeps saying. She doesn't listen. Instead, she strips down to her underwear and tries to get some sleep on a filthy old mattress, but The Chooper choo-choo-chooses her. For death! Damn.

We soon learn that the shirtless guy is named Daniel (Jason Wayne) and that he's the caretaker and ranch hand for the property and lives in the still-habitable home next to the abandoned place. His entire job consists of leaning shirtless on a shovel in the barren landscape, warning people to stay away from the empty house or The Chooper will get them, and then burying the fools who The Chooper gets after picking their pockets. "You keep killing them, Chooper, and I'll keep burying them," he says wistfully. "But they'll never tear this house down." He later refers to the house as "a historical monument" even though it's a shitty empty house in the desert. What I'm saying is, Daniel's a weird guy. About 15 minutes into the film, he puts on a vest, which he wears for the rest of the short running time even though it only comes up to his midriff and seems to get shorter as the film progresses.

In addition to Daniel and the two little neighbor girls who play near the property and ad-lib most of their lines in classic rambling little kid style, the cast of characters include Carol (Carolyn Brandt), who has just inherited the property from her late uncle, and Tim (Ron Haydock, rockabilly musician, writer and publisher of horror movie zines, and frequent B-movie actor, who died at 37 after getting hit by a truck while hitchhiking), a creepy rancher who wants to buy the property and won't take no for an answer even though Carol refuses to sell. We have two pretty obvious contenders for The Chooper here, and there is no suspense when the big reveal happens. But that's not the point. Blood Shack has no interest in the conventions of narrative storytelling. Every line of dialogue is strange, every image weird. Ten minutes of rodeo footage are included for no good reason (upped to 20 minutes for a later cut when Steckler needed a 70-minute running time for distribution purposes). Texas-sized biscuits are tantalizingly promised but never made. Weird sunglasses are worn and remarked upon. We never learn what chooping is. The final few lines of dialogue are philosophical gold. This Chooper, what a character. Do you think Daniel owns any shirts? Blood Shack!!?

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (Seth Holt, 1971)

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is a skillful and enjoyable hour-and-a-half of creepy, atmospheric fun from Hammer Films, despite the cast and crew having to overcome two tragic events behind the scenes, one at the beginning of the film's production, the other at the end. Peter Cushing was originally cast in the role of Prof. Julian Fuchs, but he left after only one day of shooting when the health of his wife, who was suffering from emphysema, took a turn for the worse. She died shortly thereafter, and Andrew Keir stepped in to play Cushing's part. With only one week left in the shoot, director Seth Holt died of a heart attack, aged only 47. Filmmaker and Hammer executive Michael Carreras took over direction for the final week. Behind-the-scenes turmoil can often make for an inconsistent film, but not in this case.

Based on the Bram Stoker novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (also the basis for Mike Newell's 1980 horror film The Awakening, reviewed here back in 2015), Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is about a group of British archaeologists who discover the unmarked tomb of evil Egyptian queen Tera. The title is fantastic but a bit of a misnomer, though Blood from the Evil Queen's Sarcophagus Inside Her Tomb would have been a little wordy. Instead of doing the professional thing, the archaeologists raid the tomb, each one taking a different artifact home.

Prof. Fuchs (Andrew Keir) takes it even further than the others by bringing the queen's body home and placing it in his basement, which he has remodeled to resemble an Egyptian tomb. Talk about taking your work home with you, am I right? He has his reasons, however misguided. At the very moment he and his team were discovering Tera's tomb, his poor wife was giving birth to a baby daughter back in London. She died during childbirth, and his daughter, unbeknownst to her, became the reincarnated spitting image of Tera.

The daughter, Margaret (Valerie Leon), is an adult now, struggling with nightmares in which she remembers the life and death and revenge curses of Queen Tera. Meanwhile, a strange man named Corbeck (James Villiers) is spying on her, her father, and her patronizing bearded boyfriend Tod (Mark Edwards). Several more eccentrics are introduced, played by a rogues' gallery of great British character actors, including Hugh Burden, George Coulouris, Rosalie Crutchley, and Aubrey Morris. Matt Berry was definitely taking notes from Morris' performance in this film, which is more than alright with me.

Straddling the line between seriousness and camp without ever falling too hard on either side, the film is assured and confident and looks fantastic. The studio sets are a marvel of expressive horror movie architecture, the blood flows like paint, the humor and scares land where they're supposed to without getting in each other's way, and the cast delivers the goods. It's a classic Hammer movie good time and a fitting tribute to Seth Holt's talent. I really liked this one.