Bloodsucking Freaks (Joel M. Reed, 1976)

Hoo boy. Bloodsucking Freaks. I'd never seen this infamous cult film until last night, and now I never need to see it again, though it's not without interest. There are even a few things I like about it, and it's definitely a time capsule of weird '70s New York City, but torture movies ain't my thing. Bloodsucking Freaks is probably the best torture movie since there's genuine humor and a couple of fun performances and an S&M and meta audience commentary thing going on, but, you know, it's still a torture movie. I don't want to sound like some Moral Majority scold or uptight prude or square from Delaware, but I worry about you torture movie lovers. Are you people okay? 

Granddaddy of torture porn, Bloodsucking Freaks is about an off-off-off-Broadway theater in Soho where a Grand Guignol-style theatre of the macabre show is staged. Unbeknownst to the small crowds attending the shows, these performances are legit torture. Owner/host/master of ceremonies Sardu (Seamus O'Brien) is secretly running a lucrative white slavery hustle while also keeping some of the women as sex slaves/torture victims/servants/performers. He has an assistant, a dwarf named Ralphus (Luis de Jesus), who kidnaps for him and shares his sadomasochistic tendencies. Sardu has artistic ambitions to take his torture theater to Broadway and Hollywood, and he desperately wants to be taken seriously by art critics.

When one of Sardu's performances is attended by hilariously named theater critic Creasy Silo (Alan Dellay) and famous ballet dancer Natasha Di Natalie (model Viju Krem) and her professional football player boyfriend Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster) (I gotta hand it to writer/director Reed, the character names are top-shelf), Sardu gets an idea for his greatest artistic triumph yet. The idea is sparked when Silo insults Sardu and his show and says the show is so bad he won't even give it a bad review because that will only encourage people to show up. Sardu has Ralphus kidnap the critic and the dancer in order to stage the S&M ballet The Death of a Critic. Meanwhile, Tom Maverick teams up with corrupt but effective police sergeant John Tucci (Dan Fauci) to find Natasha. Fauci later became a television producer and executive (including a partnership with Ted Danson in the '80s to produce TV movies) and put as much distance as he could between himself and this film, but he's one of the best things in it. He's hilarious, and the movie improves in the second half when his character becomes a major part of the events.

I can't completely dismiss this movie. It's often funny, some of the actors are actually good, it's incredibly weird, and the second half is pretty fun once the torture scenes are mostly dispensed with, but I can't get past my aversion to torture scenes. They make me feel dirty, especially when misogyny is added to the mix (almost all the torture victims are nude women), though the actors here knew what they were getting into and were given plenty of warning by the filmmakers. That cast, by the way, was a weird mix of porn stars, theater actors, models, and amateurs who were mostly college students. 

Speaking of the actors, several of them met unfortunately early deaths. Seamus O'Brien, who played Sardu, was stabbed to death by a burglar in his apartment in 1977 while attempting to detain the man until police arrived. Viju Krem, who played Natasha, was shot to death in a hunting accident in Minnesota in 1983. Alice Sweet Alice's Alphonso de Noble, who appears in a cameo as a representative of Sardu's white slave trade business partner, died of a heart attack in 1978. De Noble lived a highly eccentric life. A 500-pounder who kept a trunk full of food in his car, De Noble worked as a bouncer at a gay bar in Paterson, New Jersey, acted in horror movies, and liked to dress up as a priest and hang out in cemeteries on his days off. Luis de Jesus, who played Ralphus, also lived an eccentric life. He worked as a circus performer for many years before acting in porno movies, including such titles as The Anal Dwarf and Let My Puppets Come, and one of his only non-porn film roles was playing an Ewok in Return of the Jedi. He died of a heart attack in 1988 at the age of 36. I've said it many times before, and I'll probably keep saying it. This is a strange planet.