(Streamed via Watch Free Flix)
Bloodmania was the final directing effort of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man who invented the modern-day gore film with Blood Feast. I don’t know if co-directing and hosting a no-budget horror anthology movie was exactly how he wanted to go out, as it’s nowhere near the same league as his classics (or even the latter-day Blood Feast 2). Even if his segments aren’t very good, I guess they aren’t bad for a ninety-year-old. He’s clearly having a ball during his Crypt Keeper-style introductions to each story, which accounts for something at least.
The first tale is Lewis’s “Gory Story” (* ½). A loser finds out his girlfriend is cheating on him. When he tries to kill her with a chainsaw, he accidentally cuts his own hand off. He then goes around sporting a hook and finds out the hard way it’s cursed.
Gory Story has a one-joke premise: The dude keeps accidentally stabbing himself with the hook. It’s not very funny, but at least the gore is over the top. You know, when Lewis did this sort of thing in the ‘60s it all had a sense of humor, some style, and a lot of low budget ingenuity. This unfortunately plays like your typical bad shot-on-video horror-comedy. If it had been just a lot of gory shit for the sake of gory shit, it might’ve been okay. However, it suffers from an awkward structure and the stupid newscasts eat up way too much time (and get in the way of the gore).
“Attack of Conscience” (*) is the next story. A woman goes for a drive with her unbalanced fiancée who purposefully crashes the car and sends her into a coma. There, she perpetually lives out (and dies from) more horrible deaths at the hands of her lover.
Like Gory Story, this chapter suffers from a crummy structure. It could’ve played like a half-assed variation of Happy Death Day, but it’s all done in such an annoyingly vague way that it almost immediately becomes frustrating. The shitty CGI is also an uneasy fit alongside the cut-rate practical gore effects.
The next tale is “The Night Hag” (**). A bickering couple are killed by something living inside their walls. A new family buys the house and moves in, only to come face to face with the feral cannibal woman who secretly resides within the walls.
This story was also done by Lewis, and it suffers from weird tonal shifts. The early scenes play out like a comedy, complete with a sitcom laugh track. The stuff with the new family is played mostly straight, and it’s sort of effective. I liked the scene where the husband takes a sleeping pill which induces sleep paralysis, rendering him unable to fend off the night hag’s advances. Too bad the ending is fucking terrible.
They saved the best (relatively speaking) for last with GOREgeous (**). It tells the story of a former rocker named Gordo who gets his kicks by chopping up women with a samurai sword. He gets a gig managing an all-girl rock band and quickly sets out to make them his next victims.
GOREgeous ain’t great, but it’s coherent, fast moving, and doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s also packed with lots of nudity, which makes it the best story by default. Although it’s pretty cheesy stuff, it does contain the world’s first treadmill chase scene. There’s also a funny swordfight, but instead of swords, they use guitars.
Although Bloodmania ended Gordon’s career with a whimper, it’s still far from his worst film. Anyone interested in the legendary director will be sure to stumble upon it at some point. Just try to watch his classics first.
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