LET’S GET PHYSICAL: BLOODSUCKING FREAKS (1976) ****

FORMAT:  4K UHD

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on July 17th, 2007)

BLOODSUCKING FREAKS  (1976)  ****

Director Joel M. (Night of the Zombies) Reed’s masterpiece is still as jaw dropping now as it was when it was first released.  It features extreme nudity, gore, and healthy doses of S & M, proving once again, that they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.  

The plot has the Great Sardu, (Seamus O’Brien) and his little Latino midget Ralphus (Luis de Jesus) putting on an Off-Broadway torture show.  The first night he crushes a woman’s skull and cuts off another girl’s hand.  Ralphus finishes the act by cutting out her eyeball and eating it.  When a hoity toity theater critic is left unimpressed, Ralphus gets out his blow gun and kidnaps him.  Sardu tries to impress the critic by running 500 volts through a girl’s breasts before putting her to work in the bathroom, (where he says, “Her mouth will make an interesting urinal!”).  When the critic still doesn’t cotton to Sardu’s “art”, he decides to kidnap a world class ballerina and incorporate ballet (!) into the act.  They tie her up and brainwash her by having Ralphus bang cymbals nonstop.  When they give her too much hot cymbal action she passes out and they get a doctor to revive her.  In lieu of a fee, they let him torture one of Sardu’s girls.  He rips out her teeth one by one before performing “elective neurosurgery” on her, in which he drills a hole in her skull and sucks out her brains with a straw!  Pure genius.  Sardu then throws the doctor to his caged crazy women he keeps on hand to sell on the black market, and they promptly rip his heart out and rub it all over themselves.  

Meanwhile, Sardu convinces the ballerina to perform by cutting off her rival’s feet.  In the film’s best scene, he puts a woman in a guillotine and makes her hold the rope connected to the blade in her mouth.  Ralphus whips her until she screams out, letting go of the rope and the blade comes down and decapitates her.  THEN Ralphus gets himself a little head, if you know what I mean.  When the ballerina’s football player boyfriend and a crooked detective comes looking for her, all hell breaks loose.  He tries to rescue his true love, but since she’s effectively brainwashed by Sardu, she brains him with a sledgehammer.  The detective shakes down Sardu for some of his white slavery cash and since he keeps his money in the cage with all his crazed cannibalistic cuties, they kill him and break free, massacring everyone until the last shot of a cannibal chick chomping down on a severed penis hoagie.  

It’s that kind of movie folks.  

So, what did we learn from all of this?  

1.  If your uptight ballerina girlfriend wants to perform in an Off-Broadway torture show, LET HER.  

2.  When putting on an Off-Broadway torture show, you have to throw in some kind of upscale theatrics like ballet because your audience will not respond to sadism alone.  

3.  Brains CAN be sucked out from a straw.  

4.  If you don’t have a dartboard handy, a woman’s ass is an acceptable substitute.  

5.  Most importantly, if you keep a lot of cash on hand from trading women on the white slavery circuit, do NOT stash your cash in a cage full of hungry naked cannibal chicks.  Get a piggy bank instead.  

AKA:  The Incredible Torture Show.  AKA:  The House of the Screaming Virgins.  AKA:  Heritage of Caligula.  AKA:  Sardu, Master of the Screaming Virgins.  AKA:  Sardu.  AKA:  Sardu, Master of the Theatre of the Macabre.  AKA:  Heritage of Caligula:  An Orgy of Sick Minds.

QUICK THOUGHTS:

Bloodsucking Freaks (although the print Vinegar Syndrome used for their restoration retains the original title, Sardu, Master of the Screaming Virgins) has always been one of my favorite sleaze flicks of the ‘70s.  I pretty much said it all in my original review years ago.  This time around I was mostly just enjoying it yet again, as I hadn’t seen it in a while.  Taking in the wealth of T & A, gore, and of course, the wonderful performance by Luis de Jesus as Sardu’s demented eyeball-eating henchman, Ralphus, it’s about as close to Grindhouse Heaven as one can get.  This is one of those movies that start off so great that you think they won’t be able to keep up that kind of breakneck pace throughout the rest of the picture.  Somehow, it keeps all the human dartboards, guillotined head sex, and Kung Fu ballerinas coming at a steady clip.  Oh, and after owning this movie on virtually every home format known to man, I hope that this will be the last time I’ll have to upgrade it for my collection again. 

4K UHD NOTES:

While this may not be the sharpest or most impressive 4K restoration that Vinegar Syndrome has done, it’s still crisp enough to make all the blood and gore pop, not to mention pick up the stray visible boom mike here and there.  Then again, you don’t want a movie like Bloodsucking Freaks to look TOO polished or it would lose some of its scuzzy charm.  Still, it looks pretty good in all its HDR (Head Drilling Repugnance) glory.