Sal Longo goes down to the South American jungle to find a native method for preserving body parts. He returns home with his assistant’s head in a box that miraculously can still communicate with him through telepathy. You see, he was kept alive in a sacred mud that will preserve a man’s life forever. The only catch is that a virgin woman must be sacrificed in the mud first. He then sends Sal off to find four virgins to make him whole again. Predictably, Sal’s own daughter (Laura Giglio) is a virgin too. Will Sal be able to break the head’s control over him in time to save his daughter’s life?
This is a solid set-up for a horror movie from W.A.V.E. Productions. While the film doesn’t stray from the company’s tried and true formula, it finds interesting variations of their trademark tropes, which should make it a real treat for fans of this sort of thing. The death by mud bath scenes are a slight reworking of W.A.V.E.’s typical quicksand deaths. One of these sequences leads to an enormously amusing inter-gender mud wrestling match between Longo and Tina Krause. Another twist comes when the decapitated head uses the power of telepathy to drown its victims. There are so many W.A.V.E. flicks that feature women being drowned by men that having them drown themselves was a unique enough touch to make it feel fresh.
The usual W.A.V.E. suspects appear and put in fun turns. Longo is as entertaining as ever playing the possessed papa. Clancey McCauley is strong too as his ex-wife, Pamela Sutch is great as the leader of a pro-abstinence group, and Giglio is quite good as the virginal daughter. It’s Tina Krause who takes the acting honors as a sassy stripper who gets the best line of the movie: “I may have to work in a mud hole, but I don’t have to wallow with the pigs!”
Children of the ‘80s will likely get a kick out of the scene where Sal stalks a victim at a video store. It’s fun spotting posters for movies like Inner Sanctum, Seedpeople, and Dr. Caligari on the wall. Ah, those were the days!
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