Bloodsucking Freaks (1976)

Sorry, this movie sucks

As Good As It Gets

A Masterpiece!

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is an exploitation film. It has a whole raft of things that would feed the prurient. We watch a torture show with no holds barred. Someone decided to throw the whole sink at the audience. I'm amazed that the content was able to be put into the mainstream. It is uncomfortable to watch and has little redeeming in its entirety.

What a freak show. This movie takes you to the weird world of Sardu's Theater of the Macabre, where Sardu and his assistant Ralphus torture and manipulate young women on and off stage.Just the great 70s exploitation atmosphere combined with shameless violence and nudity (nearly every female in this film is naked) makes this film an accidental masterpiece. But in order to find this movie entertaining, you need a really messed up sense of humour. Here's torture, murder, slavery, cannibalism, necrophilia, masochism and other bizarre things. I could list plenty of great scenes and moments from this film, but i don't want to spoil anything if you haven't seen Blood Sucking Freaks yet.This is a must-see for exploitation fans and for those who think that today's cinema is lame and want to see something completely inappropriate. Sardu will show you fantasies far beyond erotica!

I think when dealing with such a cinematic tableau as Blood Sucking Freaks, with its fiendish goateed midget, s & m and torture, cheekily done decapitation, dismemberment and torture, cannibalism on the verge of an outbreak of the living dead and sexual humiliation, the framing counts. All of this could very easily devolve into a Hershell Gordon Lewis debacle and be tasteless with only the freak show element to it. This is a freak show (as the title posits), but it's also, primarily, a satire on backstage dramas, complete with the melodramatic slave-driving (and in this case that's not too figurative!) director who wants to put something spectacular on stage but has to put up with the drama of putting it together. With, you know, flailing limbs and screaming stark naked women and ravenous pieces of flesh.I don't blame anyone who finds this reprehensible trash, but I think why I enjoyed it much as I did - and though it's obviously not laugh-a-minute stuff, there's a very healthy if completely sick sense of humor and absurdity to it all - is that the filmmaker Joel Reed recognizes Its reprehensible trash. He makes his lead "Master" (And an actor at that who is having the time of his life playing a pretentious psycho) and cohort little man the real freaks, and in a sense this is almost like an inverted version of Tod Browning's 1932 film: a savage comedy on terrors and horrors, especially in the realm of shady show business (I mean, that IS where all those off-off Broadway actresses go to after all!) A good deal of it is cringe worthy and hard to watch - a tooth extraction scene got to me the most - but so much of it is tongue not so much planted in cheek but sticking out the cheekbone that it's hard to take it seriously. This isn't to say there isn't some convincing gore and body parts flying about, and certainly the preponderance of naked ladies in either total buff or dominatrix get ups makes it bonafide 70s exploitation verging on sexploitation, but so much is done knowing it looks goofy and silly. And yet there's even a scene or two, like when the lead ballerina actress under the spell of the master performs and beats up the theater critic, that do have some non-too-shabby camera shots and lighting, making a delirious mood (a second rate clockwork Orange scene as per directed by an actor that is a second rate Peter Cushing why not).Its almost no wonder then this was, I think, the first film acquired for distribution by an at the tome fledgling company called Troma in ny. Though at times perhaps more extreme than what even they put out - Kaufman admits on the DVD intro that if they were to acquire the film today they would have second thoughts - it's a ridiculous, self conscious, sometimes very smart, sometimes (no, practically always) very crude comedy of horrors (or horror of a comedy) that makes its villain a nasty but incredible presence, and some bad acting

Jesus H. Christ!! What on Earth was that I just watched?!?Sardu is a sado-masochist who just happens to run a stage show called The Theatre of the Macabre. Ralphus is his assistant, a midget with a sadistic streak and a taste for blood. Together they prepare shows which the audience think are make believe, but which are in fact (drum roll please), reality. Women - usually naked - are tortured and dismembered live on stage, and the audience applaud wildly.None stop sleave, gore and violence from start to finish, if you can cope with the extreme levels of misogyny on display, you're in for a treat.Distributed by Troma - truly the masters of the exploitation flick - this is a tour de force of bad taste: Feral women in a cage eating human flesh, thumb screws, dismemberments, whipping, beheadings, this has the lot. The lead characters are a joy, and really seem to be having a good time in their roles. There's a good line in black comedy too, and the matter of fact way they carry on with their sick and sordid business is nothing if not entertaining. Not for the faint hearted, this is an exploitation cult classic.Loved it.