BLOODSUCKING FREAKS – I first set eyes upon ‘Bloodsucking Freaks’ when I was a more militant kind of horror fan, the kind who wouldn’t watch ‘Troll 2’ but would bang on about something like this as if it were the second coming. Now I’m middle aged I prefer stuff like ‘Cellar Dweller’ – such evolution of the spirit. Anyway, I was quite amused when ‘Bloodsucking Freaks’ was passed uncut by the BBFC five or six years back, but looking at it now, I suppose you could say that the grossness is more tonal than explicit. Well, you do get to see a cageful of naked madwomen rub torn-out organs into their breasts, arses repurposed for use as dartboards, electrified nipple clamps etc etc, but I always remembered it as far nastier and less comedic. On the other hand, the ‘lightness of touch’ that seems designed to make ‘Bloodsucking Freaks’ appear to give its audience a knowing wink is more difficult to swallow than the gore in some ways. For the unacquainted, it’s about Sardu, the purveyor of a reviled Times Square basement grand guignol show, who operates a human trafficking business on the side with his mate Ralphus. They get embroiled in a vendetta against a snooty theatre critic and kidnap a ballerina; a football hero (!) and a corrupt detective investigate. Whilst all of this is going on, various little asides and scenes turn up like inverted comedy sketches, most of them involving flakily rendered sadism of some kind along with Sardu’s wisecracks (all courtesy of a genuinely mesmerising performance by Seamus O’Brien). ‘Bloodsucking Freaks’ has always enjoyed an obnoxious reputation, and in some ways it’s quite difficult to defend. There’s undoubtedly way ‘worse’ out there as far as explicitness goes, but it’s just the attitude, sneery and misogynistic. On the other hand, it’s quite shrewd, and could even be seen as a self-aware parody turning the screw on that kind of horror, or maybe brought into, or closer to, the fold of the acceptable through a kind of rehabilitation as a wilful blast of post-John Waters bad taste. Regardless of its underlying intent, it does conjure up a real ambience of sleaze and decrepitude, pure mid seventies NYC, a grimness that clings to the celluloid like a layer of pond scum but takes shape as a series of glimpses of starkly lit cellars, squalid interiors, naked flesh pressed against dripping, peeling walls, and that ever-swarming film grain. In that way, it is still quite an effective film, the shadow of a flyblown past cackling away in its own darkness. A lot of genre fans think it’s wretched, but in its callous way it’s less hypocritical than the last few dozen flicks on at your local multiplex (as was).
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