MEATCLEAVER MASSACRE – Don’t let Christopher Lee con you into thinking you’re in for some kind of British gothic thing. Once we’re past his strange introduction, which probably cost half the budget, MM lays its grindhouse soul pretty much bare. So much for gravitas. Three thugs do over their college Professor after he gives a lecture about a weird painting; he ends up in a coma, the kind of movie coma that allows you to psychically materialise as a vengeful spirit whilst your body lies prone. No prizes for guessing what happens next, and there’s a fairly bad monster at the end to look forward to, too. In the ‘supernatural comeuppance’ stakes it stacks up well beside another film full of similarly gaudy seventiesisms, ‘The Psychic Killer’. Whereas that movie was a heads-down straight-ahead boogie into mild exploitation, MM is more scrambled. It shares a similar B-movie terseness and simplicity of set-up, but weirds the tone with dreamy excursions and bits that seem quite disconnected. I have to admit I was a bit boozed up, but I prefer to think the haziness was in the film rather than just my mind. It’s kind of academic because films like MM sometimes seem like they were only ever designed to be consumed half cut or half asleep. Either way, I enjoyed it. For those interested it’s on YT or an expensive recent blu-ray from Scream Fact.
LEGACY OF SATAN – Another nugget of seventies freakery, LOS is stranger than the above and throbs with an unwholesomely trippy vibe that brings genuine menace. All the little bits and pieces that make the weird side of grindhouse such a delight are present and intact – distorting lenses, lighting from the wrong side of Bava and, more than anything else, the soundtrack. It’s as far out as they come for this kind of thing, basically just someone having a bad day and working it all out on their moog. Very odd, very jarring, but quite transporting. As for the film itself… the set-up is porno-basic, essentially some people know someone who’s into the occult and get entangled, a mere contrivance that opens the door on a faux-gothic chateau and the rituals it contains. There’s lots of silliness, some of it involving a glowing sword, but the weird tone makes material that might appear lame in the light of day seem quite ominous. I mentioned porn, and LOS has the loosely constructed feel of a lot of that stuff, strung out performances, questionable edits, but it all adds to the air of abstraction. It was directed by Gerard Damiano, and some say it’s the stripped-down, expurgated end of what began as a hardcore feature – who knows? But as it is, it’s a high point of atmospheric seventies trash.
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