Blood Sucking Freaks (The Last Drive-In)

Film Year:  1976
Genre:  ?
Director:  Joel M. Reed
Starring:  Lots and lots of boobs...being chopped off

The Movie

Oh boy.

This strange little flick features an "artist" who performs on stage by making naked women crawl out as he tortures and dismembers them in front of an audience.  The audience thinks it's all an illusion, but spoiler alert, it isn't.  He actually kidnaps and mentally breaks women and turns them into his slaves, and he just chops pieces off of them for fun (and he has a seemingly endless amount of them).  When a critic refuses to review his "performance," he kidnaps the critic and a ballet dancer, as he mentally breaks the dancer to murder the critic on stage by kicking his face in.

After watching this movie, I'm curious where the genre phrase "torture porn" originated from.  Because if it should describe any movie, it should be Blood Sucking Freaks, which is almost nothing but torture and erotica, with completely nude women littering its run time and being dismembered, simply because the movie can.

There's a certain...I don't want to say allure, but there's something about Blood Sucking Freaks that makes it almost interesting even if it isn't enjoyable.  The premise of the film involves a group of "artists" whose form of "art" is torturing and chopping up nude girls in creative ways, and not reacting well when told by a critic that their form of "art" isn't art.  This almost seems like a meta commentary on itself, as the film seems to stare its viewer squarely in the eye and dare them to declare what it's doing isn't art.  Expression can come in many forms, and if the film is trying to state something with its crass display of gore and nudity (often in the same scene), I'm not sure what it is.  But whatever that statement is, they certainly seem confident enough in executing it.

Maybe it's a boldness to the film that I admire, because it isn't shy.  It is everything it sets out to be, and you are either disgusted by it or curious about it.  It can fall either way, and I don't blame anybody for having either reaction.  I spent most of this movie asking myself "Why is this movie a thing?" and tilting my head sideways, with a desire to learn more.  There likely isn't much of an answer to that, as my suspicion is that all that's on Blood Sucking Freaks' mind is blood and boobs.

Well...you can't say it didn't deliver.

The Drive-In

We have Darcy to thank for this episode's guest host, professional wrestler Chris Jericho.  Jericho personally selected this movie for his guest spot, claiming he and some friends had a bad movie club when they were younger and this was one of his personal favorite finds.  One can't say the movie isn't memorable, though his enthusiasm for it is almost infectious.  He especially seems intrigued by the women who are slaughtered, which he deduces counteracts the movie's horrifying violence because they don't seem too bothered by the idea of being chopped up into pieces.

While Jericho has a fondness for the movie, he doesn't know much about it.  This is where Joe Bob comes into play, who has a ton of information on director Joel M. Reed, who specialized in skin flicks just a sleazy as this and even dated Batgirl herself Yvonne Craig (I am super jealous).  He also talks about the enigmatic cast, most of which were onstage thespians, and how most had unfortunate ends, leading to talk of this movie having a "curse."  As for all the naked women, they were a mixture of porn stars and college co-eds who were glad to shed their clothes for a few hundred bucks.

Jericho is surprisingly a good guest host, because he always has some sort of comment on what's transpiring and has enough curiosity to set up Joe Bob for an info dump.  Topics spring from odd lines of dialogue (such as the allusion that the women are used as urinals as well) and even the film's original title, The Incredible Torture Show (with one hell of an appropriate acronym), all the way to discussion how there is only one "blood sucking freak" in the film.  There's even the small tidbit that Oliver Stone was on set at some point!  JESUS!  Jericho closes out the episode with a musical number, which is...um...

It's hard to recommend this episode to passive audiences, because this movie is on the more extreme end of what Joe Bob offers.  But rabid fans of The Last Drive-In will know what they're in for and will jump in willingly.  The one thing I can say for certain is that who ever did the breast count in this movie probably should have gotten a bonus.  76 BREASTS!

Joe Bob's Rating

⭐⭐⭐1/2