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"The first Plague was blood..." The drollery of this rests on the utterly artless transmutation of ancient Egypt to seedy Miami drive-ins, filmed head on and lit like a gas station. The offender is one Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), "exotic caterer" and author of Ancient Weird Religious Rites, who’s got lead-hued shoe polish on his hair and eyebrows and the tendency to punctuate tirades with piercing chimes from an invisible church organ. From a makeshift shrine behind the canned goods aisle, the goddess Ishtar demands gooey human entrails; Fuad happily obeys. The eviscerations come every ten minutes or so, Grand Guignol equivalents of porno pop shots -- a platinum blonde speared in the eye, a bikini babe’s cerebellum spilled in the sand, nine inches of tongue removed from a hussy’s cavernous mouth. "Well, the ancients had many strange cults, honey." The Playboy Playmate (Connie Mason) is given one glazed expression and way too many clothes, her big-faced beau (Thomas Wood) comprises half of the city’s police department, the centuries-old butcher with a limp outruns them all. Herschell Gordon Lewis’ professed intentions are as crass and cynical as can be, the thing is intended as a debased tingler on a steady progress toward the trash compactor, and yet the finished work has the fascination of a beach-party flick with Rauschenberg splotches. There’s a Frank Tashlin movie somewhere in the machete-wielder’s intrusion into the synthetic late-'50s décor of a bungalow kitchen: "Saaaay, you wouldn’t be sacrificing me on this altar, would you?" A poem of reds and blues, with a camera that pans over a buffet of severed limbs only to reveal the salad bowl tastefully placed on the edge of the table. With Lyn Bolton, Scott H. Hall, and Christy Foushee.
--- Fernando F. Croce |