Cover Art

Credits

Director: Joel M. Reed Starring: Seamus O'Brian, Louise de Jesus, Niles McMaster, Viju Krim, Allan Dellay, Dan Fauci, Ernie peysher, Lynette Sheldon Screenplay: Joel M. Reed Country: USA AKA: The Incredible Torture Show

The film was originally called The Incredible Torture Show, but when Troma picked it up for distribution, they retitled it. I am all for accurate retitlings, and there is indeed a freak of a man who sucks bloody bits of brain from a girl's head, but the original title is more appropriate. Many mistakenly think the original title was a reference to the characters' suffering, but actually the title was citing the suffering the audience would endure while trying to watch this putrid film.

As usual, the film has an intro by Lloyd Kaufman, here only labeling himself as the 'president of Troma,' evidently having briefly toyed with the idea of dropping the 'creator of the Toxic Avenger' bit from his title.

Bloodsucking Freaks is about a Grand Guignol theatre in New York where women are tortured for an audience. For real. The audience naturally thinks it's just a show. There is some other nonsense about an abducted critic to the show and a ballerina who's gone missing, but to pretend there was anything more to the story than nude women being tormented would be misleading.

Bloodsucking Freaks was helmed by people previously involved in the sex film industry. Perhaps after getting used to their audiences wanting to see as much as possible, when they went into the horror genre, they took this same approach of leaving naught to the imagination. The result is nearly an entire film of naked women being tortured…horribly. No, not horribly tortured, the effects just look horrible. The film made Stanley Wiater's list of the most disturbing horror films ever made. I've never been overly disturbed by the movie, simply because it's impossible to take anything serious in a film where the now titular bloodsucking freak sings opera while unconvincingly drilling open a girl's head. Or where a dwarf, actor Luis "The Anal Dwarf" de Jesus, uses a severed head as a sex toy. Luis evidently had another go at a decapitated cranium, albeit much more explicitly, in an porno film a few years later…not the kind of behavior one expects from a man who played an Ewok in Return of the Jedi.