Reviewing Blood Freak is a difficult task. This extremely low-budget 1972 horror movie defies all attempts at coherent, rational description. What can you say about a film that combines solemn Christian moralizing with a turkey-headed killer, mad scientists, and some of the worst editing and music in the history of cinema?
Blood Freak Looks Like a Home Movie
Actually, the word “cinema” is too highbrow for Blood Freak. It looks more like someone’s primitive home movies run amok, with its flat lighting, grainy texture, and almost impossibly murky nighttime scenes. While some of these problems may be attributable to the film’s age, it’s likely Blood Freak looked just as bad when it was originally released.
The visual aspects of the film aren’t helped by the unbelievably incompetent set design and costuming. The fact that it was made in the 70’s still doesn’t excuse the presence of zebra and leopard prints in the same scene with a picture of a tiger on the wall. If there were awards for worst interior decorating in a film, Blood Freak would win easily.
Then again, the sets and outfits were likely provided by the film’s co-directors, co-writers, and stars, Brad Grinter and Steve Hawkes. (The notion that it took two people to create something this awful is mind-boggling in and of itself.) They seem to have been responsible for every aspect of the production apart from Gil Ward’s atrocious music and even more atrocious editing.
Gil Ward's Music and Editing is Incompetent
Ward is credited with writing and “directing” the score, which raises the question of whether Grinter and Hawkes meant “conducting” and used the wrong word. But since the score consists almost entirely of jagged, pseudo-Bernard Hermann pieces played on electric guitar and inconsequential romantic themes played on acoustic guitar, this seems unlikely.
As far as the editing, the way Ward fades to black three or four times during a single scene about ten minutes into the film indicates that he had little experience in this area of filmmaking. You never know when a scene in Blood Freak is actually finished, thanks to these inexplicable fade-outs.
A Terrible Script Featuring Terrible Narration
The script is every bit as inept as the rest of the production. Blood Freak immediately conjures up memories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. with its opening narration, delivered solemnly by Grinter as he puffs on a cigarette. He rambles on about fate and defines the word “catalyst” in a fashion that would make Plan 9 From Outer Space’s Criswell proud.
The action proper kicks off with Herschell, played by Hawkes, helping out a woman whose car has broken down on the highway. She turns out to be a devoutly religious girl named Angel (Heather Hughes), and she rewards Herschell by inviting him to a party, where she tries to convince her sister Ann (Dana Cullivan) and her drug-addled friends to mend their ways.
Ann takes a shine to Herschell, but he rejects her drugs and her sexual advances. In desperation, she gets her dealer friend Guy (no source lists which actor played the role) to give her something that will get Herschell hooked. She does this by calling him a coward when he refuses to smoke, proving that Herschell isn’t very bright.
In the meantime, Herschell takes a job at a turkey farm, where he encounters two scientists who want him to eat turkey meat they’ve altered as part of an experiment. He goes into convulsions and they dump his body, but he isn’t dead. Instead, he’s become a mutant turkey monster with a taste for the blood of fellow drug addicts.
A Hallucinatory Experience With Abysmal Acting
This description actually makes Blood Freak sound relatively coherent, but the experience of watching it is downright hallucinatory. Between the editing, the recurring presence of Grinter’s narration- his best moment is at the end, where he preaches about the evils of drugs while nearly hacking up a lung coughing from his nicotine habit- and the puzzling audio mix, it’s hard to ever predict exactly where Blood Freak is going.
It’s also filled with terrible acting. Grinter’s the most convincing presence in the movie, which is a sad statement in and of itself. Hawkes speaks so low as to be almost inaudible half the time, while Cullivan seems to be reading her lines off of cue cards.
Then there are the two mad scientists (again, no available sources associate names with their roles). They stumble over their lines, one of them strokes his beard to indicate he’s thinking seriously, and in general they project the air of two random passers-by that Grinter and Hawkes dressed up in lab coats and stuck in front of the camera.
Laughable, Low-Budget Special Effects
The special effects, not surprisingly, are laughable. Sticking a grotesque turkey mask on Hawkes doesn’t begin to make him look like a fearsome monster, and the blood that spurts from his victims resembles Hawaiian Punch. Late in the film, Hawkes cuts off a victim’s foot with a saw, and the scene is cut so absurdly that it’s impossible not to laugh.
All these elements combine to make Blood Freak one of the most hilariously bad movies ever made. It also appears to be utterly sincere in its preaching about the evils of drugs, and that just makes it even funnier. There’s never been another movie quite like it, and it isn’t likely that anything like it will ever be made again.
Paul Brown - Paul Ferrell Brown graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1994 with a B.A. in English literature, and completed his M.A. in ...
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