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"The first Plague was blood..." The drollery of this hinges on the utterly artless transmutation of ancient Egypt to seedy Miami drive-ins, filmed head-on and lit like a gas station. From a makeshift shrine behind the canned goods aisle, the goddess Ishtar demands human entrails. Doing her gooey bidding is one Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), "exotic caterer" and author of Ancient Weird Religious Rites, who has lead-hued shoe polish on his eyebrows and a yen for punctuating tirades with chimes from an invisible church organ. The Grand Guignol eviscerations come every ten minutes or so—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 too many clothes, her big-faced beau (William Kerwin) comprises half of the city's police department, the centuries-old butcher with a limp outruns them. A debased tingler on a steady progress toward the trash compactor, Herschell Gordon Lewis' little opus plays like a beach-party flick with Rauschenberg splotches. There's a 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 across 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 |