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The Great Divide of hippies and hardhats (cf. Avildsen's Joe), amusingly articulated as a tale of spoiled pastry and vengeful brats. The Age of Aquarius has yielded to kooky Mansonites, naked and frisky before a bonfire: "Let it be known, sons and daughters, that Satan was an acidhead." The ringleader (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) is a dedicated degenerate whose inclusive troupe of cultists includes jiving militants, earth mothers and concubines. They pull into the small hamlet in a Scooby-Doo van and set up Black Mass in an abandoned hotel. Raping and torturing ensues, giving an LSD tablet to an elderly veterinarian (Richard Bowler) is the last straw—his young grandson (Riley Mills) injects rabid blood into their meat pies, resulting in "unthinkable complications." Shot through an inch-thick layer of grime and scored to cinema's greasiest synthesizer, David E. Durston's blast of undiluted grindhouse surrealism always has a handful of jokes up in the air. ("I gotta call the Red Cross," some lunkhead says as infected roughnecks charge the screen with machetes.) Writhing indigestion for "the Devil's cramps," a garden hose against the foaming mob. There's an echo of the self-immolating monk, the lewd grin of the nymphomaniac (Iris Brooks) turning into a skull's grimace mid-gangbang, and Lynn Lowry's gentle handling of a hand severed by an electric meat carver. A pox on libertines and reactionaries both, "together we'll all freak out!" The debt to Romero is soon repaid in The Crazies. With George Patterson, Arlene Farber, Rhonda Fultz, Jadine Wong, John Damon, Elizabeth Marner-Brooks, and Tyde Kierney.
--- Fernando F. Croce |