An illusionist (Master Sardu / Seamus O'Brien) sets up a macabre stage show centered on scenes of torture and (explicit) violence committed on young, naked and defenseless "models."
Paying audiences can thus quench their appetite for sadism.
The question only arises when, beyond the illusionist's strange speeches uttered while he is intent on amputating, severing and operating on screaming maidens, a group of "models" is forced to endure all sorts of anguish and insults: to the extreme limit of having to feed on the remains of other victims.
And all with the support of a deviant doctor (Ernie Pysher) and some compliant assistants of the sadistic illusionist.
Where does the nightmare begin (and end)?
That's what a fading investigator named John Tucci (Dan Fauci) tries to establish, until he comes to the conclusion that reality -often- is far worse than fantasy!
Curious director this Joel M. Reed, who also made Blood Bath in the same year, except returning to the horror theme only in 1981 with Night of the Zombies... then disappearing into thin air until 2006, where we find him as producer of the sequel (in the works) Blood Sucking Freaks 2.
But -to return to the pearl in question- the effective result of this incredible achievement centered on the most gratuitous splatter and enhanced by the depiction of horror porn sequences tout court: such as the one that sees a sadist throwing darts at a female butt painted like a "doily"...
The film's violence is so pronounced as to be, on balance, laughable and implausible: generating-in several contexts-unintentional hilarity.
In any case, the work, most tasty in its visual delirium-and somewhat successful on a technical level-was at the center of a series of controversies that erupted when a group of femmistas glimpsed in it (perhaps even rightly) a rather gallant background of machismo.
The "feminist" overkill (perhaps) was also dictated by one of the film's alternate titles, which, playing with the acronym T.I.T.S. (The Incredible Torture Show), alludes to the "carnal" content (and true center of violent urges) with which the story is, in its own way, infused.
Of the films distributed (and not produced) by Lloyd Kaufman's Troma, this represents perhaps the high point: not least because the forcing of surreal and metaphorical dialogue, the high-flying performance of the illusionist and the abundant presence of (generally "fleshed out") maidens subjected to mental "sodomies" of all sorts (and culminating in physical suppression) make it an unclassifiable and mind-boggling wanderings (of the stunned viewer) in the dazzling labyrinths of the dream world and delirium. In that "perverted" and corrupting limbo of the noblest instincts, here redeemed to the evil one, but in a form so innocuous and emancipatory as to border on orgasm.
"Do what you like best," went a passage from Anton La Vey's Black Bible...but do it with evil, seems to be the film's advice....
Watch out for the disturbing images where a saw cuts flesh and bone--in front of a delirious audience--from a recalcitrant (and I believe it!) maiden: annoying, yet essential, summation of the film's entire climate...
Review by Undying1
