Blood And Lace

Hammer Carnage

Blood and Lace Directed by Philip Gilbert. Starring Melody Patterson. (1971)
This is gonna be one of those rare reviews where I throw in my two cents as well (Eric the Editor speaking). Because Skunkape and I enjoyed this way more than old Goatey, he's entitled to his opinion and I still regard him as a top notch film critic! 
    It's a hard knock life for poor Ellie. Born to a hooker who never wanted her, she's traumatized by witnessing the murders of mother dear and a client.  She's sent to an orphanage run by a pair of sick sadists who keep corpses and living torture victims all over the house. She's pursued non-stop by sleazy older men including her criminally-inept doctor, the detective investigating the murders, the violent alcoholic orphanage handyman, one of the older orphans, and a masked creep with a hammer. What's a girl to do?
    There's something almost Raimi-esque about the "hammer cam" in the opening scenes, but other than that pretty much everything about this flick is rather terrible. The twisting and turning of the plot is predictable, albeit kind of sick from time to time. About half of the characters turn out to be serial murderers or sex perverts or both. The characters' actions generally don't make a whole lot of sense. This is all part of the fun.
    Here's a test to help figure out if this is your kind of movie. Imagine you're being chased by a cleaver-wielding thug and your clothes spill out of your suitcase. Do you:
        A. Keep running.
        B. Stop and try to pack the clothes back into the suitcase.
    Now imagine you're a cleaver-wielding thug who has just hacked your victim's hand off. Do you:
        A. Keep chasing.
        B. Stop and try to pack the clothes back into the suitcase.
   You'd think the answer in both cases would be "A". You'd be wrong.
    Speaking of WRONG, there is one final twist at the end which makes Ellie's hellish nightmare complete. Yuck. Do not watch "Blood and Lace" with family members, unless you are prepared to be really, really uncomfortable afterward. Anyway, this movie could use a lot more fake blood (couldn't EVERY movie use more fake blood?), nudity is momentarily present but minimal (female butt), yet it still rates pretty high on sleaze factor. Best of all, it co-stars Vic Tayback... you'll never see Mel the same way again. You know, Mel the sweaty cook from the TV sitcom "Alice"? What do you mean you've never seen "Alice"?!? How can you call yourself a connoisseur of crap culture if you've never seen "Alice"?
   Len Lesser, Jerry's Uncle from Seinfeld plays the creepo who pisses off Mel by saying "Gee I sure would like to fuck that bitch". Doesn't anyone say Hello? anymore! I knew he had a hardened criminal past from that Bookstore robbery episode. KinderTrauma; one of my favorite blogs of all time accused this film of forseeing every slasher movie device known in the film genre like Halloween,Nightmare on Elm Street and Chainsaw Massacre. Are they insane? I dunno they could be right, judge for yourself! I have a special place in my heart for this gruesome oddity (the first rated GP film)? Not available on DVD or VHS apparently! In the 70's GP was like today's hard R but it was meant to be todays PG, confused? me too!
  The poster is really strange and I think it was a Sam Arkoff situation where they designed it before they wrote the script (there's a hooden satanist with John Lennon glasses and a giant hammer)! Gloria Grahame plays the house tyrant who looks like a total trashy booze hound (She was also in Mansion Of The Doomed). The guy she makes a lurid deal with her to keep his mouth shut is played by Milton Selzer the money grubbing relative in the Masks episode of the Twilight Zone. Available on Netflix
Reviewed by GS added material by EM

I warned you not to mention my crime of passion!

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