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THE FLESH & BLOOD SHOW
Crime And Punishment
★★★★☆ EXTRAS ★★★★☆
▶RELEASED 17 JUNE
1971-1978 | 18 | Blu-ray
▶Director Pete Walker
▶Cast Susan George, Robin Askwith, Stephanie Beacham, Sheila Keith, Susan Penhaligon, Jack Jones, Anthony Sharp
BLU-RAY DEBUT “I don’t think I ever made horror movies,” said Pete Walker, master of the dank, cruel and distinctly British chiller. “I made terror movies.”
It’s a distinction explored in this lavish seven-disc box set. Shunning the supernatural and rejecting Hammer’s gothic playground in favour of the shadows and decay of the ’70s, these are films powered by a very human darkness, where psychopaths, self-righteous crazies and assorted obsessives carve a bloody trail.
Die Screaming, Marianne feels like an outlier: a straight, sunlit Euro thriller that fails to thrill, sunk by a muddled and meandering screenplay. The Flesh & Blood Show skews closer to Walker’s typical style, as a killer stalks randy theatricals on a dilapidated pier. Not so much a whodunnit as a whogetsitnext, it’s very much a seedy English take on an Italian giallo flick, all rot, grot and milk-pale bodies. A gimmicky 3D climax embodies Walker’s natural instinct for fairground showmanship.
David McGillivray enters the picture with the bleakly salacious House Of Whipcord, in which swinging young models are incarcerated by cracked moralists – seriously, would you trust a man called Mark DeSade? A film critic turned screenwriter, McGillivray sharpens Walker’s blade and together they take savage, satirical jabs at the forces of repression.
Frightmare, the strongest film here, is a tale of generational conflict dressed up with a bloody serving of cannibalism, while House Of Mortal Sin takes on the church, its prowling, predatory camerawork anticipating John Carpenter’s Halloween. Look out for some inventively murderous sacred objects, including a poisoned communion wafer…
Schizo misses that ironic edge, proving a more conventional, pseudo-Hitchcockian affair, what Walker called one of his “slash ’n’ stalk” movies. The Comeback is another lesser entry, though it conjures some effective set-pieces among its longueurs, as a granny-masked maniac menaces crooner Jack Jones.
All seven are showcased here in new HD restorations. Walker’s grimy, grisly world has never looked more beautiful.
+ Extras The audio commentaries (15 in all) deliver an impressive range of voices, from genre experts Samm Deighan and Kim Newman to screenwriter David McGillivray and – albeit in archival form –
