Blood and Lace (1971): Part Two.

When we last left you all hanging, we had set the stage for producers Gil Lasky and Ed Carlin teaming up on a psycho-thriller, where they had to secure two female leads: one an aging starlet looking for work, the other a young ingenue who nearly torpedoed her career when she lied about her age after landing a hit TV-series.

Also, we covered the grisly murder that kicked off our plot, leaving young Ellie Masters (Patterson) a ward of the state, destined to be sequestered at the county orphanage, which is run by the taciturn Mrs. Deere (Grahame) and her psychotic handyman / muscle, Tom Kredge (Lesser). Again, this will all make a whole lot more sense if you read Part One of our Two Part look at Blood and Lace (1971) first.

Meanwhile, after Mr. Mullins (Selzer), a social worker, collects his new charge and the girl's meager belongings, the plot expositions itself a bit further on the ride to the Deere hostile.

Seems Ellie knew Jameson Deere, the late owner of the orphanage, now run by his wife like a Russian gulag, whose depths of psychopathy we’ve barely scratched (-- and did I mention they already flat-out murdered one of their other orphans already?). In fact, Ellie knows lots of men, including an embarrassed Mullins, who all spent a lot of time (and money) on (top of) her mom.

Now, judging by her attitude, Ellie didn’t even bother with the grieving process because she had no love for her “whore of a mother.” The girl also insists she doesn’t need to go to the orphanage, and will instead strike out on her own to find her long lost father, hoping he will be everything her mother wasn’t and, essentially, live happily ever after with him.

The problem is, Ellie has absolutely no idea where to start since Edna had slept with almost every guy in town; a home-wrecking fact that is constantly beaten into Ellie by the more vindictive residents of … Wherever the hell they are?!

But all of this is moot anyway, says Mullins, due to her being a minor. Thus, until she turns 21 (-- which appears to have happened several years ago to my eye, though Patterson was only 22 at the time), the girl will be staying / incarcerated at the Deere orphanage.

Here we should note that Ellie had already tried to escape from the hospital the night before. She was caught by Detective Calvin Carruthers (Tayback), who also happens to be in charge of her mother’s murder investigation; and he had a few questions for the delinquent daughter, who was apparently an eye-witness to the crime.

And so, Ellie runs through the night of the murder again, gives a general description of the killer: big, dumb, stupid looking -- kinda like Carruthers, she says, and how he fled once the fire got out of control. She didn’t get too close a look, though, because she was kinda busy escaping the fire, too. When asked if the killer was carrying a hammer, an impatient Ellie says she only sees a hammer in her dreams. (Unknown to Ellie, Carruthers already found the burnt remnants of the hammer at the crime scene.)

The detective then shifts gears and asks if the girl knew the man who was in bed with her mom that night? And could he have done it? Apparently, only one body was found. Knowing her mother, it could’ve been anybody, she says. And no, he didn’t do it.

Then, when Carruthers dropped the girl back off at the hospital, he warns her not to run away again, reminding Ellie that it's not safe to be alone right now because, as the only witness, the killer might come after her, too. And while Ellie hadn’t thought of that, she is still determined to escape at the next possible convenience.

So, was anyone else creeped out by Carruthers' lecherous, off-the-cuff advances on this minor? Well, Cummins sure was, as the two men quickly butt-heads over Ellie when he suggests Carruthers was getting a little too touchy-feely with his underage charge. (Bad touch, Mr. Man! Bad touch!)

Here, the brutish Carruthers counters, accusing the county official of turning a blind-eye on the ghoulish corruption running rampant at the orphanage for sexual favors from the owner -- Mrs. Deere. (This all proves to be true, mind you. Yeah...)

Speaking of, Mrs. Deere is in the middle of an apocalyptic shit-fit over the orphan who got away; not a concern for his well being, what with the severed hand an all, or Kredge’s homicidal actions, but the lack of a body that the county will no longer pay for. (Please note I didn’t say warm body, and then brace yourselves for what’s coming.)

Here, Kredge tries to pacify her, saying they’re about to receive a new girl, remember, which will compensate for the loss. One out, one in. This reminder gets Deere back on point: they need to be ready for Mullins when he arrives with their new charge. And for that, they will need the right head count. And to get the right head count, they will have to get the infirmary ready for inspection.

To do this, things take an even more morbid and sinister turn when Mrs. Deere and Kredge bypass the infirmary and head to the basement, where they enter a giant, walk-in freezer. Inside, three corpses are held in cold storage. (Well, four corpses, and we’ll be getting to that one in a second.) Yeah, apparently, that recent runaway wasn’t their first casualty -- he was just the only one where they couldn't find the body!

And these corpsicles must be moved to the infirmary before Mullins arrives with Ellie, so he can be fooled into the right headcount again, again; and then back into the freezer they’ll go before they thaw out, where they will wait until needed again, again.

Are you f@cking kidding me?!? That’s why Mrs. Deere was so upset? Didn’t matter if the runaway was alive or dead, she just needed the body.

Wow! And we're barely twenty minutes into the film, Fellow Programs, and I haven't even talked about the disfigured mystery man who's also lurking about. Is this the man who was sleeping with Ellie’s mom? Or was this the killer who is now after Ellie? This we do not know yet.

What we do know for sure is that Mrs. Deere is a few cans short of a mental six pack because, not only is she keeping frozen murder victims around for fun and profit, but she also believes those frozen corpses aren’t really dead. Her late husband either, for that matter.

Yup. She keeps him frozen in the freezer, too, waiting until “science catches up” to bring him and the others back to life. Spends a lot of time in there, too, talking to him, looking for advice until this miracle happens. Says Mrs. Deere, "What you call death may only be the temporary absence of life."

Anyhoo, when Ellie finally arrives at the orphanage, we discover that Mrs. Deere was well aware of her late husband's long-standing affair with her mother. Thus, even though their feelings about her were mutual, Mrs. Deere still plans to take it out on Ellie after she tends to Mr. Mullins' tour and inspection, where she will explain that one of her charges ran away and then offer him *ahem* “payment” for turning a blind-eye on everything else.

Sending Ellie on alone to meet the other kids / inmates, while the adults, well, tend to business, the girl soon gets lost in the cavernous, converted mansion and eventually stumbles into the infirmary.

Not understanding why none of the patients will respond to her, just as Ellie goes for a closer look, Kredge catches her before she discovers the truth and is quickly hustled out of the room.

Here, Kredge sternly lays down the house rules, including how the infirmary is strictly forbidden. And while he claims it's because those kids are under quarantine, Ellie doesn’t buy it. She also learns that the food is strictly rationed, and how you have to work on the house’s upkeep to earn your daily allotment because, apparently, slackers get no fruit cup.

With that, Ellie spends her first few days at the orphanage cleaning for the vengeful Mrs. Deere, avoiding the statutory rape attempts from Kredge, and falling for some lunkhead of a dope named Walter (Taft), another orphan. 

This kinda pisses off a younger girl named Bunch (Messina), who has clearly staked a claim on Walter as her boyfriend. This leads to at least two catfights between these two.

As their relationship blossoms during long walks on the confined grounds, where they talk in nihilistic circles about all the lemons life gave them, Ellie confides that she could turn it all into lemonade if she could only find her father.

Here, Walter rightfully warns her not to choke on the pits with her desperate, self-fulfilling wishes. But on this subject, Ellie will not listen to reason.

Then all the insidious secrets of the Deere Home for Wayward Youngsters begins to unravel when Ellie finally asks Walter about the three kids in the infirmary, and is told no one's been sick for over a month. Apparently, as far as the kids knew, those other three ran away months ago.

Exploring further, Ellie also finds another orphan named Jennifer (Corey) tied up in the attic. Seems she's been hung up there for days without food or water as punishment for trying to run away, too. And when Ellie is caught trying to help her, she is threatened with the exact same punishment if she tries this again.

Later, Mrs. Deere inspects her prisoner, and sadistically drinks a glass of water in front of her. And to make it even worse, the girl is so conditioned she actually thanks her captor for this.

Also poking around this ersatz concentration camp is Carruthers, who is (allegedly) looking for that missing boy (-- but I think he's just there to lecherously ogle at Ellie some more). And while interviewing Kredge, he grows very belligerent when the handyman cracks wise about taking a shot at Ellie, and is threatened to never, ever do that -- or else. 

Moving on, the detective checks in with Ellie, who confides about the missing runaway, the girl in the attic, and ties it to what she saw in the infirmary. Carruthers promises to look into it.

Later, things come to a premature boil when Kredge seemingly has a change of heart and promises to help Ellie escape. All she needs to do is help gather his tools and take them down into the basement, where they can talk in private.

But Ellie has problems picking up his hammer because she's still plagued by those nightmares -- not to mention the fact the same disfigured stalker has been lurking in her room while she sleeps, armed with a hammer, but who always disappears whenever she wakes up, making her think it was just part of her dream. Or was it?! Maybe. Gah.

Eventually, she does make it down to the basement, where, naturally, it was all a ruse by Kredge to get her somewhere alone. And as the man assaults her, basically as a middle-finger to Carruthers, the creep gets in several gropes and cups a hard feel but it goes no further as Ellie manages to hold him off until Mrs. Deere catches them.

Not surprisingly, the girl is blamed for the incident and Ellie's punishment is to clean the garage without dinner. After she's gone, Mrs. Deere tries to fire the out-of-control Kredge; but he knows too much and is willing to go to Carruthers. In fact, he now demands half of that government money, making them equal partners.

Elsewhere, in the garage, Ellie finds the suitcase of the dead runaway and sneaks it into her room, planning to use it later for her own escape. Here, Walter tries to talk her out of this, but Ellie is determined to find a better life once she gets out and finds her father.

When Walter reminds her she doesn't even know who that is, Ellie clings to the only clue she has to his identity: seems Edna held a grudge against her daughter, too, claiming the first man she ever had sex with resulted in a pregnancy that ruined her life. Her mother then spent the rest of it, however short, reminding the end result of that encounter that she was just an accident that no one wanted. And as a result, a traumatized Ellie feels she has been an orphan her whole life and has pinned all of her hopes and dreams on her real father feeling differently.

Then, after another harrowing night with the disfigured stalker lurking about, and, oh, apparently Kredge’s hammer is now missing, too, an overwhelmed Ellie turns to Walter for comfort, but finds him having sex with Bunch in the garage. (What a creep!)

Well, that's the last straw for Ellie, who decides to run away that very night. But when Walter rats her out, Mrs. Deere locks the girl in her room. And having had enough of the little trouble-maker, the old lady tells Kredge it’s time for Ellie to join her three friends in the freezer.

Still determined to escape, Ellie tries to pack her things only to find that severed hand in the suitcase she borrowed. 

Horrified by what she finds, Kredge uses this distraction to sneak in and attack. After overpowering Ellie, he gags the girl and then drags her off to the basement, where he locks her inside the freezer.

Inside, the girl opens one of those body-bags and screams at the corpse inside -- which would have been quite a shock to the audience if it hadn't been spoiled over an hour ago.

Unknown to Kredge, however, another orphan, Peter (a very young Dennis Christopher in his first role), saw the whole thing. But when he tries to rally the others to help Ellie they, led by Bunch, don't believe him.

Meanwhile, Mullins has shown up and he isn’t happy. Apparently, someone has told him about the fate of all those runaways and, with his job on the line, demands to search the house from top to bottom.

On the verge of being busted, Mrs. Deere tells Kredge to assist the man -- and to start at the bottom, not the top, near the freezer. E'yup, poor, gullible Mullins never realized what was about to hit him as he takes a meat cleaver in the back.

But when Mrs. Deere opens the freezer, so they can drag the body inside, the disfigured stalker pops up wielding Kredge’s hammer -- who was last seen holding a silent vigil over the dehydrated girl tied up in the attic.

Here, Kredge takes up the cleaver to defend himself as they start dueling. During the confusion, Ellie manages to escape the basement and tries to warn the other orphans that Mrs. Deere and Kredge killed the others; and that they're currently trying to kill her, too; and they all need to get the hell out of Dodge. 

But after Ellie runs off, as Peter encourages the others to get moving, they all just sit there. When Peter says, "Let's go!" Walter replies apathetically, "Go where?" 

All together now: "It's a hard-knock life for us. It's a hard-knock life for us! No one's there when your dreams at night get creepy. No one cares if you grow or if you shrink. Empty belly life. Rotten smelly life. Full of sorrow life. No tomorrow life…” (Man, that song gets kinda dark once you get past the chorus.)

Back in the basement, the killer whacks Kredge in the head with the hammer and then runs after Ellie. With him gone, Mrs. Deere drags Kredge, who is still alive, into the freezer. As he begs not to be left in there, she laughs that he won't be lonely; all of his friends are already here.

But when Mrs. Deere tries to leave, Jennifer, the orphan from the attic, closes the freezer, muting the villainous bitch’s screams as the door slams shut in her face and locks tight. Now wait a second, you ask? How'd she get loose? Wait. The stalker let her go?! That's right. He did. And hang on; the film's got not one, nor two, but three big twists yet to come:

We begin when the disfigured stalker finally runs Ellie down -- but not before she stumbles upon the decomposing remains of that first runaway while trying to hide, alerting the stalker to her presence.

Then, our first twist hits us hard as Ellie starts begging her attacker for mercy, crying she never meant to hurt him. 

We then flashback to her mother's murder, where it's revealed that Ellie was the one swinging the hammer and playing with matches. (That's one down.)

Suddenly, the stalker stops and pulls at his face, tearing off a mask, revealing it was Carruthers all along underneath the latex. 

Apparently, he had pieced together that Ellie was the killer with the help of some handy twelfth-hour revelations that would’ve made even Jessica Fletcher blush.

He found the other man’s body not far from the house, so he didn’t do it. And the detective had a hunch that Ellie’s stories of a phantom killer were phony. However, he decided to pretend to be the killer, using a disguise to look like the other man escaped the fire and was now after her, to scare her into running away from the orphanage. But why?

Well, get this: he knew Deere and Kredge were up to no good. And so, he was the one who finally lit a fire under Mullins' ass, which of course got him killed; and Carruthers was the one who nearly gets Ellie killed, too, through his machinations to get her to run away just to see what the bad guys would do, and then bust them in the act. But what if they didn’t do anything, you ask? Cheese and rice. THIS WAS YOUR PLAN?!? (That's two down.)

Okay, now: this is where the movie unleashes the third and final twist, and then uses this final twist like that hammer they've been using the whole movie to bludgeon us over the head to drive it home. Brace yourselves.

For it seems Carruthers has no intention of arresting Ellie for the murder of her mother and the other man (-- whoever the hell that was). He's had his eye on Ellie for a long time now, and thinks she's fine breeding stock for a wife. (Okay, this is officially getting weird.) Thus, he gives her an ultimatum: life in prison, or marry him. *THUD*

Sorry. That was my jaw hitting the floor. Just let me reel that in. (Tell him to kiss your grits!)

Well, Ellie doesn't like the sound of prison, and so, she agrees to this blackmail-fueled marriage proposal. After all, her mom always said there was someone for everyone. Maybe this creep was for her? This gets a chuckle from Carruthers, who then has the gall to mention that he was her mother's first client. *THUD*

(That was my jaw again.)

In fact, he was the first person to ever have sex with her.

Omigod ... This film has reached a whole new substrata of vileness. Yup, that's right: that makes Carruthers Ellie's father.

Upon this revelation, when Ellie starts to cackle maniacally, Carruthers doesn't understand what’s so funny -- at least not yet. (And odds are good it wouldn’t make much difference to that creep anyway.) 

And as the audience retreats with the camera, her dissonant laughter takes us to the ever lovin’ end of one of the vilest fairy tales ever concocted in any medium.

Known by many titles while it was under production -- The Blood Chillers, and The Blood Secret, when the film was finally finished, Lasky and Carlin struck a distribution deal with American International Pictures, who branded it with the rather nonsensical title Blood and Lace (1971) -- for while there was a lot of blood, no actual lace appears in the picture.

Speaking of bloodletting, Scott Ashlin, alias El Santo over at 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting, talks in his review of Dementia 13 (1963) about digging up movie fossils in his quest to discover the origins of the Slasher movie -- a quest not unlike John Hanning Speke’s efforts to find the headwaters of the Nile river, in that it’s too easy to get lost in all the tributaries that either lead to a dead end or keep branching off exponentially.

I find myself equally curious about the origin of this genre, too. I was hooked early by the body counts and figuring out whodunit. I loved the good ones, and the bad ones generally still made me smile as I reveled in their ineptitude, gore and boobs.

And while digging around in a strata well below the likes of Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978), I first stumbled upon Blood and Lace; another archeological find to be added to the Slasher fossil record. And here, I will defend my thesis.

Often, people like to point out that the Slasher boom of the 1980s stole the majority of their ideas from the Italians -- like Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (alias Sei donne per l'assassino, 1964) and Bay of Blood (alias Ecologia del delitto, alias Reazione a catena, alias Carnage, alias Twitch of the Death Nerve, alias Blood Bath, 1971), or Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (alias L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970) and The Cat o' Nine Tails (alias Il gatto a nove code, 1971).

But there’s also a ton of evidence for a just as heavy domestic influence; whodunits that were high on the body count and, like their Italian counterparts, don't make a whole lot of sense once the killer is finally revealed and flushed.

I'd say it's even money that at some point John Carpenter or Debra Hill probably saw this movie, as the opening stalk and kill with the hammer is eerily similar to the beginning of Halloween, where the young Michael Myers, via the steady cam, murders his older sister. And that in no way, shape or form should be construed as a knock. They might have been influenced by it, but Carpenter one-up'd it big time. That is one fantastic scene.

But cheap, off-the-wall films like Blood and Lace had a heavy influence on those that followed: the graphic violence, all those psychological hiccups, and especially the wicked twists at the end.

In every sense it is a Brother's Grimm Fairy Tale gone horribly, horribly wrong. You could also make some inference to Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, I suppose -- if Dickens had dreamt up that story after consuming some bad pork. But, no, I think Blood and Lace is more in tune with a fairy tale:

Helpless children trapped in a nightmare situation (Ellie and the orphans); wicked step-mothers and evil witches (Mrs. Deere); monsters (Kredge, Carruthers); a gothic setting (the dilapidated Deere house); and several characters meeting very violent ends. Only in this one, they all definitely DO NOT live happily ever after, as Prince Charming turns out to be a grotesque pedophile.

And so, in conclusion, being all kinds of morbid, murky and vile in its lusts and implications, Blood and Lace definitely helps bridge the gap between old school horror shocks and the graphic whodunit bloodbaths that were destined to follow.

As I mentioned in Part One, Lasky hired novice TV director Philip Gilbert to make his movie a reality. But this would be Gilbert’s first and last picture. And it’s kind of easy to see why. Aside from that opening murder set-piece, his direction is rather lackluster and barely perfunctory in spots.

His cinematographer, Paul Hipp, came from the world of softcore skin flicks, working with David Friedman on Thar She Blows! (1968), The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood (1969) and Trader Hornee (1970). Everything is shot and lit as if it were a sitcom. And the editing is credited to Dennis Film Services en masse, so we’re not sure who’s responsible there.

Whomever’s fault it was, the film was plagued with bad sound and murky visuals due to the poor lighting, with one too many filters used during the laughable day for night shots. Granted, the digital upgrade is a distinct improvement over the usual VHS murk. But everything appears rushed, which it probably was considering the budget. And the only real juice comes from Lasky’s outré script.

“An obvious low budget saddles Blood and Lace with limitations,” said Peter Shelley (Grande Dame Guignol Cinema, 2009). “However, in the only film he has directed, Gilbert does manage to provide some imaginative touches to a narrative concerning the conflict between a younger woman and an older grande dame. The grande dame here is another mentally unstable one because she talks to her dead husband, whose corpse she has kept (shades of Norman Bates in Psycho). Even though the film offers plenty of Grand Guignol, the plot never reaches the gothic greatness of some other titles.”

In his commentary for the 2015 Shout! Factory release of Blood and Lace, Richard Harland Smith pointed out that Louise Sherrill, who played Ellie's mother, was a horror film enthusiast and had directed The Ghosts of Hanley House (1968), an obscure independent seen by few -- and those that did found it pretty risible. According to Smith, Sherril helped to secure the North Hollywood house used as the Deere orphanage, which was uninhabited at the time of filming.

The film was shot in early 1970 in and around Los Angeles, catching a few scenes here and there on private property without incident. And with the film’s low budget, they couldn’t afford an original soundtrack; and so, it was scored using library cues filled with theremins and horns and is chock full of old stock sound-effects. But this older style of music only adds to the delirium and creates a dissonance in the film’s frequency, as what we hear doesn’t match with what we’re seeing while someone gets hammered to death.

Man, this film is just so blasé in its browbeating cynicism and wretched, sleazy characters (-- there are no good guys here --) that you really do feel the need for a shower when it's over. You'd expect even in a fractured fairy tale like this, Ellie would find her father -- the good parent, and live happily ever after.

But the film gets us twice. Burning us first by revealing Ellie was a killer, and then scatters the ashes when they reveal who her father really was all along. There’s no release, it just keeps stacking up, and by the end the sense of complacent disquietude is nauseatingly palpable.

Now, I figured it was Carruthers running around as the disfigured stalker. What I wasn’t so sure of was whether or not he was the man sleeping with Ellie’s mom at the beginning. We never got a great look at that man's face before it got Black and Decker'd, but it definitely wasn’t the same actor.

However, that kind of a cheat never really stopped a film like this before, so I presumed this was Carruthers, looking for revenge on Mrs. Deere, because, for a hot minute, I thought she killed Ellie’s mom. But the other victim was just a red herring, and all of my deductions were wrong because, in hindsight, all the evidence of Edna’s murder always pointed back to her daughter.

But we're so retroactively conditioned to the concept of a Final Girl, it comes as quite the shock when we find out she was the killer all along. And when you lump all the other late revelations on top of that, well, all you can do is tip your hat. Well played, movie. Well played.

Honestly, we probably should’ve seen some of this coming. But that's the thing with this damnable movie. Logic does not apply here -- at all. By design or incompetence? That’s me shrugging right now. That, and the apparent fact that Shirley Partridge and Mike and Carol Brady must have died because all the Brady and Partridge kids now appear to be imprisoned at this Orphanage of the Damned.

And with everything we've seen and witnessed as Blood and Lace came to an end, I'm still stupefied by the fact that this thing got a PG rating (GP at the time of release), meaning it was open to all ages and left to the discretion of the parents. (Bring the kids! Free hammers given out in the lobby!) And this goes way beyond the graphic nature of the murders and the abuse of the popsicle corpses.

No. This thing is like a kiddie version of Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1975), with Grahame replacing Dyanne Thorne. Or thinking on it, she dresses and acts more like Mistress Olga (Audrey Campbell), which I guess makes it more like White Slaves of Chinatown (1964) or Olga’s House of Shame (1964). It's that sick; all that was missing was some gratuitous nudity and then we would’ve had a genuine atrocity picture on our hands. (And we actually kinda / sorta do get some nudity; it's just not that gratuitous).

Now, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but the first time I ever watched Blood and Lace, the actress playing Ellie's character was looking really familiar to me. I recognized Grahame right away, but I couldn't quite place the other actress. Thus, when the closing credits scrolled up I was in for a genuine surprise.

Holy shit, said I. That was Wrangler Jane?! My Wrangler Jane Angelica Thrift!

You have to understand, whenever anyone would trot out the old axiom and give you the choice of Ginger or Mary Ann, I would always answer Wrangler Jane. Damn, but I had the biggest crush on her back in the day. And after a quick mental pow-wow, I realized that, at the time, I hadn’t seen Patterson in anything else BUT F-Troop. (Both The Angry Breed and The Cycle Savages would come later.) No wonder I didn’t recognize her out of her western duds.

“I worked really hard on Blood and Lace,” said Patterson (Lisanti, 2012). “On the first day of shooting I came down with the flu. They weren’t going to let me off the hook and for some reason we were shooting very, very late in this big house. The producer got her doctor to give me some kind of antibiotic and basically they just put me to bed. When it was my scene they just dragged me out of bed and put me in the shot and then put me back to bed. I was very sick for the entire first week of shooting. I had a high fever and was feeling really awful.”

The woman Patterson referred to was most likely associate producer Chase Mishkin. And whatever flu bug it was Patterson caught also played hell with her voice. And since she had moved to Hawaii during the film’s post-production, Lasky brought in noted voice actress June Foray to dub over some of her lines. This seems to be limited to her lines while she was in the hospital. (And once you hear it, you can’t unhear it as Ellie sounds just like Rocky the Flying Squirrel.)

As for working with Grahame, Patterson said (Lisanti, 2012), “I was quite impressed with Gloria. She was an absolute dear and wonderful to work with.” In fact, Patterson enjoyed the overall experience despite the film’s grisly premise and subject matter. “This movie I liked and it has turned into a cult hit. But to me it wasn’t really gory because the special effects were so bad. Even Vic Tayback’s mask that he wears running around was phony looking.”

Tayback is probably best remembered as the cranky cook Mel Sharples on the TV-series Alice (1976-1985), which was a spin-off of Martin Scorcese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Tayback was the only holdover from the film. Beyond that, he played a lot of sweaty heavies in features and episodic TV.

As did Len Lesser, a great character actor since the 1950s, who was one of those guys that is instantly recognizable even though you can’t put the familiar face to a name. And while starring in a ton of films like Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Lesser is probably best remembered for his recurring characters on Seinfeld (Uncle Leo) and Everybody Loves Raymond (Garvin).

Blood and Lace would make its theatrical debut on February 12, 1971, at the McVicker Theater in Chicago. And it would stay in circulation for years, playing the third, fourth or fifth bill at your neighborhood Drive-In. Critical response, as expected, wasn’t very keen.

The Chicago Tribune (February 14, 1971).

Howard Thompson of The New York Times (March 18, 1971) found it to be “a low-grade exercise in shadows, screams, traumas and slayings that are largely more laughable than shocking” and how “the haggard Miss Grahame simply walks through her assignment."

Also, he said, "There's a good deal of blood and a minimum of logic, or lace for that matter, in Blood and Lace, which was exposed to illustrate, we assume, that horror can be both vague and silly.”

“These days all you need to make a horror movie is a camera and a dirty basement,” added Emerson Batdorff of The Cleveland Plain Dealer (March 26, 1971). And Ann Guarino of The New York Daily News (March 18, 1971) felt “the cast tried to bring believability to the plot, but the audience couldn’t help laughing in the wrong places” before the film “reaches [its] ridiculous conclusion.”

Meanwhile, “Blood and Lace is the barrel’s absolute bottom,” observed Jeff Simon of The Buffalo Evening News (May 18, 1971). “While the film veritably overflows with the title’s first commodity, they’ve really foxed us on the second. It’s probably there somewhere but if you look hard enough to find it you run a substantial risk of needing alkalizers for two days.”

The Johnson City Press (September 23, 1971).

Most critics were aghast at the film’s GP rating, like Lou Cedrone of The Baltimore Evening Sun (April 19, 1971). “Blood and Lace is a nasty, ugly little film that some critics have labeled as low camp, but I can’t go along with them, probably because I was disturbed by the presence of so many very young children at the screening I caught.”

Cedrone couldn’t believe that parents could be so utterly insensitive and foolish. “But they are,” he said. “And if their children grow up thinking that murder and torture are a ball, there will be little wonder why … They really should put this entire film on ice because the odor is almost overpowering."

The Valley Morning Star (June 16, 1971).

Other critics rendered their garments and beat their breasts over someone with Grahame’s star wattage being reduced to appearing in this kind of dreck. Of course, they all failed to mention that no one else was actually tripping over themselves to hire her for more legit fare.

But in The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror (1984), Phil Hardy notes, “For its time remarkably graphic and unrelenting, Blood and Lace has been compared favorably with de Sade for its unflinching, unrelieved catalog of psychopathology, which includes incest, starvation, death by hammer blows, blackmail, rape and torture. An atmosphere of stark, one-dimensional gloom prevails, and the attack on the hypocrisy of small-town America is absolutely unrelenting. And amidst the welter of thoroughly unpalatable characters, Grahame is awesome in her matter-of-fact portrayal of human depravity.”

And Foster Hirsch found the film to be a near miss for Cinefantastique (Fall, 1971) , saying, “Blood and Lace is a gothic psycho-thriller from American International Pictures which contains ripe, though mostly unrealized, possibilities. Loaded with fantasy-like Freudian motifs, the movie is so casually put together -- kernels of imaginative ideas are mixed so haphazardly with scraps from AIP dead files -- that it blunts most of its opportunities," said Hirsch.

"In B-movies like this there is usually a schematic separation between good and evil, but the world depicted here is one of unrelieved corruption. The bland heroine turns out to be the murderer: the figures of authority -- a social worker, the detective, the proprietress of the orphanage and her Neanderthal-like assistant -- are all wildly demonic. The kids at the orphanage represent the only innocence in the movie, and they are curiously helpless and will-less.”

The Grand Island Independent (September 4, 1971).

Also of note: “The movie flirts with variations of Oedipal motifs: a girl who kills her mother and marries her father, and a childless woman who wants to preserve her own youth by killing her surrogate children (there are implications as well that the proprietress is sexually involved with her oldest ‘child’)," said Hirsch. "But Blood and Lace is diverted from its best intentions by gratuitous bloodletting and by wallowing naively and irresponsibly in its proliferation of evil. 

"In that nightmarish climax, the father-detective tells his desirable daughter that 'evil breeds evil.' Gil Lasky, who wrote the screenplay, has used this maxim as his all-purpose building-block, and the result of the universal evil is self-caricaturing: the movie serves up such a relentless array of psychoses that our only response is to laugh.”

Grahame’s career would recover somewhat after the release of Blood and Lace. She would divorce Anthony Ray in 1974 after nearly fourteen years of wedded bliss, which was a record for her.

She would star in Mama’s Dirty Girls (1974) for Lasky and Carlin, but would spend most of the 1970s working in TV -- and would sort of play herself in the telefilm The Girl on the Late, Late Show (1974), which is worth a look if you can find it on YouTube. And she managed a late career rally starring in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) and Melvin and Howard (1980) before losing her fight with breast cancer in 1981.

Meanwhile, after appearing in The Harrad Experiment (1973), Patterson’s film career pretty much dried up. And after appearing in three episodes of Hawaii Five-O, the actress would divorce MacArthur in 1977 and shift to working on the stage full time for the rest of her career.

Once they wrapped production on Blood and Lace, Lasky and Carlin immediately went into production on another picture in the same vein with Whispers in the Dark, which was eventually released by Jerry Gross as The Night God Screamed (1971).

We reviewed that one a while ago, which featured the last leading performance for another aging ingenue, Jeanne Crain -- A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Cheaper by the Dozen (1950). But even though they brought in a more seasoned director in Lee Madden -- Hell’s Angels ‘69 (1969) and Angels Unchained (1970), the film is a repetitive slog. But! The final twist provides such a satisfying shock it will push the film into the win column for most viewers. At least it did for me.

As I mentioned, Lasky and Carlin would team up again on Mama’s Dirty Girls, where Grahame has her daughters work a homicidal gold-digging scheme, and The Manhandlers (1974), where a woman tries to turn her late uncle’s brothel into a legit massage parlor, which brings down the wrath of the mob when they no longer get their cut.

Sadly that would be it for Lasky, but Carlin kept at it with The Swinging Barmaids (1975), where a deranged killer goes after the cocktail waitresses at a certain club, which was penned by Roger Corman regular, Chuck Griffith. Carlin would then start working for Corman’s New World Pictures full time, too, producing the Hicksploitation classic Moonshine County Express (1977) and The Evil (1978), which was Corman’s take on The Amityville Horror (1979), where Victor Buono played the Devil lurking in the basement of a possessed haunted mansion.

Carlin also oversaw New World’s most ambitious production to date, Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), which, like with Piranha (1978) and JAWS 2 (1978), was Corman cashing in on the impending release of The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Carlin would also produce Superstition (1982) for Caralco, a Slasher with a supernatural twist, which includes a circular saw blade kill that belongs in the Hall of Fame of such things.

And yet, nothing they did after could ever live up to their original film’s rather squalid reputation.

Over the years since its release, I believe it was Michael Weldon who first tagged Blood and Lace as the sickest film to ever receive a general audience rating in his essential Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983). Seriously, somebody was asleep at the wheel for the MPAA on this one.

Look, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before in a PG-13 movie, let alone an R. But, again, it's not just the graphic nature of the hammer and meat cleaver murders, but the noxious and nauseating vibe that just oozes off the screen if you ever come into contact with it. And once you’re infected, all hope is lost.

It's a weird and strange little bugaboo of a movie. I'd hesitate to call it good, let alone great, but I would highly recommend Blood and Lace to any genre fan who wants to see the Slasher film work through some growing pains, in a movie that is so rightfully dubbed, and should be celebrated as, the sickest PG-movie ever made. Enjoy!

Originally posted on August 6, 2004, at 3B Theater.

Blood and Lace (1971) Contemporary Filmakers :: Carlin Company Productions :: American International Pictures / P: Ed Carlin, Gil Lasky / AP: Chase Mishkin / D: Philip Gilbert / W: Gil Lasky / C: Paul Hipp / E: Dennis Film Services / M: John Rens / S: Gloria Grahame, Melody Patterson, Len Lesser, Vic Tayback, Louise Sherrill, Ron Taft, Dennis Christopher, Maggie Corey, Terri Messina, Peter Armstrong