Blood Song (1982): Part Two.

Greetings, Boils, Ghouls, and all other Sentients, as a Public Service Announcement I will remind you all that what you are about to read will make so much more sense -- well, maybe -- if you've read Part One of our exhaustive Two Part retrospective on the nearly forgotten slasher, Blood Song (1982).

To sum up, in Part One we discussed how a couple of Brooklynites -- one a former professional wrestler, the other a former 1950s pop singer -- both with (alleged) ties to the mob, who collided while making a boxing kangaroo movie, who then decided they needed to make a horror film where a teenage girl is plagued by bizarre psychic visions of an escaped lunatic with a flute fetish who only knows one song with a penchant of killing people whenever they ask him to please stop playing said song. Oh, and the killer is played by Frankie Avalon. Yes. THAT Frankie Avalon.

No. I did not make any of that up. And if these psychic visions hold true, the killer might just be coming for her next. Worse yet, no one will believe her: not her abusive father, her passive mother, or her boyfriend. But as the body count steadily mounts, and her visions intensify, in a brief respite from all the recent shock and horror she’s endured, Marion Hauser (Wilkes) finally gets some good news, on the physical plane at least, with her latest checkup.

Here, her doctor (Izay) reveals the girl’s injured leg has now healed enough that she will no longer need to wear that cumbersome brace. This does mean she will have to transition to a cane for a spell, as the doctor reminds his patient to continue taking it easy. The leg is healing well enough, he says, so don’t screw it up now. And for the first time in forever, all the gloom and doom in the girl’s life dissipates -- at least for a while.

Editor’s note: To let Marion enjoy her moment for just a tad bit longer before this nonsense continues, I will add some empathy and an understanding of the joy she feels right now. Having recently gone through a massive bone break (femur), and suffered through months of rehab, transitioning to wheelchairs, to walkers, to a cane, and still suffering through a limp you’re convinced will never, ever, go away completely, you take that moment and you cherish it, girl. Now back to the review.

Cut to the County Sheriff station, where Sheriff Gibbons (Clark) is nursing a crippling hangover as one of his subordinates gets him caught up on the day's events. Bookending a report on a couple of dogs fornicating on a flowerbed are two seemingly unrelated items. (To each other, I mean, not to the fornicating dogs.) First is a report on a stolen van that matches the description of the one now in Foley’s possession; and second, is an alert about Foley’s recent escape from the mental institution.

But Gibbons is barely listening, which will prove both very relevant and tragic later on, delegates the other two issues, and declares the escaped lunatic is out of their jurisdiction and is the State Police’s problem. He then gives strict orders not to be disturbed for the next few hours so he can sleep off this bad case of the brown bag flu on his office couch. (Enter snide your tax dollars at work comment here.)

Meanwhile, back on the road, Foley (Avalon) has reverted once more to ‘friendly mode’ and picks up his own hitchhiker, a girl named Judith (Enskat), who's looking for a ride to Stanford Bay. He agrees, but then lays down the ground rules. She can mess with the radio and the 8-Track deck (kids, ask your grandparents) on his boss van as much as she wants, but the flute is strictly off limits.

They reach Stanford Bay without incident and stop for gas, where a friendly pump jockey points Foley to the nearest no-tell motel. 

Meanwhile, right across the street at the Pizza House, Marion, her boyfriend Joey (Cullen), and her best friend Kathy (North) are finishing up their pie. At the moment, Joey is encouraging Marion to attend a high school booze-can with Kathy while he’s gone over the weekend, but the fight for permission with her father just isn’t worth it, she concludes.

Speaking of, Marion manages to get home right before Frank (Jaeckel), who is apparently drunk again as he plows into their curbed trashcans. While righting them, he notices the discarded leg brace, realizes he’s missed out on the good news, heads inside, and enters his daughter’s bedroom, who’s faking being asleep, not realizing he is in a rare good mood. 

But this quickly dissipates when he notices the cane leaning against her nightstand. The guilt over the accident rushes back. And thus, the cycle of abuse will continue after this all too brief respite.

Later that night, Marion is overcome by another dream as we suddenly transition to a motel room, where Foley and Judith have just finished having sex. He then presents the girl with a necklace she’d been admiring in the gift shop. She is grateful, but he can’t seem to take a hint that she can’t go with him as he lays out their travel plans for the foreseeable future. (Believe me, we will be discussing how Foley knew how to have sex, let alone drive a car, if he’d been locked up in a mental institution since he was six, as the movie wants us to believe, I think. Maybe. Stay tuned.)

She then makes a fatal mistake by making fun of his flute playing. Sufficiently triggered, Foley attacks the girl and uses the heavy necklace chain to strangle Judith to death. 

Here, Marion wakes up screaming, drawing her parents into the bedroom. The quarter has finally dropped and the girl is now convinced that the homicidal maniac in her visions is going to kill her, too. But her parents chalk it all up to nothing more than a bad dream.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Gibbons is alerted that a local family has reported their daughter, Judith, missing. Apparently she was due back yesterday, coming home from college. When told she was hitchhiking her way back, Gibbons fears the worst.

Cut to the docks. Marion is there. Since her parents won’t believe her psychic visions are real, she tries once again to convince Joey. But he still thinks it's all stress related. After he casts off, Marion goes for a long, soul-searching walk alone on the beach, where she is serenaded by a sad ballad until spotting the dastardly van from her visions.

And perhaps not in the wisest of moves, she stealthily approaches and then circles the van, where she sees the man from her dreams digging a hole in the ground with two large trash bags sitting beside him. 

Obviously he is trying to bury something. And as he digs deeper, Foley accidentally tips one of the bags over, which spills open, revealing some long human hair.

Startled by this sight, and figuring the hair belongs to the latest victim she saw killed at the hotel, Marion gasps. Unfortunately, this alerts Foley, who sees her before she can run away. In her panic, Marion drops the cane, never to be seen again, and flees into the woods. Foley, meanwhile, takes up his trusted axe and chases after her.

Luckily for the hobbled Marion, she runs into some classmates out target shooting in the woods. Between gasps for air, she relates what she saw and where. Here, the armed teens split up, one staying with Marion while the others head back to where the van was spotted. However, they quickly return with nothing to report.

Maybe you just thought you saw something, one of them says, noting they’d heard she’d been having some weird dreams lately. (I’m thinking confiding in blabbermouth Kathy wasn’t such a hot idea.) Regardless, the boys offer to take her home. When they arrive, no one else is there. And so, Marion quickly works to lock every door and window.

Meanwhile, Foley is back at the gas station, laying out a cock ‘n’ bull story to the attendant about how he's thinking of moving his family to Stanford Bay and would like to check out the high schools. He is told there is only one. Thus, that is where he will start looking for the girl who got away.

Next we have one of those maddening moments where the killer could’ve been stopped right then and there, with multiple lives saved, if only Sheriff Gibbons was any good at his job. See, he pulled into the station before Foley could leave. But the killer pulls another story out of his butt about camping in the area out of his van, which satisfies Gibbons. Who might’ve recognized Foley and the van if he’d bothered to read the APBs on them.

To make matters even worse, Gibbons says he’s interested in buying a similar van and asks to take a look inside. Here, Foley panics when the Sheriff receives a call on his radio. And while he attends to that, Foley discretely vacates the premises. 

Oh, and the reason for that call? The radio dispatcher was hoping Gibbons could pick him up a cheeseburger on the way back to the station. [Chief Wiggum/] “Good job, boys. [/Chief Wiggum].

The next day at school, Marion spots Foley’s van lurking around outside. But when the final bell of the day rings, Foley is long gone. With Marion now more paranoid than ever, Kathy is really starting to worry about her friend’s mental state, fearing either her and Joey had a nasty fight or, worse yet, did she get pregnant? The answer to both is no.

On the walk to the docks, their conversation then shifts to if Joey and Marion still plan to run off together. This Marion confirms to be true. Aren’t you worried about your parents sending the cops to bring you back, asks Kathy. Before she can answer, Marion asks if Kathy heard a flute just now. Nope.Then a worried Kathy watches her friend dither, as if someone was following them. When asked why she has been acting so strange lately, Marion promises that one day she will explain everything.

Once Joey’s boat arrives and Kathy heads home, Marion tells Joey about the man, the van, and the body he was trying to bury near Beck’s Beach. No, she didn’t call the sheriff. And no, she didn’t tell her folks, either. Why? They’d never believe her, she insists. Here, Joey still contends there’s a reasonable explanation for what she saw. However, he does agree to go with her to scope out where this all allegedly happened -- but on one condition:

If they don’t find anything, she must stop obsessing over all this rampaging homicidal lunatic stuff. She agrees.

Now, while there is evidence that a vehicle had been parked where she said it was, all Joey manages to dig up are some garbage bags filled with actual trash. Here, Marion breaks down, swearing she's not crazy. Joey assures he believes her, and that she saw something, it just wasn’t what Marion thought it was.

So, what did Foley actually do with the body? We get our answer quick enough when Gibbons is called away from cheeseburger duty to an alley where a body had been found. He arrives to the sound of retching from one of his deputies, and then he sees why: the grotesquely dismembered corpse of the missing hitchhiker.

Meanwhile, Joey takes Marion home. Here they once again profess their love for one another and reiterate their escape plan. When Marion mentions that her father will come after them, Joey responds he’ll have to find us first. With a promise to call as soon as he reaches Portland in the morning, Joey leaves, not realizing they’d already been caught. 

But not by Foley, who has been clandestinely following them ever since they left the docks, but by Frank, who saw them smooching in the car. This earns Marion a slap to the face when she gets inside the house, with Frank automatically assuming she and Joey are sleeping together in a biblical sense. Or dogs fornicating in a flowerbed sense. Or something.

Once again her mother, Bea (Bower), tries to intervene, saying they both need to go if they’re to make a PTA meeting. But Frank refuses to leave, convinced that Joey is going to come back for some, well, sloppy seconds. He orders Bea to go on without him, then confines Marion to her bedroom, grabs another beer, and plops on the couch to stand vigil. 

Before she leaves, Bea asks if Frank realizes what he is doing to their only child. Then bluntly asks is there no love left at all? Sadly, he has no answer.

Half a six pack later, Frank appears to be on the verge of reevaluating some of his life choices when it comes to his daughter. Alas, this realization comes too late as Foley chooses that exact moment to break in, axe in hand!

The men fight, and Frank takes an axe blow to the chest, his cheek and both legs. Drawn out by the commotion, Marion sees what is happening and is horrified. Frank screams at her to run. She does. 

Here, Foley tries to give chase but Frank rallies long enough to let her get away. Foley then flies into a rage and keeps swinging the axe. Frank will not be getting up again.

Now, I’m not sure why Marion didn’t try to run to a neighbor's house for help. To her (and the film's credit) she does try entering a grocery store; but even though the lights are on it's locked up for the night. She even tries to call the police from a pay phone (-- kids, ask your grandparents); but by then Foley has caught up to her with the van, and eventually herds her into a nearby lumber mill.

The mill is huge, a true rat's nest of stairways and machinery, with hundreds of places, nooks and crannies, to hide. But like in any other slasher film, no matter how many times she tries to hide, or how well hidden, Foley manages to track Marion down. (Which would make more sense if they hadn’t completely abandoned their psychic link about two reels ago.)

Worse yet, Foley flips on nearly every power box he sees, starting up all the wood processing machines -- all lethal and armed with steel teeth that could shred or mulch anything to a pulp in seconds.

But in the resulting cacophony, Marion manages to get her hands on a pick and gets the drop on her pursuer, burying the blade up to the hilt in his stomach. This breaks what few mental twigs Foley had left as he starts screaming about how she hurt him, and how this wasn’t fair. 

Then Marion tags him again, stabbing him in the hand. But instead of checking for a pulse -- in a Pacific Rim sense -- she then flees again, again.

Elsewhere, the cops are at Marion’s house, where Bea had discovered her husband dead and her daughter missing. Deputy Dipstick assumes this is the work of the same killer who killed the hitchhiker. Sheriff Dipstick doesn’t disagree, and charges his men to find the girl and catch the bastard who did this. Good luck with that, Dipsticks.

Meanwhile, back at the mill, things have escalated even further as, it turns out, Marion has brought a knife to a forklift fight as Foley commandeers one of the contraptions, guns the engine, and uses it to chase her deeper into the building. 

But! This action also draws the attention of the night watchmen (Clark), who can’t believe what is happening before his eyes despite Marion’s best efforts to warn him. Alas, he does not heed and winds up being crushed to death when Foley rams him with the forklift.

Then, this game of cat and mouse officially comes to an end with Marion stuck on top of several pallets of lumber, which the cackling Foley snares on the tines, and then lowers her down, screaming their game is finally over, right into his grasp.

But Marion is done running and once more goes on the offensive. And as they struggle, Foley loses control of the forklift, which plows through a nearby exterior wall, knocking the girl clear. 

Foley, however, is still behind the wheel when the machine rockets off the pier and crashes down into the bay below, where they both sink out of sight. (I love how the buoyant pieces of wood angrily break the surface and pop back up and out of the water in this scene.)

Later, Sheriff Gibbons gets word that the Hauser girl has been found wandering near the mill. Marion is then brought back to the station, but she’s not really here anymore. In shock, she keeps mumbling about how she killed Foley. The man she dreamt about. The man who killed all those people. Who killed her daddy, too. 

With that, Gibbons pleads with the girl to start from the beginning and tell him exactly what happened.

Cut to the mill, where reporters have gathered as several workers manage to successfully recover the forklift from the bay. Then Gibbons arrives just as some divers claim to have found a body. Assuming this is the killer, Gibbons is surprised to see that, no, it’s the night watchmen.

Cut to the road to Portland, where Joey stops and picks up a hitchhiker. You guessed it, the hitchhiker turns out to be Foley, alive and well. Joey? Not so much.

Cut to the hospital, where (a reasonable facsimile of) Marion wakes up screaming, having seen the whole thing in another nightmare. (More on the facsimile thing in a bit.) 

As she tries to warn the attendants that the killer is still out there, and how he’s after Joey, of course they don’t believe her. And when she refuses to calm down, they wind up restraining the poor girl to the bed and then end this interlude with a sedative. 

One of the orderlies then asks the charge nurse to page Doctor Monte because the patient in room 205 just had some kind of seizure or fit. Once he clears off, another attendant picks up Marion’s chart and heads to her room. Only this isn’t Doctor Monte. 

No. It’s Foley. There to end their game once and for all as we fade to black with a madman's cackle mixed with the girl's screaming, which brings us to the end of our precognitive tale of murder and mayhem. 

DEFEND YOUR THESIS:

In the October 31, 1980, edition of The Eugene Register-Guard, a brief press release with a dateline of Coos Bay, Oregon, stated, “An independent film group says it will pump $1.3 million into the depressed economy of this central Oregon Coastal area during the shooting of a film about an axe murderer. The film, titled Premonitions, features Frankie Avalon as the murderer, said producer Lenny Montana.

“Coos County has been hit hard by slumps in the timber and fishing industries,” the blurb continued. “Director Alan Levi and his crew of 75 began filming last week and plan to spend about three weeks in the area. ‘It’s a nice quiet community,’ said Levi. ‘We knew there was a little problem with money and decided to bring some dollars into town.’”

According to an article by Charles Kocher for The Coos Bay World (October 22, 1980, which is no longer extant online, much to my consternation), the idea to shoot in the area was Jim Kimbrell’s, whom the article said was an executive for Mountain High Enterprises -- one of two production companies backing the picture along with Allstate Film Company. Apparently, Kimbrell had formerly lived there and felt “it would be an ideal setting for the film.”

And so, Levi, with his cast and crew, would descend on Coos Bay the last week of October, 1980, and would shoot for either two to three weeks, depending on which source you consult. The number that kept cropping up the most was 22 days of actual filming all over the region. 

Other locations used were in the neighboring cities of Charleston, Coquille and Northbend, where you would collectively find the Pony Village Mall, Gino's Pizzeria (subbing in as the Pizza House), the Charleston Small Boat Basin, the Southsider Hotel, the Coquille Police headquarters, and the Coos Head Timber Company, whose mill and warehouses on Bunker Hill provided the stellar location for the climax.

Meanwhile, St. Catherine’s Hospital in North Bend served as the psychiatric ward Foley escapes from, and then later breaks back into to torment our faux final girl even further, which has since been converted into a retirement home.

Scenes were also shot at both Marshfield and North Bend High Schools. In my research, I found an alumni Facebook group for the North Bend High Bulldogs and a post (March 17, 2025) asking if anyone remembered the horror film that was shot in their hometown back in 1980, and reading through the responses was an absolute scream!

One poster claimed they were working at Gino's Pizza when they filmed there. Some claimed to have been an actual extra in the film in the scenes shot in Mrs. McNamer’s first period class at North Bend High; or knew somebody who was an extra; or knew somebody who knew somebody who was an extra. And one alleged extra was flummoxed over how she was taller than Avalon. (He only stood at five-feet-six, a full foot shorter than Montana.)

Other posts got very specific on filming locations, including a house on Hall Street and another on the corner of Ingersoll and 5th. Another claimed their mom gave Avalon a ride from the hotel to a local restaurant. 

But I think my favorite was from a poster whose family volunteered their cats to jump out of a closet for a scripted jump scare, only the cats refused to cooperate, as they do, and the scene had to be cut. Also of note, they all agreed the film was pretty terrible.  

Frankie Avalon.

As for how Avalon got involved in the first place, well, that was Levi’s idea. “The director saw me on a Fantasy Island episode and liked my work,” Avalon told Lynn Van Marte for The Austin American-Statesman (July 23, 1983). “He wanted me for the film because he liked the idea of me playing against my usual nice-guy image.”

The episode in question was “Terrors of the Mind” (S3:E19, 1980). Curious, I tracked it down, gave it a watch, and the tenants of the plot might ring kinda familiar. A woman (Lisa Hartman) wants to know what her future holds. Her host, Mr. Roarke (Ricardo Montalban), gives her a magic ring that lets her see into the future. But this comes with a warning about paradoxes and predestination. Basically, even if you are aware of what the future holds, you might not be able to change it. And if you do, you might make things even worse.

Her first glimpse into the future allows her to save a man (Avalon) from being hit by a drunk driver. As a show of gratitude, he invites her out for a night of gambling on him where she uses her new parlor trick to cheat at roulette to the point of nearly bankrupting the casino.

Later visions show someone is out to kill her but it's unclear at first as to who. Here, the episode lays out plenty of breadcrumbs that Avalon might be the one trying to kill her to get his hands on the money, which would’ve made for a nice ironic twist. But, nope, turns out it was the casino owner all along, who couldn’t afford the payout and decided to just kill her instead. The two lovers then leave the island together. The End.

The Grand Island Independent (October 9, 1963).

Now, to be perfectly clear upfront: I am an unabashed fan of both Avalon and the Beach Party movies -- hell, basically everything he did for American International. They are not even guilty pleasures because there is no detectable guilt involved. At all. They were righteously goofy, the beach girls were absolutely adorable (-- still crushing on Patti Chandler), and the tunes were catchy as hell. And to me, I don’t know, Avalon always seemed like a stand-up guy who never lost that South Philly-bred edge no matter how deep the kitschy cheese got.

“My feelings about the beach films have never changed,” said Avalon in an interview with Billy King for The Atlanta Constitution (April 10, 1982). “I liked them when I did them and like them now. They were good, solid, fun, entertaining family type pictures. They did what they were meant to do, which was to bring laughs and fun to a lot of people.”

As for being typecast for all eternity, Avalon had grown philosophical over the years. “Oh, I’m sure it has typecast me. And I went through a period of my life when I’d say, ‘My god, I’m always going to be considered the beach boy.’ But as I got older and wiser, I realized what an opportunity those films gave me. And now I’m thrilled I got the chance to do them.”

Also of note, at the time of filming Blood Song, Avalon was in the natal stages of reviving the franchise with The Last Beach Party. This, of course, eventually turned into the truly hilarious Back to the Beach (1987) -- which was worth it for the Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughn cover of The Chantays “Pipeline” alone.

Avalon was born Francis Thomas Avallone in South Philadelphia on September 18, 1940. As the legend goes, when he was around ten years old, Avalon was so entranced by the Michael Curtiz film Young Man with a Horn (1950) he stayed to watch the film five or six times in one sitting. And so hooked was he, not two days later he talked his father into buying him a trumpet, which he mastered in less than a year.

Soon enough, billed as ‘The Boy Wizard of the Horn’, Avalon was playing gigs at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. And in 1952, at the age of 12, he would appear on a Honeymooners Christmas party sketch on The Jackie Gleason Show (S1, E13, 1952). And he would then join the group Rocco and the Saints, which also featured Bobby Rydell, who released two singles through RCA Victor.

Turned out Avalon had another musical talent, too: singing, which noted bandleader Ray Anthony encouraged him to develop further. And though Avalon never really gave up the trumpet, most of his music career that followed centered on him as a vocalist after he signed on to Bob Marcucci’s Chancellor Records.

A legendary Philadelphia impresario, Marcucci helped the young star really break out with hits like “Venus” and “Why.” “I was signed to a local record company with a group,” Avalon recalled (King, 1982). "And we put out a record that started to make a little noise around the country. Then they singled me out of the group and had me record some things as a solo and we started to build a following.”

At the time Elvis went into the Army in 1958, Avalon would join the likes of Rydell, Fabian Forte, Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka, and Paul Anka in a tidal wave of clean-cut Teen Idols that really shaved the edges off of Rock ‘n’ Roll until the Beatles invaded America. Still, Avalon’s single “Venus” would spend five consecutive weeks atop the charts in 1959 and sell over 7-million copies; and the singer would chart 31 more songs from 1958 to 1962.

“I was so involved in trying to build a career,” said Avalon on his burgeoning stardom (King, 1982). “It was fun and exciting, and of course, I enjoyed it. But I was busy looking for other things to grow as a singer and branch out to achieve certain goals I had.” One of which was acting.

He would make his big screen debut opposite Alan Ladd in the western Guns of the Timberland (1960). Apparently, Ladd’s daughter was a huge fan and encouraged her father to get Avalon in the movie. This would in turn get him on John Wayne’s radar, who cast him in the role of Smitty, one of the youngest defenders of The Alamo (1960). Wayne would produce, direct and star as Davy Crockett in the historical epic, with Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie, and Laurence Harvey as William Travis. True to history, only Avalon’s fictional character would survive the film.

“In the course of editing, we’re not cutting one bit of any scene in which Frankie appears,” Wayne told Philip K. Scheuer of The Los Angeles Times (April 6, 1960). “I believe he is the finest young talent I’ve seen in a long time.”

Avalon would follow that up with a role in Irwin Allen’s proto-disaster movie, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), where he got to play the horn and sing the title song; and he would headline Drums of Africa (1963) for MGM. And I was finally able to track down a copy of Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), a screwball comedy of errors wrapped up in a bank heist film, and was not disappointed. Avalon was joined by Robert Wagner, Dolores Hart, Frank Gorshin, Carolyn Jones, Ernie Kovacs, and Harvey Lembeck, who would go on to play Avalon’s constant foil, Eric Von Zipper, a combination of Brando’s Johnny Stabler and all Three Stooges, in the Beach Party series.

Speaking off, and strangely enough, Avalon’s first in a long line of pictures for American International didn’t start at the beach, nor the second. No. His first foray at the major minor was doing voiceover work for Alakazam the Great (alias Saiyūki, 1960), one of the first anime features imported from Toei in Japan. Avalon would do the singing for dubbing legend Peter Fernandez -- probably best known for voicing Speed Racer. And the second film would be the criminally underappreciated Panic in the Year Zero! (1962).

In that film, Ray Milland, who also directed, takes his family out of Los Angeles for a camping adventure with his wife (Jean Hagen) and two teenage kids (Avalon and Marie Mitchell). Thus, good timing has them way up the road when an atomic bomb takes out the city. From there, tensions rise as Milland moves to protect his family at all costs from the inevitable collapse of civilization.

“It came out to real good reviews,” explained Avalon to Susan King of The Los Angeles Times (January 7, 2003). “AIP was smart enough to send the stars with the picture around the country to promote it. We did a tour of theaters in Los Angeles, and it made its money back just in Los Angeles alone.”

With that, AIP would sign Avalon to a nonexclusive contract. According to the King article, he was friendly with regular AIP screenwriter Lou Russoff -- Day the World Ended (1955), Dragstrip Girl (1957), and together, they would hatch the idea for Beach Party (1963), which eschewed the usual trappings of AIP’s juvenile delinquent message pictures and focused instead on what happens to 100 co-eds with 50 beach blankets when the sun went down, the moon came out, and the water got too cold to surf.

“It was about young guys on a beach with their girls,” said Avalon (King, 2003). “The next thing I knew, they cast this girl on loan from Disney named Annette Funicello. The director was Bill Asher. I had worked with Bill when he was doing a lot of specials for television. We talked about the project, and sooner or later we were on the set doing it. We were constantly filming. We were doing 28 setups a day. And it just worked.”

The Grand Island Independent (September, 1973). 

From 1963 to 1966, Avalon would star in 10 more features for AIP, including four Beach Party sequels -- Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965); two adjacent Beach Party movies -- Pajama Party (1964), and Ski Party (1964), the second being a pretty good riff on Some Like it Hot (1959) with Avalon and Dwayne Hickman taking over for Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis; and two Beachniks go to war epics -- Operation Bikini (1963) and Sergeant Deadhead (1965); and a stock car adventure in Fireball 5000 (1966).

Topping it off would be some spy shenanigans with Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), where Avalon and Hickman teamed up again to take on Vincent Price, who was out to conquer the world with an army of fembots.This would also mark the end of Avalon’s association with AIP, as the studio would do a hard pivot from the beach in exchange for some chrome and hot leather and a dose of LSD in films like The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967).

Now, Blood Song wouldn’t be Avalon’s first horror film / body count movie either -- and I’m not talking about Skidoo (1968), Otto Premiger’s shit-hemorage of an all-star comedy craptacular. (Though I admit that film has kinda grown on me over the years.) No, I’m talking about The Haunted House of Horror (1969).

The film was made in England by Tigon British Film Productions, who tried really hard to compete with Hammer Films and Amicus; but aside from Witchfinder General (alias The Conqueror Worm, 1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), the studio was more miss than hit for me anyway.

Picked up and released in the States as Horror House by AIP, the film’s a bit of a snoozer and is nowhere near as riveting or suspenseful as the filmmakers sure thought it was. The only redeeming value were a couple of nice explosions of violence and gore, and could have used a few more of those to thin out the herd, IMHO, as the characters were all pretty much insufferable twats. Of course, AIP would excise all of the bloodshed out of the American prints, leaving you with, well, a bunch of twats wandering around an old house and not a whole lot else.

As he moved into the 1970s, Avalon would shift away from features to television and would stop recording new songs altogether. Said Avalon (Marte, 1983), “I stopped recording after the Beatles came in, and I saw that single artists were fading out. But I was working too much to get upset about it. By that time, I was really busy making films, playing Las Vegas, and touring the world.” But there weren’t a whole lot of features by then, though he was pretty great as a small-time hood in The Take (1974), where Billy Dee Williams plays a crooked cop out to take down mob boss Vic Morrow.

But then, while out playing golf in 1977, his manager tracked him down, who had set up a meeting at Paramount with Allan Carr and Randal Kleiser, who were working on adapting the hit Broadway musical Grease (1978) to the big screen; and they wanted Avalon to be a part of it.

The role in question was the Teen Angel, who serenades one of the characters about her life choices in an ersatz dream sequence. “I saw the play, and it’s not my style,” said Avalon (King, 2003). “He comes down from a rope and he has long sideburns like Elvis and a black leather jacket. It’s an extension of an Elvis Angel.”

And so, initially, Avalon turned them down flat. But Carr, the producer, and Kleiser, the director, kept after him. And Avalon started to come around when Kleiser admitted he’d been a background beachnik in one of the Beach Party movies. 

Then Avalon officially got on board when Kleiser told him to change the character to whatever he wanted it to be. “I did six days of rehearsal and three days of shooting,” said Avalon (King, 2003). “The most important thing I was concerned about was, I didn’t want to be a joke in this picture. I wanted some credibility.”

Personally, I think he came off just fine and “Beauty School Dropout” became another showstopper in a film chock full of them. Strangely, with the ‘50s nostalgia boom of the era and a hit movie tucked in his back pocket, you’d think that would’ve led to a massive revival for Avalon the singer, but he just wasn’t that interested. “I’m not that thrilled with recording,” said Avalon (King, 1982). “Today’s music is nowhere -- I mean, it’s all over the place. The music has no direction right now.”

Thus, Avalon seemed content to continue on with his nightclub act, an occasional revival show, and occasional acting roles, like in The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, which brings us full circle back to Blood Song. And while Levi recruited him, Avalon was also familiar with Avianca as the two would perform together when Avalon became a replacement act on The Winter Ballroom Tour in 1959 after Buddy Holly and the others tragically died.

“I’m the heavy for the first time in a movie,” Avalon explained to Ed Blank of The Pittsburgh Press (April 16, 1981). “I play an escapee from a mental institution who can be normal until something triggers him into becoming a killer. Definitely a different role for me.”

In later interviews, Avalon would always refer to the film as a suspense thriller and not a horror film. And, as he told Linda Fowler of The Star-Ledger (February 13, 1982), “It will be interesting to see what kind of a reaction it gets.” Turns out he wouldn’t have to wait that long.

Donna Wilkes. 

“When I heard that Frankie Avalon was playing the killer, I thought, Wow. I used to watch him in Beach Blanket Bingo. I just couldn’t imagine him [as the killer],” said co-star Donna Wilkes during her panel interview at Cinema Wasteland (October 5, 2013). “But he did a great job. Omigod, he was excellent. I was very impressed.”

Probably best known among the brethren for her stellar role as Molly Stewart -- prep school student by day, Hollywood hooker by night -- in the film Angel (1984), Wilkes began in the business at the age of six with her first commercial for Keds sneakers. More commercial work followed, but by the age of eleven Wilkes was tired of the hustle and quit to become what she referred to as a “normal student.”

Wilkes’ parents had divorced when she was still an infant. Her mother was from the Dominican Republic and she would finish high school there, graduating early at the age of 14. By happenstance, while living there with her aunt and uncle, Francis Ford Coppola was shooting The Godfather 2 (1974), subbing in the Dominican for the needed scenes that narratively took place in Cuba. Answering a cattle call for extras that looked like American tourists, it’s unclear if Wilkes actually got cast but the actress, fluent in English and Spanish, would claim that she was hired on to be Coppola’s translator for the duration of the location shoot.

This experience relit the acting bug in Wilkes; and to those ends, around 1976, she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 15, where she had to lie on her resume to get work as a secretary and administrative assistant to make ends meet between auditions.

She would land her first role in Martin Davidson’s coming of age comedy Almost Summer (1978). It was a small role but it was enough to get Wilkes her SAG card, which led to her most recognized role to general audiences -- even though she almost wasn’t in it.

Apparently, Wilkes had originally just missed out on the role of Jackie in JAWS 2 (1978). But after director John Hancock was fired off the picture over ‘creative differences’ and replaced by Jeanot Szwarc, Universal decided to completely revamp the script, whose subsequent delay resulted in some cast turnover.

So, imagine Wilkes’ surprise several months after shooting had commenced when she got a call, saying she now had the pivotal role as the girl who peer-pressures Mike Brody (Mark Gruner) into joining the ill-fated boating trip, where they all become mechanical shark bait.

“After JAWS 2 I thought I would never work again,” said Wilkes (CW, 2013), who admitted she always had a problem with low self-esteem. “I thought, oh, this is going to be terrible.” But while it didn’t do near the box-office of its predecessor, and I still contend not enough people get eaten, JAWS 2 did well enough and would score as the highest grossing sequel of all time until it was dethroned by The Empire Strikes Back (1980) two years later.

Wilkes would then spend the next few years splitting time between features -- Fyre (1979), Hard Knocks (alias Midnight Rider (1979) -- and TV. She would appear as a teenage alcoholic in the episode “Alice in Disco Land” of The Incredible Hulk (S2, E7, 1978), a role that would prove prophetic in real life. Then, she would be put under contract by Norman Lear to star in the series Hello, Larry (1979).

Now, this sit-com has since become somewhat of a punchline over lead actor McLean Stevenson giving up his role of Col. Henry Blake on the hit series M*A*S*H to star in this dud, which went through several overhauls but still barely lasted two seasons. Wilkes saw it as a lame duck from the jump, asked to be released from her contract, and would leave the show after the first season.

Her next feature would be her first stalk and slasher, Schizoid (1980), which saw Wilkes playing the mentally unstable daughter of a mentally unstable psychiatrist played by the legendary unstable actor / weirdo Klaus Kinski.

“It was really interesting,” said Wilkes (CW, 2013). “I mean, Kinski was a real character, to say the least. He really liked to get reactions from people. So he would do things on purpose just to freak you out.” But the two developed a good working relationship, with Wilkes helping him with his English and, since Kinski was boarding near where she lived, she would chauffeur him to and from the set.

Klaus Kinski (Not acting). 

Later, in his autobiography, Kinski Uncut (1988), the German actor claimed the two had a torrid onset affair, whose graphic description I will leave to you all to track down. Said Schizoid co-star Flo Lawrence, who also had issues with Kinski’s aggressive, grab-fanny behavior on set, later recalled (-- quoted from the IMDB), “I think Kinski was rough on Donna Wilkes; she might have had a lot of black and blue spots on her. I think she did get along with him regardless of any rough handling. Kinski presented her with some perfume as I recall."

And then there was the stabbing incident. Apparently, while shooting the film’s climax, things got a little too amped up and, along with some callous disregard for safety when it came to the props, Wilkes accidentally stabbed one of her co-stars.

“Craig Wasson, poor guy,” confessed Wilkes (CW, 2013). “What happened was, at the very end, when I am supposed to be stabbing the killer (Wasson), there’s a pad (on his back) where the scissors were supposed to hit. The scissors were supposed to be dull but, I don’t know, these were the scissors we used” -- he typed ominously.

Wilkes then continued, saying, “Craig was a very emotional actor, and [director David Paulsen] told him you gotta stay kinda still because she’s got to hit that pad. It was a pretty rough scene, and I missed the pad. [But] I wasn’t sure that I had missed it, and he kept going, acting, and I’m like, guys, Cut!”

Sure enough, she had missed the pad and left about an inch deep laceration. Said Wilkes (ibid), “I really did stab him, and I was like, Ohhhhh…” Luckily, it didn’t cause any permanent damage. “He was really cool about it.”

Wilkes next assignment would be the role of Marion Hauser in Blood Song. (Some sources claim she was a last second replacement again for Carol Lynley.) “We did that up in Oregon,” said Wilkes (ibid). “I got to gain a bunch of weight because they wanted me to [look dumpy]. I played a cripple in that, so I have a limp. I just sat in my room drinking beer and eating candy bars."

Playing Marion’s parents would be the legendarily ageless Richard Jaeckel and Antoinette Bower. A character actor with few peers, Jaeckel was one of ‘those guys’ whose familiar mug seemed to show up in damned near everything. He made his big screen debut in the war film Guadalcanal Diary (1943) and his last feature would be King of the Kickboxers (1990), with 193 roles in between.

Genre fans will instantly recognize him for roles in the Japanese imports The Green Slime (1968), who loses his command to Major CrabAss (Robert Horton), and the brain-bending Latitude Zero (1969); he also rode herd on The Dirty Dozen (1967); not to mention a couple of stellar JAWS knock-offs with Bill Grefe’s polarity reversed, shark as victim, Mako: Jaws of Death (1976), where he shared a psychic link with sharks in this offbeat tale of revenge; and William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976), which saw him take on the role of a surrogate Matt Hooper -- only Girdler let his character die after getting mauled. Twice. There’s also Day of the Animals (1977), Mr. No Legs (1978), The Dark (1979) and Herbie Goes Bananas (1980).

Sadly, Fargo’s screenplay does Jaeckel’s character no favors in Blood Song. He’s bitter, he’s drunk, he’s abusive, and that’s about it. There’s a few hints at contriteness and possible reconciliation but these inevitably fizzle. But there is a brief, popcorn fart of a redemption arc when Hauser comes to the defense of his daughter. And the fight between Hauser and Foley is a highlight of the film, and proves enough of a distraction to let Marion get away -- at least temporarily.

Bower’s Bea Hauser fares a little better as the stanchion between their daughter and her volatile husband, who does her best to decelerate things whenever her husband gets triggered and lashes out, which is, like, all the time.

Mostly appearing on TV, Bower did have a few features in between appearing in shows ranging from Have Gun - Will Travel to The Six Million Dollar Man. She headlined the Filipino-shot Superbeast (1972), another Dr. Moreau retread for George Schenck. And as sort of a dry-run for Blood Song, Bower would play Jamie Lee Curtis’ mom in Prom Night (1980). Wait. That would also make her the killer’s mom, too, right? Anyhoo…

Rounding out the cast would be Dane Clark as the perpetually hungover Sheriff Gibbons. Like Jaeckel, Clark had been around since the 1940s, with early roles as one of the doomed defenders of Wake Island (1942) and Lewis Seiler’s solid film noir Whiplash (1948). And to his credit, his character was written as an incompetent boob and Clark delivered on this brilliantly.

Getting his Hitchcock on, Montana would take a role, too, with “a special guest appearance” as the Skipper of the boat Marion’s boyfriend Joey works on. He would also find a role for his son, Lenny Montana Jr., as one of Foley’s victims -- the one who gets an axe to the face. 

Joey, meanwhile, was played by William Kirby Cullen, who first appeared in John Water’s Multiple Maniacs (1970) as the Freak. And his film career would then be bookended by Blood Song, which falsely claimed to be introducing him in the credits, as Cullen would be out of the business by 1985.

Behind the camera, for his cinematographer, Levi turned to Steven Posey. Posey had served as a camera operator or 2nd unit DP on many genre staples: Black Samurai (1976), H.O.T.S. (1979), Penitentiary (1979), and The Unseen (1981), which you can’t unsee once you’ve experienced the great Stephen Furst as a gibbering, murderous man-baby in a soiled diaper going on a rampage.

Post Blood Song his resume only got fatter with credits that included The Howling (1981), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), and Repo Man (1984). And to his credit, the movie looks pretty good, meaning solid enough, with some well staged shots that show off the bucolic locations rather splendidly -- especially during the climax at the sawmill.

Not helping matters much was the total lack of urgency in the editing. Ann Mills broke into the business as an assistant editor on Rudy Ray Moore’s Petey Wheatstraw (1977), Moore’s take on the legend of Faust with a Blaxpo twist. Later efforts were Silent Rage (1982), which essentially boiled down to Chuck Norris vs. Michael Myers, Bloody Birthday (1981), which suffers from some of the same issues as Blood Song, and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982), which could never quite decide if it was a full-bore boner comedy or a body count flick. Either way, the audience lost.

As for the score, well, sometimes a score can save a movie -- or least glue it together long enough to make it to the end credits. In Blood Song, it barely gets us past the first reel. To start with, we have Foley’s constant flute playing. The same song. Over. And over. And over. And over yet again. Though it was kind of funny when the motorist, subbing in for the audience, has a meltdown over this lack of variety only to wind up stabbed in the face.

But even if we set aside the flute muzak, the rest of Robert Walsh’s synth heavy score never really lands. Instead of gelling things, it just curdles. It honestly sounds like a sampler snippet on a vintage Moog synthesizer stuck on repeat.

One could almost call the soundtrack cartoonish, which would make sense when you realize the vast majority of Walsh’s work was for a staggering amount of children’s cartoons. Basically, if you owned a toy from the 1980s, odds are good he scored the cartoon / commercial for it: G.I. Joe, JEM and the Holograms, Inhumanoids, Transformers, and My Little Pony. He also did some work for Jim Henson on both Fraggle Rock and the Muppet Babies.

Digging deeper does show Walsh did contribute some scores that were outside his wheelhouse, starting with Bert I. Gordon’s Necromancy (1972) and a replacement score for the imported Revenge of the Shogun Women (alias Shi shan nu ni , 1977), which I finally caught up to recently with the Kino Lorber disc, featuring a restored 3D version courtesy of the 3-D Film Archive. Highly recommended. He would also do a score for Don Dohler and Nightbeast (1982) and Revenge of the Ninja (1983) for the Go-Go Boys at Cannon Films.

And then there’s the Monty Turner penned ballad “It’s All in Your Mind” that serenades Marion for her soul-searching interlude on the beach. Watch and baffle as the film kills a reel so we can hear the whole shebang. Also of note, the song was performed by Lanie Kazan, probably best known for My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2003) and its progeny. But I will always remember her as Marguerita from Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust (1984), feuding with Divine over Tab Hunter.

San Antonio Express-News (October 26, 1980).

But the crew’s biggest asset was art director Robert Burns. A native of Texas, Burns was responsible for the phantasmagorical look of the cemetery and the Sawyer house in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The arm chair made of arms was his idea.

“Really, when it comes right down to it, Chainsaw was a pretty disgusting film,” admitted Burns in an interview with the AP's Kenn Herman (San Antonio Express-News, October 26, 1980). “It was such an offensive title. It probably kept some people away, but it also probably brought some in. It was really outrageous. It was tasteless. But it had a whole lot of raw energy. I wouldn’t go see it, but a lot of people like to get scared.”

Burns would then work for Wes Craven for the cannibal atrocities of The Hills Have Eyes (1977), the mannequin-centric Tourist Trap (1979), the dismembered appendages in Microwave Massacre (1979) and, oddly enough, another Rudy Ray Moore vehicle -- Avenging Disco Godfather (1979).

Thus, before he would pitch in on The Howling and Re-Animator (1985), Burns worked on Blood Song; and frankly, he was not impressed. “Somehow Levi thought this little item was his ticket to the big time,” Burns recalled to Stephen Thrower for his indispensable book Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007), where the author shined a light on unsung regional productions.

“Knowing nothing about what makes horror scary, [Levi] went for more blood. In a fight to the death between Avalon and Jaeckel he just kept wanting me to pour more and more of it on the long-suffering Jaeckel," said Burns. "He ended up looking like a squashed jelly donut.”

Assisting Burns on the grue was Rick Hatcher, which marked Hatcher’s singular contribution to cinema. There are a couple of good gags, though obviously inspired by others -- thinking of that axe to the face homage from Bava’s Bay of Blood (alias Carnage, alias Twitch of the Death Nerve, alias Blood Bath, alias Ecologia del delitto, alias Reazione a catena, 1971). The dismembered hitchhiker was pretty gnarly, and the wounds incurred by Jaeckel during his axe-brawl with Avalon were top notch.

Now, with all that solid-enough clout behind the camera, none of it really transferred to the screen in Blood Song -- at least not consistently. How all of that distilled down into this lackluster result is both puzzling and a tad disheartening.

According to local lore, while shooting in Oregon, the cast and crew would be billeted at the Thunderbird Motor Inn (-- now the Red Lion Hotel). And according to one of the posts on that Facebook page, from someone claiming to be the chef of an adjacent restaurant at the time, “They all stayed at the Thunderbird for two solid weeks and ate tons of food and skipped out on [an] over $48,000 [tab].”

True or not, this financial hiccup would prove to be the least of the production's problems. As Thrower pointed out in his write-up of the film, “The fact that Marion’s mother never reappears, even after the police arrive to mop up her husband’s butchered remains, is a clue to the film’s behind the scenes problems. Although the sole directing credit at the start of the film goes to Levi, the end credits mention additional scenes directed by Robert Angus, and with a different cinematographer, Irwin Goodonvov (-- which sure sounds like an alias to me, I mean, c’mon, Irwin GoodEnough?), suggesting that the new scenes were filmed after the initial production wrapped."

There’s corroborating evidence to back this theory, too, as Variety (September 3, 1986) listed Levi as a director who’d been replaced during a production. Angus was an editor by trade and it's unclear as to what he actually shot. I usually have pretty good instincts at identifying scenes scotch-taped in after the fact, and near as I can tell the only added material was that tacked on final coda at the hospital.

I’m guessing the film originally ended with Foley getting into the car with Joey. But then, in perhaps an ill-advised attempt at a twist to punch up that ending like the jump scares in Carrie (1978) or Friday the 13th, they brought in Angus to film these scenes. And while they did manage to get Avalon back for the final punchline, Wilkes was apparently unavailable. They never show the patient’s face when she’s wrestling with the orderlies, and when we do finally get to see her, in the darkened room, I am 99.9-percent sure that’s a stand-in and not Wilkes. And frankly, I thought the ending on the road was better and more effective.

Things only got worse from there for Blood Song. The film was shot for a theatrical release and originally wrapped in the fall of 1980. And from there things get a little murky aside from the reshoots. Following what little breadcrumbs there were, most were gleaned from subsequent interviews with Avalon. In April 1981, Avalon told columnist Ed Blank, “It’s been edited toward a fall release.” But as the calendar flipped to 1982, the film still hadn’t shown up in theaters as it struggled to find a distributor.

The Los Angeles Times (August 18, 1980). 

In a February 1982 interview with Avalon, Linda Fowler mentioned the film would be released that summer through AVCO-Embassy. Apparently, that fell through, too. Then, in another interview dated July 23, 1983, the film was still languishing in limbo but Avalon insisted a release was coming.

This struggle was also most likely a huge contributing factor to the name change from Premonitions to Blood Song to add more punch to the sales pitch. Unfortunately, the film ran into some bad timing as slasher or dead teenager films were facing a serious public backlash from both parent groups and critics like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who led the crusade against them, causing most studios to shy away from any more independent horror pickups. And frankly, going by the box office numbers, they weren’t really bringing in the ridiculous money of Friday the 13th any more.

The IMDB lists a release date of 1982 for Blood Song and shows the distributor as Summa Vista Pictures, who only had three other films on the books before disappearing into the ether; the psycho-sexual thriller Head On (1980); the unbridled lunacy of Kill Squad (1981); and the also-ran boner comedy Heartbreak High (1981). But I’m damned if I could find any trace of it theatrically either in some far off-the-road drive-in or seedy grindhouse no matter what title I searched under. If anyone out there has evidence to the contrary, I am all ears and will gladly update this.

Thus, as far as I know, Blood Song never got a theatrical release in the United States. There is slight evidence that the film did see a release in Australia -- said evidence being a single listing for an Australian Daybill poster (pictured above) -- and possibly Mexico but that’s it as far as I know. There’s also evidence that the producers had waved the white flag and went the home video route instead, with evidence of a VHS and Betamax release as early as June, 1982, in Great Britain, where it was soon pegged and seized as a Video Nasty. Then it got an official domestic release on home video in 1983 through Coast to Coast Video.

The  Retford, Gainsborough and Worksop Times (July 23, 1982).

And then it started showing up on basic cable around 1985, where it was featured regularly on the USA Network’s Saturday Nightmares, back when the SuperStations didn’t suck. Then some time in the 1990s it would receive a rerelease on VHS through HQV Video under the alternate title Dream Slayer. According to Joe Kane (alias The Phantom of the Movies), HQV was kinda notorious for this bait and switch practice, rebranding Pigs (alias Daddy’s Deadly Darling,1972) as Horror Farm, which is repugnant no matter what title you see it under; also Vampire Hookers (1978) as Twice Bitten, and The Blazing Stewardesses (1975) repackaged as Up Like a Shot.

Along with their distributor, in the resulting financial bloodbath, All State Film Company and Mountain High Enterprises would also both fold, never to be heard from again. As were executive producers Stephen Sofro and Len Turner, as Blood Song would be a one and done for them, too. Montana was pretty much done as well, but Avianca would rebound with one more horror film, The Undertaker (1988), where Joe Spinell gets his murder on to keep his funeral home full.

There’s been rumors and speculation over the years that with Montana and Avianca’s involvement and mob connections that Blood Song was backed with dirty money. Wilkes sure thought so, admitting how she didn’t want to make any waves during shooting “because the Mafia backed this movie.” Said Wilkes (CW, 2013). “When you went into these (casting) interviews it was all ‘dees’ and ‘dem’ guys from Hoboken, New Jersey, you didn’t say a word. A lot of the guys from The Godfather were in it and producing it.” But at the end of the day, it’s still just speculation.

Sadly, the fallout of the botched release would also leave their efforts in a legal limbo. Worse yet, the physical film itself has apparently up and disappeared. When BCI Eclipse obtained the rights to the film with a planned DVD release in 2008, they failed to locate any original elements or prints to transfer, leading to speculation that a film print may no longer exist or has been permanently lost. 

And so, BCI was forced to use a VHS transfer instead, releasing a no frills, full screen version of Blood Song as part of a double feature with Michael Dugan’s Mausoleum (1983), where Marjoe Gortner has to save his wife (and former Playboy Playmate) from a possessive demon.(Editors note: all the vid-caps for this retrospective were sourced from the BCI disc, which I later cropped into widescreen for my own OCD aesthetic purposes.)

“The lackluster presentation of both features in this double bill is a tad disappointing coming from BCI, which was making headway as a supplier and distributor of noteworthy vintage-genre special editions before the label’s operations were kiboshed by owner The Navarre Corporation earlier this month,” reported Michael Gingold for Fangoria Magazine (January 2, 2009).

Montana passed away in 1992, and Avianca in 2014, leaving the current rights to the film up in the air. BCI gave up on the license, and again, as far as I know, no one else has secured them, which means (I would presume) it has reverted back to the respective estates. I know you used to be able to stream it on Tubi and Roku but those channels have since deemed it “content no longer” available, leaving us with the BCI disc -- long out of print and kinda expensive, old VHS tapes, and shoddy VHS rips on YouTube, with any future release of Blood Song relegated to film purgatory indefinitely.

With no theatrical release means no contemporary reviews to plumb either. It failed to gain an entry in the 1986 edition of The Overlook Encyclopedia of Horror, and Blood Song barely got a blurb in either of Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film or the Psychotronic Video Guide (1983 / 1996). 

But Gingold found that “the body count was fairly small, with just as much attention paid to Marion’s family drama and respites with her boyfriend as to Paul’s activities … The final reel delivers the goods, though, as Paul goes after Marion’s pop and then pursues our heroine through a sawmill at night, complete with an impressive forklift-into-the-water stunt. Not as over-the-top as Mausoleum, Blood Song can nonetheless be enjoyed by fans of their era with a little less guilt.”

And Thrower felt, “If you’re familiar with Avalon from his Beach Party films with Annette Funicello, or as a teen pop star contemporary of Fabian and Bobby Rydell, you’ll probably do a double-take at the sight of the former Sultan of Surf slamming an axe into a man’s face. Ironically though, given that Avalon never sings a note, the film’s biggest problem is the music. Thanks to this musical hotpotch, and some puzzling ellipses in the narrative, the film’s momentum is as stumbling as the lead character’s gait.”

“I'll admit I had high hopes for Blood Song,” said Stacie Ponder for Final Girl (October 6, 2009). “It features beach party boy Frankie Avalon as a cold-hearted killer. As we all know, however, high hopes are sometimes beaten to a bloody pulp and flushed down the toilet. Such is life.”

And so, “Blood Song was more than a bit of torture to sit through,” continued Ponder. “Sure, Avalon gives it his best effort, but the brief flashes of action and violence are wrapped up in a tortilla of boredom. The entire affair is plodding and dull -- the ‘Don't insult my mad flute skillz’ angle is taken too seriously (also, not serious enough) to be any fun, and the psychic connection between Flute Man and Marion proves pointless in the end. All in all, it's a sub-par slasher flick with a ‘shocking’ ending that goes on and on and on until you cry ‘uncle’. What a drag.”

But Justin Kerswell of Hysteria Lives! was a little kinder, saying, “[Blood Song] certainly isn't the best slasher from the early 80s, but it wins points for its sheer out-there quality (including an audaciously stupid twist ending) and some bona-fide slasher movie thrills and spills.”

And finally, Geoff Rosengren of The Tell Tale Mind (October 3, 2018) felt, “One can pretty much guess how this film will play out, and it’s not all that suspenseful because of that; but factoring in that little bit of what some might call the paranormal, a few murders and some genuinely decent performances by Richard Jaeckel, Antoinette Bower and Dane Clark in addition to Wilkes and Avalon himself, the film manages to rise just slightly above the mundane to make for a fairly enjoyable, if not tame entry in the genre.”

Despite Posey’s best efforts one of Blood Song’s lesser sins is that it can’t quite escape Levi’s ingrained TV trappings. Meaning while it’s still well executed, technically, the feature never really felt cinematic and comes off rather blandly until we reach the sawmill, where the film finds a whole ‘nother gear. But the film does manage a nice blue collar vibe similar to George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine (1981), an apex example of the genre, which was being shot around the same time.

As for the mishmashed script, well, it definitely leaves more questions than answers. And so, let's start with an easy one: the puzzling Tennyson quote that opens the film -- “Thro’ cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear, that I come to be grateful at last for a little thing” -- only it isn’t so puzzling once you dig into it, where you discover the verse was actually absurdly appropriate.

The quote is from Tennyson’s Maud, a monodrama, where the speaker compares his life to a bird with a broken wing, crippled by trauma, and unable to soar or live fully. Sure sounds like Marion to me, and Foley, too, honestly. And the trigger for the madness and ‘haunts of horror an fear’ the author endured were triggered by his father’s suicide, which links us back to Foley. As for the little thing to be grateful for? Donna has Joey, and Foley has the flute, which they both desperately cling to. Thus, and dare I say, one could almost call this verse profound? That’s me shrugging right now.

Next, while one should never assume, logic dictates that Foley has spent his entire life in an asylum since he witnessed his family’s annihilation as a boy. The fact that he knows how to drive a van, or the ins and outs of intercourse, says to me that he was not committed until later when something bad happened that triggered his current psychosis. And so, to me, despite the tacked on sequel bait ending, I would say a prequel might be in order instead.

Also, I noticed that some people have misread the ending, thinking since they found the watchmen in the water, and not Foley, that the Sheriff now thinks Marion was lying and she’s the one who killed her father. And following that train of thought, Marion, who claims to have a psychic link with the real killer, has been declared insane and committed to an asylum.

This is an easy assumption to make given Sheriff Gibbons general incompetence on full display everywhere else, but no. I think he believes what Donna says. Not the psychic link stuff, mind you, but that someone else killed her father, the hitchhiker, the watchmen, and then tried to kill her, too.

There’s mention that Donna has been sent on to the hospital when Gibbons arrives at the docks right before they fish the forklift out of the drink. From there, she has a vision that her boyfriend is about to die, rightfully freaks out, the orderlies follow protocol with restraints and a sedative for an out of control patient. That’s it, and not some morbid, wrongly-condemned twist.

Sadly, the most interesting story angle -- the psychic link between Marion and Foley -- is pretty much abandoned after she “sees” him kill the hitchhiker until taking a final bow during the  tacked-on coda. Imagine if Marion had honed this link and was able to remote in to see where Foley was during the climax, allowing her to stay ahead of him.

I also think they kinda dropped the ball when Marion essentially blunders into Foley burying a body. The scene might’ve been better served if there had been a precognitive element to these visions instead of her tuning into Foley's deeds happening in real time. This would’ve allowed Marion to follow some psychic clues to Foley’s dumping ground instead of relying on mere happenstance.

Avalon also gets a lot of grief for this film, but I think he gives a rather startling performance. I loved the affect when he switches from amiable charm to dead-eyed kill-mode whenever anyone dares to mock his flute playing. And there's a great moment after he finishes off Frank Hauser, where he finally notices all the blood splattered all over himself, where part of him appears to be repulsed by it, while the other starts stripping off layers to get rid of it to stay locked on Marion. 

There’s also a quick, subliminal blurb correlating his morbid oral fixation with the flute to his father putting the gun in his mouth. But like nearly everything else in the film, once this notion is introduced, it is summarily ignored and left to die on the vine.

“I’ve been a ham my whole life,” said Avalon, but I think these same qualities make for a pretty good psycho, too. Sure, you have to suspend some disbelief on the hit damage he accrues at the end, but his constant oscillating between personalities, the developmentally arrested young boy, the triggered killer, is really quite good. And his constant infantile cries of how Marion hurt him, and how he doesn’t want to play anymore, followed by insane cackling just, I don’t know, it just works. As far as I know, Avalon is still around, too, 74 years young at the time of writing and was last seen on an episode of Dancing with the Stars (S30:E06, 2021).

Give Wilkes some credit, too, as she gave a yeoman’s effort to carry her half of the film no matter how repetitive the plot gets. Despite her own misgivings, charting her career to this point one can see she was getting better and growing as an actor. Sadly, a salary dispute prevented her from appearing in Avenging Angel (alias Angel 2, 1985) as that franchise she firmly established moved on without her. Wilkes would get sober and leave acting in the early ‘90s after the birth of her daughter before reviving her career in My Stepbrother is a Vampire?!? (2013) and was last seen briefly in Once Upon a Time in Hollyweird (2024).

Also, I kinda dug the opticals whenever Marion was overcome by a vision. The camera would zoom in on her eyes, sometimes reverting to a montage as we got nearer to a single iris. This would be followed by some kind of kitschy animated wipe, revealing a solarized negative that quickly shifts back to normal as we enter Foley’s perspective. And unlike Eyes of Laura Mars, which gave us a subjective view of the killer, Marion is sort of remote viewing objectively and can take in the whole scene, not just what the killer sees, allowing her to know who the killer is.

Add it all up and you have an oddball body count flick where an escaped lunatic shares a psychic connection with the final girl because of a shared blood transfusion who kinda sorta traces this link back to her; a film I kinda liked, and would love to love, but I can’t because these novel ideas were routinely botched in the execution or abandoned completely. Not always, but enough to derail the train.

And so, Who knows? In better hands and with a little more finesse Blood Song might’ve gone from passable thriller to unsung slasher gold.

Originally Posted on 10/31/2026 at Confirmed, Alan_01.

Blood Song (1982) Allstate Film Company :: Mountain High Enterprises :: Summa Vista Pictures / EP: Stephan B. Sofro, Len Turner / P: Frank Avianca, Lenny Montana / AP: Lee Shrout / D: Alan J. Levi / W: James Fargo, Frank Avianca, Lenny Montana, Joseph Shrink (story), George Hart (story) / C: Stephen L. Posey / E: Ann E. Mills / M: Robert J. Walsh / S: Donna Wilkes, Frankie Avalon, Richard Jaeckel, Antoinette Bower, Dane Clark, William Kirby Cullen, Noelle North, Jennifer Enskat, Roydon Clark, Lenny Montana, Lenny Montana Jr./