Im Rampenlicht des Bösen

I have been a fan of director/producer Pete Walker's 1970's horror films in the past. I never knew he had a filmography of what shall I call them 'sexploitation' films earlier in his filmmaking career.

Now this 1972 UK film has elements of sexploitation in a slasher horror film as several members of an acting group are murdered at a disused theatre at the end of an old pier in a seaside town in England, out of season to add to the ambience of proceedings!

Now my review title is a play on the Confessions films which were hugely successful in the 1970s starring Robin Askwith who is incidentally in this film as well as one of the young actors. Askwith plays a typical Timothy Lea type character from the Confessions franchise and points to the 'sexploitation' scenes in this film, which is a shame in my opinion. It puts the UK film industry of the period in a bad light. Mixed in with the gore of a slasher horror are scenes of the characters in semi-naked scenes.

Atmospheric and a mediocre early Pete Walker horror. I have found his later 1970's films better if I am honest. This film is very low budget. Scream (1996) it isn't!

"The Flesh and Blood Show" bookends Pete Walker's 'golden period' of horrors, with "Schizo" (1976) at the other end; it is a gruesome piece of film-making that shows improvements in Walker's work from "Die Screaming, Marianne" - and yet he is still limbering up, in truth.

Patrick Barr - to be used again by PW - is excellent here, playing 'the Major', the first in a line of Walker protagonists who appear to be harmless English eccentrics, but are actually... well, that would be telling! The youth characters may be rather stereotyped, but that is part of Walker's approach: to set a licentious, permissive youth against a resentful and uncompromisingly vengeful older generation. It is much to Walker's credit that few if any characters could be described as typical heroes. And he doesn't take sides; the photography indeed mimics the voyeur's view at times - implicating the audience, using the trick first deployed by Michael Powell in "Peeping Tom" (1960).

The out-of-season seaside setting - Cromer, apparently - fits aptly into this dialectic. The troupe of young actors' arrival seemingly doubles the ageing population of the resort, who can seemingly only dream of the past. It can even be argued that there are pre-echoes of Alan Bennett's use of Morecambe in "Sunset Across the Bay" (BBC, 1975) - though of course, lacking quite the same sad humour and dry insight.

Still, it is an serviceable enough shocker. Not as bizarrely gripping as Walker's subsequent Melodramas of Discontent, but a decisive step in that direction. And with a script by Alfred Shaughnessy (one of the prime wits behind LWT's "Upstairs, Downstairs") and a suitably eerie score from Cyril Ornadel (who composed all of the music for ATV's seminal "Sapphire and Steel"). Oh, and Robin Askwith... who is enjoyably absurd in horror films (see also the ludicrous "Horror Hospital" from the following year), where he is rather more horrific in myriad dire sex comedies to come.

Pete Walker brings us a proto-slasher that's now as cornball as can be. Is it worthy of respect in the pantheon of horror? Yes, maybe.

This is a coastal town that they forgot to close down.

A group of actors and actresses have mysteriously been lured to an end of pier theatre to star in a play. Pretty soon they start being bumped off one by one.

So it be! There's plenty of nudity, actors siting around musing on the "biz" and its perils, while the matter of fact attitude to the disappearances is almost as ludicrous as someone opening the door in the middle of the night stark naked...

It's good fun in truth, especially for British film fans like me to see the likes of Robin Askwith and Jenny Hanley in this. The run down theatre setting is a good one, while the play they are rehearsing makes no sense and is quite surreal! 5/10

The plot is a familiar one. A bunch of people go to an abandoned building to stay there, and some of them start dying.

Even taken more specifically, this is a group of young actors who go to an old theater, and are killed for reasons relating to the theater's past. The Clown at Midnight (1998) is similar.

The movie has a lot of dialog, which isn't of much interest. People go off wandering, and sometimes they come back and sometimes they don't. They visit an older couple, and I didn't get a sense of where their house was in relation to the theater, which seemed to be on an island. Police actually are contacted fairly easily early on. The actors continue to stay at the theater far beyond what is sensible.

There's a fair amount of female nudity, even some full frontal nudity. There is even some full frontal nudity from one of the men. Deaths are not depicted very graphically, to the extent they are barely on screen at all. The killer is a heavy breather, with a black mask and gloves.

The music throughout reminded me of the incidental music from the original Scooby Doo series!

There's a flashback scene which is rather surprising, that has a couple having sex in front of a young girl. The girl's scenes were quite obviously edited in (i.e. she wasn't in the room with the nude actors), but it was still a little shocking. That scene was a little better than the rest of the movie, although it started off with a staging of Othello, which was not too involving. There's another good scene in which some of the actors think one of them is shining a spotlight, but it then shines on the person they though was handling it, who was nude. Being a little thick, they don't immediately realize the spotlight must be handled by someone else, nor do they notice how the nude figure doesn't appear to have any life in it.

At the end of the Monterey Home Video, there were trailers for The Slasher is the Sex Maniac, Night After Night After Night, and The Grim Reaper, all of which looked much better. Although I've seen a cut version of The Grim Reaper AKA Antropophagus (1980), and didn't think it was all that hot, but then the trailer for it was all of five seconds long or so. The other trailers were of ordinary length.

A group of actors and a director are gathered together by a mysterious producer to rehearse a play in a creepy abandoned theater at the end of a pier off the English coast. In "Ten Little Indians" fashion they begin to disappear one by one. This sounds like a typical slasher movie, but in fact it preceded the slasher craze by many years. It was one of those movies like "Schoolgirl Killer", "Fright", and "Bay of Blood" that contained many of the elements of the slasher films and may have even influenced some of them a little, but was made well before "Black Christmas", "Halloween",and "Friday the 13th" initiated the deluge of slasher flicks.

This movie avoids many of what would later become tedious clichés of the slasher films. There's no heavy-breathing POV camera shots. The characters are stupid, but they are not so stupid that they don't notice their friends disappearing. The killer's motivation is actually somewhat believable and doesn't seem like something the filmmakers just pulled out of their collective keisters to justify the carnage. Actually, there isn't much carnage either. Most of the murders actually occur off-screen (blasphemy, I know). But what the movie lacks in blood, it makes up for in T and A. This movie marked a transition in British director Peter Walker's career from softcore sexploitation fare like "School for Sex" and "Four Dimensions of Greta" to his more mature and superior 70's horror films like "Frightmare" and "House of the Whipcord". Not surprisingly, Walker offers a hot shower of generous female nudity to prepare viewers for the sudden cold shower of the terror scenes.In the hilarious opening scene, for instance, an incredibly voluptuous actress is awakened by a knock on her door at three in the morning, so she gets out of her female "roommate's" bed and answers the door completely naked.

I'd recommend this movie to anyone, but people who like Pete Walker, and slasher movies that are actually well-crafted and scary will especially enjoy this one.