Terror sin habla

Pete Walker's 'Frightmare' is a gloriously gory mix of psychopathic and cannibalistic killings and pretty English cottages, all topped with all those naff '70's fashions, haircuts and British cars.

Walker regular Sheila Keith is the woman sent to an asylum fifteen years ago, along with her abetting husband. He's helpless when her cravings come back and assumed cured, she now reads tarot cards. Their daughter gets romantically involved with a young psychiatrist and when her younger, adopted sister starts going off the rails, the young doctor naturally wants to help.

She's actually helping find feeding matter - and their brains - for her step mother. And step mother uses an array of everyday tools and appliances to get to her subjects' juicy bits. Electric drills, pitchforks, you name it. There's plenty of reasonable looking blood at the right times and some great make up effects of everyday folk with half their heads missing.

Now, nearly forty years on it's more a chiller than a screamer but very effective nonetheless and certainly one of the better Brit horror flicks I've seen. I saw it on The Horror channel.

There were some great exploitation flicks made in the seventies; but unfortunately, Frightmare isn't one of them. That's not to say it's terrible, or even really bad; as the film definitely does have it's moments, but it's also very talky and the plotting is far too slow, which isn't what you want when you're watching a film that has supposed to have been made to entertain the gore fanatics of it's day. If the entire movie was as good as it's last half hour, I'd be on here praising it to high heaven right now; but for some reason, director Pete Walker has seen fit to make us sit through a sometimes interesting, but more often that not tedious first hour; which doesn't do anything that couldn't have been done in half the time. The plot follows murderer and cannibal by the name of Dorothy, who is sent to an asylum along with her devoted husband Edmund. They are released after fifteen years; and this proves a problem when it seems that the couple's daughter, Debbie, has inherited her mother's lust for killing. Step daughter Jackie tries to sort things out with her father, but that doesn't stop the mother and daughter team getting seriously into cranial DIY...

The atmosphere of the film is superbly sleazy, with the couple's isolated living place taking on the foreboding role of the film's central location. Insanity often makes for a theme that allows a film to present a great atmosphere, and Pete Walker has capitalised on that. Another thing he's capitalised on is power tools. Power Tools would come to great uses again in films such as The Driller Killer, The Toolbox Murders and, of course, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and it's obvious why they continue to get used in gory exploitation flicks. Things get very messy when you've got a deranged lunatic brandishing a power drill, and this serves as one of this film's main talking points. Walker makes best of the 'insane granny' theme too, ands he gets his lead actress to show how good she can be in that respect several times in the film. In the final half hour, the film really starts to come together and as the gore increases, the tension mounts and that is when this movie is at it's very best. When the film has to rely on it's script for intrigue; it falls down, and that pretty much sums up the first hour. I'd like to like this more; but just so you know, once the first hour has elapsed; you're in for a treat!

This is one those horror movies that is totally unique. It is a cannibal movie, but it humanizes the cannibals more than any other movie I've seen. They're not rampaging monsters like in "Texas Chainsaw" or stereotypical Third World savages like in the later Italian gut munchers--they're the ordinary people living right next door--and this makes them all the more frightening.

The director is Pete Walker, who found an interesting niche in 1970's British horror/exploitation movies between the hedonistic youth of "Swinging London" and the repressive, reactionary forces that were moving in to stop the party. Walker managed to appeal to both audiences with his "House of the Whipcord", a film both startlingly reactionary and irredeemably sleazy. This film, however, is instead a pox on both houses. There are two cannibals here--one is a seemingly kind old matron (Sheila Keith) who lures victims to her isolated country estate with tarot card readings. She is unwittingly accommodated by her weak-willed husband and well-intentioned step-daughter. She represents a truly twisted version of what American conservatives would later call "family values". The other cannibal is equally frightening--an innocent looking adolescent girl (Kim Butcher) flouncing around in a miniskirt or knickers, coyly manipulating both rough motorcycle-riding youths and respectable older men. She represents the free-spirited and cheerfully amoral youth of the era. It is Walkers genius to ultimately put these two monsters in cahoots. The relationship between them turns out to be very twisted and very close indeed.

The movie is very creepy and truly frightening. Its ultimate message is quite bleak. Apparently, Walker was heavily influenced by American film noir when he made this, and this influence is evident in the dark, eerie visuals and bleak, fatalistic tone where the shadow of the past is always casting a pall over the present. This is a genuinely disturbing film, but one I would recommended highly.

Director Peter Walker's and screenwriter David McGillivray's shining hour, the British contribution to the "all families are bad" horror genre.

Walker's technique, handled quite well, is that he knows the audience comes to a horror film for jolts and unpleasantness. The audience waits in rapt attention -- bang, wallop, and it really is jolting and unpleasant.

Many things are addressed in this film: neglect of the old, the callousness of the young, and how in the end the acorn never, ever falls too far from the tree. This is the Pete Walker film to see.

This film is typical of early Seventies British horror in its style and format, though this is much more dark, morbid and disturbing than the average example.

The film features a psychotic woman with a penchant for cannibalism, and her equally disturbed family, hiding out as a recluse in a remote English farmhouse following her release from 15 years in an institution.

A few items of gore are presented here (the UK version will be cut by three minutes), but the real beauty of this film is its dark and unnerving undertones, along with its shocking and feel-bad finalé.