The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) Reviews

• Superior proto-slasher film

  lazarillo2005-02-23

  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.

• Nifty enough seaside shocker: Walker's crimson period starts here

  HenryHextonEsq2010-05-16

  "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.

• Decent British mystery/slasher.

  HumanoidOfFlesh2003-02-09

  Performers auditioning for a British "Grand Guignol" show are murdered in mysterious ways in this deranged horror directed by Pete Walker("Frightmare","Schizo","House of Whipcord").The film is pretty creepy and offers a nice amount of sleaze.There are decapitations,drownings,psychotic elderly tramps,naked women and some gruesome killings.The cinematography is pretty gloomy and the location sets are suitably eerie.A must-see if you're a fan of British horror!

• a couple good scenes, lots of unnecessary boring dialog; fair amount of live flesh, little or no blood

  FieCrier2005-04-11

  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.

• Maximum flesh & minimum blood, but a decent show overall.

  Coventry2006-09-24

  Pete Walker was one of the most remarkable directors in the British horror industry and most of his efforts (especially those of the mid-70's period) ought to be considered as quintessential viewing for genre admirers. Even this forgotten and sadly obscure gem, which obviously suffers from terribly poor production values, is actually a very important horror film for two specific reasons. First of all, "The Flesh and Blood Show" represents Pete Walker's transition from banal sex comedies into mature and rudimentary horror. "Die Screaming Marianne", released one year before, already contained some admirable horror aspects, but Walker only managed to truly capture the horrific themes of murder and insanity in this film. The second and even more important reason to establish the essence of this film is that it's actually a pioneer of slasher-movies! Alongside Mario Bava's "Bay of Blood" and perhaps a few notable other titles, "The Flesh and Blood Show" was one of the first film to introduce a maniacal killer amidst a group of defenseless victims. The film is, in fact, pretty similar to "Bay of Blood" and it easily could have been named "Pier of Blood". A group of ambitious young actors and their director gather in an abandoned theater, located in an even more abandoned seaside village, to rehearse a play that'll hopefully launch them at prominent theaters in London. Shortly after their arrival, it becomes clear that the old theater and its dark catacombs also homes a sardonic killer and the players begin to vanish one by one. To reveal the killer's identity, the remaining survivors will have to dig up the theaters' dubious history... The search for the killer is very compelling and, thanks to the dark & ominous setting, the film simply oozes with suspense. The script features some very effective red herrings and the denouement is satisfying and even plausible! The murders are regretfully tame and unclear but, as said before, this is merely due to the inferior production values. No worries, as Walker will largely make up for the lack of carnage in his later films. His past career as a sleaze filmmaker, however, is more than obviously detectable here! There's tons of nudity in "The Flesh and Blood Show" and, albeit completely irrelevant to the plot, all the ladies have impressively ravishing curves! Decent movie, well worth adding to your horror collection.