This is an influential but forgotten trio of flicks I bought on Blu-ray that ironically all came from 1971, and one of them has some homoerotic content, landing it on the does the gay guy die? page.
FRIGHT (1971)
I imagine this overlooked film was some of the inspiration for movies like Black Christmas, Halloween, When a Stranger Calls, and Trick or Treats. I’d never seen it before picking up the new 4k release, and I’m glad I did, mostly because of how obviously influential it was.
It opens in dark, misty woods at night as a pretty young woman walks to a babysitting job in the middle of nowhere. She’s just asking for it. Get a damn taxi or something!
Once at the house, she does some conversing with the couple before they leave. They give each other shifty-eyed looks, and the wife gets uncomfortable when the husband references ghosts.
No, it’s not a ghost movie. Not literally.
Once the babysitter is alone, we soon see someone lurking outside.
The babysitter’s boyfriend visits…at least I think he is her boyfriend. She’s a dick to him because he keeps trying to scare her, but he learns his lesson soon enough.
This isn’t really a stalker film or slasher. It’s more of a home invasion film. There are several atmospheric moments of the babysitter being spooked by sights and sounds, and in between we keep getting scenes of the couple out to dinner, which are included as an avenue to eventually reveal to us who the stalker is.
The final segment of the movie focuses on the babysitter being terrorized by the stalker. There’s no mask or anything, but he doesn’t need one because he’s creepy as is. There’s even a really effective, understated assault scene that completely drops any audio cues. Quite unnerving.
I didn’t love the final few minutes much. We’re taken out of the “alone with a psycho” setup as police arrive for a standoff. A rather disappointing finale, although it does have a dark tone.
I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1971)
Two years before Romero’s The Crazies and six years before Cronenberg’s Rabid, this infected movie was slapped with an X rating. Don’t get too excited…it’s pretty tame considering some of the things we’ve seen in the 6 decades since.
Thankfully, the jazzy 70s score that ruins the early part of the film is replaced by that more trippy, early 70s horror music sound later on, but that doesn’t help make the film scary. It’s fairly bland.
The basic premise is that violent hippies invade a nearly deserted town, rape a young woman, are then tricked into eating pies injected with rabid dog blood by the raped girl’s young brother, and then become even more violent!
There’s lots of dismemberment and that tomato soup color “red” blood that was used in movies of this era, and the infected hippies foam at the mouth, but there’s no biting or cannibalism. Which begs the question…how do they start spreading the infection? I’m guessing it’s when a group of construction workers rapes one of the infected hippy women (not shown, but implied).
Horror queen Lynn Lowry has a bit part as one of the infected, but that was the only familiar face here. Other than that, the only thrilling part is when the infected hippies invade the bakery where the pies were made. It’s also the funniest, because they also “knock down” an entire wall that appears to be made of some sort of flimsy cardboard material. My favorite infected hippie is one that laughs maniacally while swinging a machete and a decapitated head. He could have been the lone killer in a much freakier movie.
For a slightly darker and more satisfying ending, you’re better off watching the slightly longer “director’s cut” instead of the “original X-rated theatrical cut” on the Blu-ray.
BLUE SEXTET (1971)
Included on the same Blu-ray release as I Drink Your Blood because it’s from the same director, this bizarre film plays out mostly like a whodunit, as a group of friends gathers together to talk about their recently deceased friend and ponder how he died.
A sexploitation flick at heart, it continuously flashes back to events leading up to the death of the friend, including one wonderfully perverse orgy scene of varying sexualities hooking up, with two hot dudes even wrestling in their undies.
However, there’s one nightmarish segment, which is why I’m covering this film. It’s supposed to be footage shot by the deceased, who fancied himself a filmmaker, and it features this deformed ghoul in a hooded robe doing some sort of cult ritual with a naked woman tied down.
He bites on her nipples until she bleeds, and we get that warped, psychotropic visual and audio vibe that’s so indicative of early 1970s horror, drenched in red light. I wish the whole movie had been built around this haunting moment.
In the end, the movie leaves us guessing as to what happened. Was it a drug-induced accident, a suicide, murder, or was this group of people actually dabbling in the occult? The sudden upbeat, celebratory ending is so jolting and bizarre.
