Scalpels glisten in the subterranean operating room, jungle servant apes surgeon barking out orders. Victim Number One, strapped to a slab table, screams for mercy but Dr. Butcher, M.D., will have none of it: "Shaddup! I don't care about you. All I want is your brain." This is a gruff Dr. Butcher! Blood-soaked brains awaiting transplant and a legion of obsequious zombies testify to the serious business at hand. No one's smiling. Everybody will die in a bloodbath of gratuitous gore and gorged gratuity! Dr. B. M.D. (1982) inherits a proud filmic tradition.
So-called splatter movies aim "not to scare or drive audiences to the edge of their seats in suspense, but to mortify them with scenes of explicit gore," explains genre expert John McCarty in his book Splatter Movies. "Mutilation is the message - sometimes the only one."
But why stop there? Within even the so-called closed system of Splatter reside dozens of thus far unaccredited coo( sub schools. The wide world of low-budget sleazy horror sends signals to dozens of message centers. These days, almost every new feature breeds a new subgenre, expanding previous parameters.
Take The Hills Have Eyes, for example, Wes Craven's camper-family-stranded-in-the-desert-and- surrounded-by-maniacs saga. It borrows heavily from Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But Hills' expansive Splatter spirit adds new rules to the game. Craven's new dimensions pile up the fear factors like poker chips: rattlesnakes; kidnapped baby; missing daddy tied to a stake, bound, gagged and torched. An ear of bright yellow corn stops the old geezer's mouth from screaming; as the flames lick his clothes, Craven's disaffected camera rolls around the guy's head. There's a newfound, demented cleverness here that doesn't stop with wild characteriza tion and taffylike plot twisting (shades of Edward Albee).
Or take old Doc Butcher himself. This weasely imitation of 1980's vastly superior Zombie wears its cool on its plasma-drenched sleeve by not even bothering to apologize for its incomprehensible plot and unintelligible dialogue (overdubbed and lip-synched in English!) The film's initial setting, N.Y.C., dissolves into tropical junglescape and a regular Gilligan's Island of bladecrazy headhunters and decaying zombies. Throats are slit, guts devoured, all in outlandish satanic rites whose sole purpose seems to be (many times mute's "the only message") propagation of the splatter species itself.
Some species. When did the crazy parenting start?
Theatre du Grand Guignol. The French theater "created initially in the late 1800s for the benefit of those with jaded tastes," says McCarty, gravitated even further toward "a more unsophisticated audience." Eventually they were portraying realistic eye-gougings and beheadings (leave it to those French). Claims McC: "Plots were openly derivative or nonexistent. In Grand Guignol, gore, not drama, was the thing. Like a ghoulish magic show." Hi mom, hi dad.
That's what the immortal Herschell Gordon Lewis must've said in 1963 when he began filming what experts agree was the very first of its kind - Blood Feast, a no-holds-barred barrage of violence and psychosis from start to finish. Lewis, a "one-time" prof of English at the University of Mississippi (M.A. in journalism, doctorate in psychology), tinkered uneventfully with 11 serious cinema" before making some modest attempts at sexploitation with Daughters of the Sun and B-0-I-N-N-N-G. Feast itself followed, with an unrepentant orgy of gore. Synopsis: a deranged head-case, on a crusade to replenish the "life force" of a long dead Egyptian princess, winds up tearing limbs and organs from well-endowed young women with lots to offer.
Even the Medveds, in their Golden Turkey Awards book (Putnam's, 1980), salute the film's most famous scene, which depicts "the youthful hero reaching into the mouth of one of his love victims and ripping out her tongue. To shoot the sequence, Lewis used a sheep's tongue. Sixty thousand dollars and nine days' filming in Miami were enough to complete the project." The tongue, not especially well refrigerated before its cinematic debut, required "a liberal dose of Pine-sol" before it was serviceable.
Full-scale leave-taking of one's senses was H.G.'s beat. (See also 2000 Maniacs, Gore Gore Girls, and She Devils On Wheels.) Make no mistake. Such abandon is surely a credential of cool in the splatter realm. Not just brainless mummies or dim-bulb Franks and Dracs but the living dead (vampires, ghosts) - the whole senseless spectrum of human facsimiles charged with paranormal life force.
In the great Not of This Earth (1958), mindlessness is induced with an alien (Paul Birch) who comes from "somewhere else" (!). Birch becomes an icon of orthodox cool by donning a pair of '67 Lou Reed wraparound shades, then goes berserk. He gets hyperkinetic, hops around like an insurance salesman on acid, and begins speaking with this weird, maybe Armenian accent that makes zero sense. Birch is surely one of the coolest cats ever to script-speak horror flick dialogue. Once he snaps, his laconic drawl gives way to grunts, barks, and ranting commands not unlike Kevin McCarthy in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (K.M. was last seen on the nighttime soap Flamingo Road, wearing a Southern accent that's about as convincing as a drugstore toupee.)
But Birch's mindless behavior (and the film's utter senselessness) is sublime. "Luke into my eyes! My eyes are aa-lien!" he bellows. After some friendly blood-siphoning (into milk bottles) and a vacuum cleaner demonstration by B-movie legend Dick Miller (Corman's Bucket of Blood, etc.), Birch pursues Beverly Garland in the most redundant chase scene ever shot - one series of roadway footage recycled six or seven times, end on end. "Luke at my eyes, you tool!" he yells trom his car to Bev in hers. But she's too clever to "luke" into her rearview mirror, and shortly thereafter Birch cracks up on the highway.
It's really not that far from irrationality to the blissfully witless. Absurdity and brilliant stupidity are just over the hill, and the place where they all collide - the veritable astral plane of cosmic horror show ridiculousness - is Zombieville. Since violence and grossness are common by-products of conventional monster movie insanity, zombs encompass all aspects of creep cool. It's a rare zomb epic that fails to incorporate all these strains. Bela Lugosi's White Zombie (1932) and Revolt of the Zombies (1936) bring you right up to the amazing I Walked with a Zombie (1945) and George Romero's workouts in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.
Romero's zombies are all Class I's: grave-risen moms and grandmas merely answering the call of a higher command to get up and do the funky deathwalk around the streets of your town. They take orders. Class 11 zombies act on impulse and aren't nearly as predictable (or subservient). The creatures of 1981's Zombie are Class II's. Their path of orbit appears almost arbitrary, they're more self-propelled and pissed-off than the folks in Last Man on Earth (1964) or Zombies of Mora-Tau (1957).
Class II's can play night and day, but most Z-I's come to life when the sun sets. Last Man's I's spend all eve chasing Vincent Price. They also share gene secrets with their cousin Dracula - they don't like garlic, and it's suggested their condition is the result of "a rare blood disease," which links them to the swell Dr. Butcher once again, as well as to They Came from Beyond Space (1967) wherein an alien intelligence uses corpses to spread the plague! Class I zombies are rarely considered disease carriers. Zombie motivation leads to still more sub schools, such as the exotic robot z's of Target Earth (1954). Luke at them.
After zombies, we're left with little in the way of ghoul cool that hasn't been previously explored. There's the boring rational-parables-of-man's-demise routine - radiation, hothouse effects, marine life malaise in Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Immortal Monster, and Caltiki (malevolent jellyfish). Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954 introduced actual fish-man monsters (nothing more than a gilled Class II zombie), which inspired Slithis and 1980's Humanoids from the Deep. Demon and devil-possession cool is well documented, and so's modern gothic (Amityville Horror) and the rube-fiend wing of Agri-horror (1981's Motel Hell and 1975's Race with the Devil, with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, and their wives fleeing squads of hick devil-cultists).
For true creativity in a Hideously Underrated Semi-Splatter Work, the winner is The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1958). Unlike the implied violence that most ghoul films run on, Piedras Blancas' lead creatch goes for explicit decapitation. (This one'll never make it onto TV.) In the best tradition, stupidity and gross-out walk hand in hand here. In one mind-boggling scene, the monster strolls into the center of town, turns into a grocery store, makes it over to the produce section, and palms two freshly severed heads that have been tossed in with the romaine and iceberg.
Luke into my lettuce!
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