Brad Grinter | Through the Shattered Lens

Oh, poor Veronica Lake.

In the 1940s, Veronica Lake was undoubtedly a star. She appeared in Preston Sturges’s classic comedy, Sullivan’s Travels. She played the femme fatale in a series of classic film noirs. She proved herself to be just as capable of playing comedy as she was playing drama. By wearing her hair down and often allowing it to fall over her right eye, she created the peek-a-boo hairstyle. She was briefly a star and a fashion icon but she also developed a reputation for heavy drinking and being difficult to work with. During World War II, the U.S. government actually requested that Lake change her hairstyle in order to decrease incidents of women, many of whom were working factories as a part of the war effort, getting their hair tangled in the machinery. Lake did so, cutting her long hair and going for a more practical look. Her career never recovered.

The years following her 1940s heyday would not easy ones for Veronica Lake. Along with multiple divorces, she also struggled with alcoholism and with the IRS. Lake spent much of the 50s in England. When she returned to the States in the 60s, she was arrested several times for public drunkenness and eventually took a job as a waitress to pay the bills. A news story about her life as a waitress renewed some interest in Veronica Lake, as did the publication of her memoirs in 1969. As so often happened with former stars who fell on hard times, she considered taking roles in the type of low budget films that she wouldn’t have even been offered when she was at the height of her fame.

That brings us to Flesh Feast.

In Flesh Feast, Veronica Lake is cast as Dr. Elaine Frederick. Living in a dilapidated mansion in Florida, Dr. Frederick believes that she has discovered the perfect way to not only look younger but to also reverse the aging process itself! It involves maggots, lots and lots of maggots. For just a few dollars, Dr. Frederick will apply maggots to your skin and, like magic, they’ll suck away the years. That may sound disgusting but, whenever the viewer is show Dr. Frederick working in her laboratory, it’s obvious that the maggots are instead grains of rice.

Dr. Frederick is approached by a group of South American neo-Nazis who want Dr. Frederick to use her maggots to make their leader young again. They refuse to tell her the name of their leader but you can guess who it is, right? I mean, he’s living in Argentina. He’s in hiding. The rest of the world thinks that he’s dead. He’s German. He used to be involved in the government …. oh, okay, I’ll tell you. It’s Hitler. The group wants Dr. Frederick to use her maggots to make Hitler young again. Dr. Frederick agrees but it turns out that she’s only interested in getting revenge!

There’s a lot of negative things you can say about Flesh Feast but it’s perhaps the only film to feature Veronica Lake laughing as a bunch of maggots eat Hitler’s face. Don’t get me wrong. It takes forever to actually reach that moment. There’s a whole subplot about a journalist trying to investigate Dr. Franklin’s experiments. As well, Dr. Franklin’s assistant is an undercover government agent and she keeps stumbling across dead bodies at inopportune times. The first 70 minutes of Flesh Feast are about as draggy and boring as any movie that I’ve ever seen. But, after all that, you get to see Veronica Lake kill Hitler. Some would say that’s definitely worth the price of admission!

Flesh Feast was Veronica Lake’s final movie. (She not only starred in the film but she co-produced it as well. Director Brad Grinter was also responsible for Blood Freak.) It was filmed in 1967 but not released until 1970, after the publication of her memoirs renewed interest in her career. Unfortunately, Flesh Feast didn’t exactly do well at the box office. Lake would die just three years later, at the age of only 50. But her films and her performances will live forever.

It’s difficult to explain why exactly Blood Freak, a no-budget horror film from 1972, is a movie that you simply have got to see. I could tell you about how it’ll force you to wonder if the movie was meant to be taken seriously or if it’s all just a huge joke. I could go on for paragraph after paragraph about how this movie (and its status as one of the great cult films of the last century) represents one of the purest triumphs of independent cinema and how this movie is one of the few American films to ever come close to Lucio Fulci’s theory of “pure film.” But I fear that even after I do all that, I will not be able to convey just how beautifully odd and wonderful this movie truly is.

So, instead of doing all of that, I think I’ll just tell you what Blood Freak is about.

Steve Hawkes (a body builder who appeared in several Spanish exploitation films in the late 60s) plays an aimless drifter who, as the movie starts, finds himself in Florida. He meets a virginal young woman named Angel. Soon, they are a very clean-cut, chaste couple. As seen in the clip below, Angel even gets him a job working at the local turkey farm.

However, there’s trouble brewing. Angel has a sister named Ann. Ann is Angel’s opposite in every way. Not only does she stay out for all hours of the night with her sleazy friends but she also introduces our hero to a little drug called marijuana.

Soon, Hawkes discovers that — apparently like most of America in the early 70s — he is now addicted to marijuana! (“I have a feeling I’m hooked!” he explains.) Of course, we all know what happens when you mix marijuana and repeated exposure to turkeys. That’s right, our hero ends up falling asleep and then waking up as a blood-crazed man/turkey hybrid, as seen in the scene below (which, fair warning, has some fake blood in it).

However, if that wasn’t enough, there’s one more thing that makes this movie an absolute requirement for any discerning film lover. Blood Freak has a narrator. And our narrator isn’t some wimpy, off-screen guy with a stern voice and a moralistic outlook. No, our narrator is Brad Grinter, the film’s writer and director. Grinter pops up every few minutes, sitting behind a desk and explaining the larger social and moral concerns raised by the story of a muscle-bound drifter transformed into a half-Turkey. Whenever Grinter appears to lose his train of thought (which happens frequently), he holds up what appears to be the film’s script and reads his commentary line-for-line. While he explains why marijuana is bed (Mmmkay), Grinter puffs away on an ever-present cigarette. Several times, he has to pause in his commentary in order to hack up a lung. One of his more inspiring moments can be seen below:

Blood Freak. See it.

(On a related note, I usually love Something Weird Video but I’m a little bit annoyed with them that they’re apparently only selling the Blood Freak DVD as part of an over-priced box set. Still, a used copy of the film on DVD shouldn’t be hard to track down. Why anyone would want to sell their copy of it, I can’t begin to guess but apparently, not everyone recognizes the brilliance of this film in quite the same way as I do. Their loss.)