Well, with a title like Blood Sucking Freaks, it has to be good!

Right?

First released in 1976, Blood Sucking Freaks is one of those not particularly good films that every horror fan has to sit through at least once.  Historically, it’s important as an example of a film that generated a thoroughly unnecessary moral panic, largely amongst people who had never actually seen the stupid thing.  It tells the story of Master Sardu (Seamus O’Brien), who runs a Grand Guignol-style theater in SoHo.  Wealthy New Yorkers flock to the theater on a nightly basis, to watch as Sardu and his dwarf assistant, Ralphus (Luis de Jesus), torture women on stage.  The crowd thinks that it’s all fake but what they don’t know is that Sardu and Ralphus are abducting real women and forced them to live in a cage underneath the theater, where they are occasionally brought out to be abused by high-paying patrons.  All of the torture and death that takes place on stage is real.

Most members of the audience enjoy the show and consider Sardu to be a master of transgressive art.  However, critic Creasy Silo (Alan Dellay) doesn’t think much of Sardu or his show and he writes a review in which he refers to whole thing as being pretentious.  Sardu apparently considers “pretentious” to be the worst insult that can be uttered against his production of pain and murder so he orders his followers to abduct Silo.  Held prisoner in the theater, Silo is told the truth about the show and then brainwashed to become a part of the show himself.

Meanwhile, Sardu’s followers have also kidnapped a ballerina named Natasha (Viju Krem).  Sardu feels that, if Natasha can be brainwashed to perform in the show, it’ll lead to greater things.  The show might move to Broadway and then someone might make a movie about Master Sardu!  Natasha’s lunkhead boyfriend, Tom (Niles McMaster), is not happy about Natasha being kidnapped.  He teams up with a sleazy cop (Dan Fauci) and they head down to the theater.

Much as with Snuff, Blood-Sucking Freaks generated a lot of controversy when it was first released, with some speculating that the murders in Blood-Sucking Freaks may have actually been real murders.  It was originally released in grindhouse theaters with an R-rating.  That R-rating might take some people by surprise when you consider how graphic the film supposedly was but it must be understood that the R-rating was self-imposed.  The filmmakers refused to submit the film to the MPAA and just rated it themselves.  When Troma acquired the film and submitted an edited version of the film to the MPAA, the organization refused to even watch the film.  That’s how controversial Blood-Sucking Freaks is!  The MPAA won’t even watch it long enough to tell other not to!

Also, much like Snuff, Blood-Sucking Freaks is actually a pretty boring movie.  Blood-Sucking Friends does deserve some credit for satirizing the pretentions of the underground arts scene but, for the most part, it’s a slow-moving and terribly acted film and the gore, while plentiful, is not particularly convincing.  Seamus O’Brien, who was murdered in an unrelated incident shortly after the film’s release, gives an absolutely lousy performance as Sardu.  Controversy aside, it’s a dumb movie and the only thing that really redeems it is that it knows it’s a dumb movie and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The main lesson of Blood-Sucking Freaks is that it’s the type of movie that probably would have vanished into obscurity if not for the controversy that it has generated over the years.  Outrage sells.