Night Of Bloody Horror

Night Of Bloody Horror Directed By Joy N. Houck Jr. Starring Gerald McRaney (1969).

Like The Herman's Hermits song, "Something Tells Me I'm Into Something GOOD"!

From the bubble popping and weird lights during the credits to the promise of a rock band called The Bored, I can already tell I'm in for something trashy! 

   Future Major Dad actor Gerald McRaney stars as the blood crazed psycho gone berserk. I first became aware of this hair raising film though Psychotronic Video and it's been difficult to track down for some reason. But it's worth seeking out, especially if you're a regular TOG reader, which means you are fond of demented trash!

My brain is trying to rip through my skull!

   They use the same hokey LSD trip effects from Mantis In Lace to convey an extreme case of bi polar/migraine disorder that afflicts the mind of the killer.

   A blonde girl goes to confession and is randomly attacked while in the booth! A long needle gets stuck through her forehead and instantly kills her, next we are at her funeral. The viewpoint is from the ground up, as her boyfriend Wesley (McRaney) Stewart, stands above her coffin. Everything about this film is dime store cheap, from the shoddy audio to the constant room tone, in an S.F. Brownrigg way. 
   I'm on board though, even though I detest Brownrigg with every fiber of my being and there's three of his films in the Deep Red catalog that I will reluctantly get to!

   Wesley tries to drown his anxiety with booze, but can't shake the feeling. The music that plays in the bar sounds like The Dirtbombs played through a shitty broken radio. 

   A hair hopper nurse takes sympathy on Wes after he gets robbed and beaten over the head, lying in the street. Robert Zemekis must have watched this when he wrote Back to The Future, because Wes wakes up without his pants, and the "Florence Nightingale effects" starts to wash over the screen as their love blossoms to a magical zenith, but then it all ends tragically.

We'll always have The Poconos.

   He can't enjoy himself, because that igneous headache takes over and the urge to kill surfaces! There's a nice dissolve of blood in the sand into a bowl of tomato soup, so I take back the Brownrigg crack!

Night of Hot and Creamy Tomato Soup!

   This director is more accomplished and inventive as I originally suspected. I've read reviews from critics who claim to have fallen asleep, don't listen to these hacks, they have zero attention span! 

I shouldn't have gulped down thorazine

   Two homophobic cops try to rile up the killer by calling him a "fag", and Stewart seems to have a history of offenses with them. I have to mention that McRaney was the dad in The Neverending Story and humiliates his son for drawing unicorns! "They aren't Horses dad, they're UNICORNS!!!" 

   He goes to a club and runs right into psychedelic garage band, The Bored! They have a really fuzzed out bass and an overdriven organ. 

  The main character can't leave the house to escape his over bearing mother without getting into a fight or hacking someone to pieces! 

Was it something we said?

   43 minutes in, they finally establish Wesley's backstory and the fact that he was in an asylum for stabbing his brother and a few other people. I'm not sure what they were waiting for? 

   The cops make his J. Edgar Hoover looking psychiatrist his caretaker and put him into an Edmund Kemper, "move back in with your mom" solution. If you've done your serial killer research, you should know how that ends up, vocal chords stuck in the garbage disposal!

   His mother Agatha (Evelyn Hendricks), looks like a human version of Lady Elaine Fairchilde with meth teeth! Later on he has a sex nightmare about mom crawling into his bed! Eeek! There are shades of Psycho obviously radiating through-out this, and the ending reminded me of Don't Go In The House. Am I giving this schlocky flick too much credit, not sure, judge for yourself.

So What if I dropped my anti-psychotic medicine down the drain?

   Everything unravels from there on, as his doctor gets chopped up with an axe (the film oddly jump cuts in an unsatisfying way)! Wes hides out at a neighborhood girl's house and hears an all points bulletin for his arrest! There's no empathy required for any of these one dimensional characters. The mom gets even creepier toward the end as she talks to herself in a slowed down voice. Wes is a hopeless sad sack and anyone he kills, is never given any depth or is just an annoying authority figure that you don't feel too bad for. 

   Director Houck Jr. had an odd career, later on he had a small role in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law and directed a film with Mickey Dolenz as a strangler. There's an insanely unexpected twist ending that really brings the film into Ed Gein, Deranged territory. 
Don't miss it, it actually made my skin crawl alittle! It played along with the director's other feature Women And Bloody Terror and people were rewarded $2000. if they died of fright during the double feature! I only wish it really happened, so they could make up an excuse to give away the nonexistent money. I was cracking up when I realized there's an actor named George Spelvin and my dyslexia thought I read Georgina the porn star from The Devil In Miss Jones! 

Worth Seeking out for that major league creep-fest ending!

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Also Available on Amazon Instant for 2 bucks.