No words can do justice to Joel Reed’s 1977 classic – which has also been known as Heritage of Caligula, The Heritage of Caligula: An Orgy of Sick Minds, The House of the Screaming Virgins, The Incredible Torture Show and Sardu, Master of the Screaming Virgins . . .
Along with his midget helper Ralphus, Sardu (Seamus O’Brien) runs an S&M stage show – “Sardu’s Theater Of The Macabre” – in which the actresses are tortured and killed for real, unbeknownst to the audience.
Ralphus eats eyeballs, a nude woman becomes a human dartboard, hands, feet, heads and fingers are severed, teeth are pulled with pliers, and a woman’s brain is sucked out through a straw by a demented doctor. (The brain sucking scene even sickens Sardu and Ralphus).
Understandably, this film was one of those picketed by Women Against Pornography, and there’s no arguing with the fact that women here are continuously degraded, abused and butchered as entertainment.
The sexism is glorified and resplendent, aiming the humour at the basest male instincts.
The film is filled with blatant misogyny. Women are used as tables, caned, torn apart on a rack, and put in a guillotine.
Virtually every woman in the movie is totally nude, and several of them are locked in a cage, just waiting to taste human flesh. They get their wish a few times – especially in the film’s last scene . . . That’s no hot dog she’s eating!
The violence is imaginative if not that well-executed and the tongue of the filmmakers is seriously stuffed in their collective cheeks.
Surprisingly, the erotic level of the film is low. Given the high level of nudity, one would expect more sexual explicitness in a film which contains little more than a breast fondle by the mad doctor or a suggested blowjob from a just-decapitated head, worked by Ralphus.
This is probably the goriest, most repulsive film ever made, and a true classic – but if you possess so much as an iota of political correctness, even the loosest of moral fibre or any semblance of good taste, Bloodsucking Freaks will be your worst enemy.
After playing Ralphus, Luis De Jesus played an Ewok in Return of the Jedi (1983).
Sardu
Seamus O’Brien
Ralphus
Luis De Jesus
Natasha Di Natalie
Viju Krem
Tom Maverick
Niles McMaster
Police Sgt. John Tucci
Dan Fauci
Creasy Silo
Alan Dellay
Doctor
Ernie Pysher
Sardu’s Assistants
Helen Thompson
Ellen Faison
Director
Joel M Reed
