![]() Not as bizarrely gripping as Walker's subsequent Melodramas of Discontent, but a decisive step in that direction. Still, it is an serviceable enough shocker. It can even be argued that there are pre-echoes of Alan Bennett's use of Morecambe in "Sunset Across the Bay" (BBC, 1975) - though of course, lacking quite the same sad humour and dry insight. The troupe of young actors' arrival seemingly doubles the ageing population of the resort, who can seemingly only dream of the past. The out-of-season seaside setting - Cromer, apparently - fits aptly into this dialectic. And he doesn't take sides the photography indeed mimics the voyeur's view at times - implicating the audience, using the trick first deployed by Michael Powell in "Peeping Tom" (1960). It is much to Walker's credit that few if any characters could be described as typical heroes. well, that would be telling! The youth characters may be rather stereotyped, but that is part of Walker's approach: to set a licentious, permissive youth against a resentful and uncompromisingly vengeful older generation. Patrick Barr - to be used again by PW - is excellent here, playing 'the Major', the first in a line of Walker protagonists who appear to be harmless English eccentrics, but are actually. ![]() "The Flesh and Blood Show" bookends Pete Walker's 'golden period' of horrors, with "Schizo" (1976) at the other end it is a gruesome piece of film-making that shows improvements in Walker's work from "Die Screaming, Marianne" - and yet he is still limbering up, in truth. I'd recommend this movie to anyone, but people who like Pete Walker, and slasher movies that are actually well-crafted and scary will especially enjoy this one. Not surprisingly, Walker offers a hot shower of generous female nudity to prepare viewers for the sudden cold shower of the terror scenes.In the hilarious opening scene, for instance, an incredibly voluptuous actress is awakened by a knock on her door at three in the morning, so she gets out of her female "roommate's" bed and answers the door completely naked. This movie marked a transition in British director Peter Walker's career from softcore sexploitation fare like "School for Sex" and "Four Dimensions of Greta" to his more mature and superior 70's horror films like "Frightmare" and "House of the Whipcord". But what the movie lacks in blood, it makes up for in T and A. Most of the murders actually occur off-screen (blasphemy, I know). Actually, there isn't much carnage either. The killer's motivation is actually somewhat believable and doesn't seem like something the filmmakers just pulled out of their collective keisters to justify the carnage. The characters are stupid, but they are not so stupid that they don't notice their friends disappearing. There's no heavy-breathing POV camera shots. This movie avoids many of what would later become tedious clichés of the slasher films. It was one of those movies like "Schoolgirl Killer", "Fright", and "Bay of Blood" that contained many of the elements of the slasher films and may have even influenced some of them a little, but was made well before "Black Christmas", "Halloween",and "Friday the 13th" initiated the deluge of slasher flicks. ![]() This sounds like a typical slasher movie, but in fact it preceded the slasher craze by many years. In "Ten Little Indians" fashion they begin to disappear one by one. A group of actors and a director are gathered together by a mysterious producer to rehearse a play in a creepy abandoned theater at the end of a pier off the English coast.
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