A long and strange story of horror royalty, the B-movie king, moral panics and the critical triumph of outsider cinema.
When I was a kid, late in 1977, a double bill of horror films appeared at our local Classic cinema the two-screen venue that offered major releases in Screen One, sex and horror in Screen Two. There was nothing odd about double bills on the second screen, or the fact that they were films I was unfamiliar with while gazing in amazement at the posters outside the cinema, dreaming of the day when I would be old enough to see such horrors – but while The Terror of Dr Chaney was easy to identify as Mansion of the Doomed thanks to a House of Hammer magazine review, Revenge of the Dead remained a mystery – all the more fascinatingly elusive because it starred Christopher Lee. The poster, with a photo of Lee added as the guest attraction, lingered in my mind for years afterwards but there was no reference to any film of this title in any of the articles I read about the horror legend – or, indeed, in any horror magazine or reference book. How could a film starring Christopher Lee be so unknown? This was long before you could look up anyone’s filmography at the click of a mouse.
But also: in other editions of that same magazine was passing mention of The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre, or just Meatcleaver Massacre, a film that also had the unlikely involvement of Lee. It took a while for things to click, partly because it seemed unlikely that a film of that title would have played in the UK – but eventually, it dawned on me that Revenge of the Dead was, indeed, this movie. Either that or Lee was making some very odd movie appearances in the late 1970s, which was not beyond the realms of possibility.
As I hit my teens and the video revolution happened, The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre was one of the films that I was desperate to see. I mean, that title! The title was, in fact, pretty much all we knew about the movie – the first reference book that I saw covering the film was 1983’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, and that was a ‘review’ that dismissed the movie in a couple of lines. That didn’t put me off. But the film remained elusive – at the time that all manner of obscure horror films were appearing on obscure video labels, this film was conspicuous by its absence.
In 1984, I finally had the opportunity I’d been waiting for. There, on the shelf of my local video store, was something called The Evil Force. Such a dull and generic title was hardly going to pull in the punters, even with a staged photo – not even movie artwork – of a hand holding a bloody knife on the cover. VIPCO, who released the film, had been at the forefront of video advertising outrage in the early 1980s, the outrageous sleeve for The Driller Killer being one of the catalysts for the Video Nasty panic. As such, their releases had become a target for police forces and, perhaps aware of the fate of David Hamilton Grant – who had spent time in prison for releasing Nightmares in a Damaged Brain – the labels that had once been revelling in sensationalism began to pull back and make their horror films look rather less outrageous in the hope of avoiding seizure and prosecution. The Evil Force is a much less attention-grabbing title than The (Hollywood) Meatcleaver Massacre. Of course, that wouldn’t just divert police attention from the film – the public also tended to overlook these increasingly generic and obscure-looking films. And it was all for nothing – as it turned out, the police’s determination to seize every horror film that they came across meant that even those with the blandest titles and covers – Night of the Demon with a front cover shot of clouds, for crying out loud – were likely to be confiscated – especially if someone in authority had actually watched these films and noted just how gory they were.
As it turned out, VIPCO’s gamble worked. The Evil Force did not appear on any of the Video Nasty lists. I suspect the main saviour of the film was the tantalising back cover promise of Christopher Lee making a ‘guest appearance’. Lee’s presence hinted at a respectability that the cover denied. Lee was, after all, the star of the classic Hammer Horror movies, the exact horror films that we were continually assured by journalists and politicians were a world away from the Video Nasty, lest viewers who’d watched horror movies were wondering what all the fuss was about. This is a tactic that is regularly used to deflect any doubts or criticism about new censorship laws.
This is how it works: you might think that horror movies, porn movies, comic books or heavy metal albums are not that big a deal, but don’t be fooled – the stuff around now is much worse and much more dangerous than the stuff that did you no harm when you were a kid. I first saw this argument made about IPC’s Action comic in the 1970s and it continued with Video Nasties and then porn in the 1980s (and later, BBFC-approved horror films in the post-Bulger panic of the early 1990s). When you see this claim made about internet porn today, remember that in the mid-1980s, exactly the same thing was being said about the porn of that era – that it was much, much worse than the stuff you might have seen in the past. It’s the classic way of silencing critics – you might think this is all essentially (and provenly) harmless stuff but actually, it is much more violent and abusive than the material that people were saying was more violent and abusive than regular porn back in the Eighties. It’s a proven censorship tool – you need to convince those who are not regular consumers of a product that whatever they might think it is, the truth is that it is far more dreadful. You can even convince the people who are regular consumers that there is much, much worse material out there that they have somehow or other managed to not come across while searching PornHub – that all porn is non-consensual, violent and abusive apart, somehow, from everything that they watch. Or simply convince them that they are wrong – it is surprisingly easy to gaslight people into believing that the things they enjoy are evil, that the things they believe… the things they know… are untrue. It’s a classic case of repeating a lie so often that even the people who know better will begin to doubt themselves. The films that became Video Nasties were not clandestine releases leered over by hairy-palmed deviants – they were rented in vast numbers from high street video stores by ordinary people who presumably enjoyed them until the point that the relentless media campaign convinced them that these films were unspeakably dangerous.
This is how propaganda works: you convince people that the evidence of their own eyes and experience is somehow false. Most people don’t like to be outside the norm and if you convince them that everyone else thinks a certain way, they’ll step into line and eventually, they’ll genuinely begin to believe in whatever they are told. In the past, it was the tabloid press that would lead these re-education campaigns; now it is social media. Question the new reality and you will be an outcast – cancelled, if you prefer the modern vernacular – and made to be a part of the problem, even if ‘the problem’ is something that is either exaggerated or wholly invented.
Given that it was released by VIPCO – one of the more notorious labels in the Video Nasty panic, the company behind Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Driller Killer and Flesh for Frankenstein – we might wonder how The Evil Force managed to completely escape official attention. It might be because fewer shops stocked it – as the Nasty panic took hold and more and more shops were raided and hauled into court, owners became understandably more cautious about what they stocked. Horror movies from labels with a bit of a reputation probably seemed less of a sure-fire money-maker than they might have done a year or so earlier. Also, the major film distributors had overcome their initial suspicion of home video and the market was becoming increasingly dominated by big-name movies. Even without the Nasties scandal, the days of an obscure horror film topping the rental charts were effectively over. There’s another story to be told about how complicit the major labels and the film establishment were in allowing the Video Nasty paranoia to go as far as it did – but the shelf space in shops once dominated by Go Video, Intervision, Replay, Astra and the rest would soon be filled by multiple copies of the latest releases by Warner Home Video, CIC and others. Even if one or two of these labels had occasionally been caught up in the whole hysteria (Thorn EMI in particular), they could just pull titles from sale, re-edit them and put it all behind them, an option not open to smaller labels with tight finances. The major labels did very well out of the purge of feisty indies and the respectifying of home video.
So there, in the dying days of the glorious era when a whole new world of previously hidden entertainment was opened up by opportunist and adventurous independent video distributors, was this film. A boring title and a terrible cover suggested little of interest, but there was Lee on the back cover. It was easy to put two and two together. How could this be anything else but The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre? And indeed, that was what it was, opened by Lee sitting in a study, delivering a five-minute lecture on the supernatural. This had nothing to do with the rest of the film, at least in terms of the content – Lee is not involved in the main story and you have to wonder what audiences – even audiences pulled in solely by Lee’s presence – made of all this while waiting for the massacre of the title to begin.
The official word on this appearance is that Lee had shot the footage for a different film, one that was unfinished. The producers of The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre bought the footage and used it to bookend their movie, now retitled simply Meatcleaver Massacre. Lee did not know of this and was, understandably, furious. He was dissuaded from suing by his lawyer for… erm… ‘reasons’ but for the rest of his life vigorously denied ever (willingly) making this film. It’s a classic example of opportunism and an actor being unable to control the use of his work once filming has been completed.
That’s the official word. Some of us have raised our eyebrows at these claims because, well, it’s not the first film that Lee appears in where he claimed to have no idea about what was being made. Back in 1969, he shot scenes for director Jess Franco and producer Harry Allan Towers that later appeared in Eugenie – The Story of Her Journey into Perversion. This adaptation of the Marquis De Sade‘s Philosophy in the Boudoir is a mildly erotic, slightly kinky and oddly brilliant film that is as much Franco as it is De Sade (though the two shared a lot of artistic tastes). Lee claims that he had no idea that while he was filming his scenes, naked actors were cavorting behind him. But if you watch the film, the idea that Lee’s scenes are inserted becomes laughable – he is clearly an integral part of the film and while he might not have known exactly how explicit it might have been (and it isn’t really, though I accept that in 1969 it might have been hot stuff), the idea that this well-read actor didn’t know that it was based on De Sade seems laughable. He continued to work with Franco and Towers afterwards, which hardly suggests a man outraged at being duped and I suspect that he was allowed deniability by everyone involved to save face about his involvement in a film that he probably thought no one outside the sexploitation world would ever see. How was he to know that it would later be released on DVD, then Blu-ray, then UHD for the cult film market?
So at the very least and taking him at his word, Lee had a habit of making movies without even knowing what he was making or controlling where the footage went. Or else he just signed up for work on the understanding that he could then deny ever having done so in the future. Either way, it suggests an actor who was not exactly discerning when it came to work and who was more interested in quick paydays than anything else. A harsh comment for a cinematic legend, perhaps, but one that history suggests is not entirely unfair. He did, after all, also make the comedy film Dracula Father and Son in 1976 and then claimed that he had no idea that the Dracula-like vampire he was playing would be called ‘Dracula’ in the film.
We might also note that the unfinished film that this footage came from has never been named and that the subject of Lee’s introduction is not entirely removed from the narrative of Meatcleaver Massacre – sure, it could be seen as a generic lecture on occultism but it also seems to fit within the wider plot of the film. If it was proven that Lee had filmed this introduction for the movie in which it appears, would you honestly be that surprised? What we know about this is that the original film – The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre – was released in 1977 with a 77-minute running time and this later version came out with an 85-minute running time – the additional time essentially being the Lee intro and outro. The film was made around the time that Lee was making all manner of crap – End of the World, Starship Invasions, The Keeper – and so it seems entirely likely that he might have willingly signed up for a day’s work on this, especially if it was being sold to him under a different title (assuming he’d bothered to even find out the title of the film). In the end, everyone won – Lee could deny involvement and no one (least of all the filmmakers) would contradict him, while the movie got a big-name star who wasn’t going to take them to court. Notably, when asked about this film, Lee was able to both express outrage and denial while almost immediately identifying what the footage probably was. Whatever the truth of the matter, I do rather like Lee’s introduction. It’s got the feel of a slightly pompous occult documentary and if someone were to unearth concrete evidence of its origin as one of the many 1970s documentaries about the ‘unexplained’ – everything from UFOs to ghosts to Bigfoot – I would not be surprised.
As it turned out though, when I sat down to watch The Evil Force, Lee’s appearance was the highlight of the film – everything was downhill from hereon in, and the Psychotronic dismissal seemed, if anything, rather kind. Of course, we have to factor in the disappointment level – regardless of what the mainstream genre magazines implied (or maybe because of it), I had high hopes for the film. By 1984, I was done listening to the chin-stroking genre experts of the day. What we might call ‘establishment’ horror/science fiction magazines of the time when this film was made and released tended to be very dismissive of what we might now call ‘grindhouse’ cinema – everything from low-budget American exploitation to dubbed Euro-horror. A discussion about the finger-wagging moral superiority of the genre magazines that existed from the 1960s through to the 1980s – and beyond – is an article of its own; but as a kid who loved horror movies, I was always fascinated and frustrated by the way ‘horror’ magazines – or ‘monster’ magazines as many insistently call them in a determined effort to make the entire fandom seem more juvenile – insisted on covering science fiction, often to the detriment of horror. I remember how House of Hammer featured a photo from Star Wars on one cover in place of the impressive illustrations that graced every other edition (a cynical commercial move that might’ve paid off but which was a slap in the face for the regular readership) and how early editions of Fangoria cover featured the likes of Star Trek, An Arabian Adventure and The Empire Strikes Back, almost as if the magazine was going out of its way to avoid being pegged as a horror magazine despite the demands of the readers. Add to this a weird cultural snobbery and an old-fashioned attitude that still saw Hammer Films dismissed well into the 1970s by many American horror historians, and it was no surprise that films far better than The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre – everything from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Peter Walker’s movies, Last House on the Left and every slasher film of the early 1980s – were dismissed as tasteless trash while the extremes of European horror cinema went entirely unnoticed until the Video Nasties era when they were treated by most ‘establishment’ genre writers in much the same way that they were by the Daily Mail.
What all this told us teenage fans, once home video arrived and we could see all these movies for ourselves, is that we couldn’t trust the opinions of the old farts who had long been the genre’s gatekeepers. The films that they dismissed out of a snobbish idea of what filmmaking should be (one that allowed Jean-Luc Godard and respectably experimental filmmakers to play with form and structure but gave no quarter to a film like Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood or even Ganja and Hess) or as ‘offensive trash’ (even though the films that they hailed as classics had also once been dismissed in the same way by other critics) were the ones we were seeing new qualities in. Sure, some in the fanzine world maintained a certain pomposity, and it took some filmmakers a while to be appreciated; you didn’t see much praise for Andy Milligan back then, even from his current supporters. But minds were much more open and few fans were going to condemn a film for being too gory, too exploitative or too trashy – or for being rubbished by the critical elite. The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre might have been ignored or reviled by the critics – but then, so was The Driller Killer and The Child. If anything, critical dismissal was a sign that a film might be worth a look.
But not everything was, of course. Plenty of films still failed to impress. In our own way, we were still sometimes rather too demanding and could dismiss movies too quickly – inevitable when there was so much available. A new horror canon was being established and those films that fell outside it – say, the ones that didn’t attract police attention in the Nasties era or else were still too far outside cinematic norms – were often dismissed even by the fans. I was an admirer of the experimental films being shown on Channel 4’s Eleventh Hour slot that existed during its interesting early days – the films of people like Jon Jost and Stephen Dwoskin – and was much more tolerant of things like Don’t Go in the Woods than most people seemed to be – but I still found some movies unbearably incoherent. Of course, the visual limitations of VHS tape, questionable masters and 625-line 22-inch TV sets hardly helped. Neither did expectation over reality, which was certainly the case in films like The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre. How much of this is the fault of the film is open to question. It began life as a screenplay (included with the 101 Films Blu-ray, should you care to compare and contrast) titled Professor Cantrell’s Messiah, a title that was much less likely to have gorehounds slavering in anticipation, and in the great tradition of cinema it underwent all manner of reinvention and retitling, with screenwriter Keith Burns either being given the boot or stepping down voluntarily from the directorial chair in favour of Ed Wood. Yes, that Ed Wood. If only we’d known that at the time, the film might have developed a far different level of expectation and appreciation, but this was at a time when we knew a lot less about the later years of Wood and even when we did, his involvement here was also something of a mystery. The fact that he allegedly directed part or all of this – his final film if true – without anyone knowing about it for decades is another fascinating element in the film’s twisted story.
I guess we don’t have to introduce Ed Wood, a man whose reputation effectively developed alongside the discovery of directors like Ray Dennis Steckler, Ted V. Mikels and all the other Incredibly Strange Films alumni, though he reached fame – or infamy – before they did and so was mocked mercilessly. For years, it was cool to laugh at Wood’s work, even though his films are more fun and more imaginative than the output of a lot of his more respectable contemporaries. That he was made the butt of jokes by the ultra-conservative Medved brothers, a pair of opportunist idiots who mocked low-budget films and filmmakers for not being conventional enough, is telling. Wood was essentially a transgressive filmmaker who challenged restrictions and stereotypes and his classic work is all oddly marvellous. By the 1970s, his muse had vanished amidst a blur of alcohol and while his work in the porn industry is interesting – his anonymous Swedish Erotica loops are, presumably, solidly glossy given that I haven’t seen anything terrible from that company – it wasn’t his best time. If he did direct The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre, it would be the first feature film he’d helmed since 1971’s Necromania. There is little of Wood’s style in the film, but then it is hard to work out just what his style might be at this point – he hadn’t made a non-sex film since 1960 and only shot a part of this movie – how much remains a mystery. The film is credited to Evan Lee and it is only in recent years that anyone knew a thing about it beyond that mysterious pseudonym.
Time marches on. The Video Nasty era began around 1982 and so by default primarily involved films made in the 1970s. It dominated the fanzine and collector scenes of the late 1980s but quickly slipped into history, bound to be the subject of increasingly error-ridden nostalgia pieces by people who weren’t there at the time. A new generation of horror fans grew up on the films of the mid-to-late 1980s, the horror world that had already been effectively sanitised and commercialised but which has subsequently been reinvented as a Golden Age. The infamy of films like The Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre faded under the collective criticism of pompous ‘proper’ film critics and disappointed splatter movie enthusiasts. It was too terrible for most people to bother with and didn’t even deliver the expected levels of massacre (it is notably devoid of meat cleavers) to become a cult favourite.
Recent years have seen the unexpected revival of some unexpected oddities and obscurities from the depths of 1970s and early 1980s horror. A mix of VHS-era nostalgia from video company producers and the ongoing scramble for content has seen a lot of weird, forgotten films suddenly dusted off and given the special edition treatment, suddenly hyped as beloved classics and predictably hailed as such by the collector market. Films that you might have expected to stay forgotten have been given a new life by Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome, Severin and the like, with the surviving filmmakers dusted off for baffled interviews and the discs presented in the sort of packaging that bigger, more respectable movies could only dream of. 101 Films’ edition of Meatcleaver Massacre comes with the printed screenplay, a 32-page book and three cast and crew interviews, as well as both versions of the film – with and without Lee. Whoever would’ve thought it?
These new editions offer a chance to reassess a film that you might have only seen decades earlier in shitty editions on poor-quality tapes. You get the chance to see them through fresh eyes, stripped of whatever misguided expectation that you might have had the first time around. A lot of these films seem a lot better as a result. This one? Well, perhaps. It’s a late slice of Mansonploitation, toying with elements of a notorious crime (including a lead killer called Mason) that was heading for a decade old by the time the film came out, which is probably why it throws in a psychic-occultist revenge plot, where the student murderers of Professor Cantrell are killed off one by one, in scenes that are bloodier than I remember without ever pushing the envelope. The BBFC has commented that the film contains “strong bloody violence” and “sexualised nudity”, but not enough to push it past the 15 certificate level. It now feels like an interesting period piece, never quite reaching the levels of weirdness or dream-like madness that make the best of the Seventies obscurities so compelling. Should you check it out though? Definitely. Everything that we see today feels the same – TV shows look like movies and even a film shot on a phone has a slickness that you’d have to try very hard to escape. The outer limits of 1970s exploitation cinema have a weirdness that is now lost – films that look, feel and are unique, in both narrative and execution. The oddities of the past – and this is certainly one of them, albeit less dramatically so than others – seem organically odd, made that way because no one involved knew any better. I don’t know if we can ever get back to that – today’s immediate cult films seem cynically manufactured and still look very professional even if they try to break the rules – rules that everyone now knows, with even the most basic YouTube commenter talking confidently about filmmaking techniques.
Everything about this feels so far away. The Video Nasties outrage is now treated as jolly nostalgia by the very newspapers that led the charge against these films. Movies that critics damned for decades are now hailed as lost classics – all of them, it seems, with as much discernment being shown now as when they were all dismissed as trash. In a world awash with billion-dollar franchise movies, these films have somehow found the market denied to them when it mattered. It’s all very odd. Some things never change, of course – Ed Wood is still the butt of critical jokes, snarked at by people who have never actually seen his films but who nevertheless like to show their cultural superiority watching awful, sneering rubbish like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Rifftrax, laughing on cue at ‘hilarious’ scenes that would go uncommented on in other films. At least 1970s horror still generally tends to be too difficult, too odd and too extreme for the modern-day Medveds and their belief that all this stuff – all the stuff that we love – is worthless. Not that they don’t try, which is why these new editions – physical edition works of love for the unloved, recognising the art of the outsider and the importance of individuality in art – are vital.
DAVID FLINT
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