The Flesh and Blood Show (1972)

If nothing else, this one gets points for truth in advertising—The Flesh and Blood Show features copious amounts of nudity and a smattering of gore. There’s also a story of sorts, but it’s probably kinder to focus on the ways in which producer-director Pete Walker delivers the goods. A prolific maker of U.K. sexploitation flicks, Walker tries to create a straightforward thriller about innocent victims trapped in a confined location with a killer, but he can’t help himself. Nearly every scene is designed to showcase the female form, so The Flesh and Blood Show features copulating, groping, ogling, stripping, and even a long sequence of a fully nude starlet running from a killer who demands that she meet her fate naked because she’s committed carnal sins. Clearly, nothing rings Walker’s bell more than persuading attractive actresses to disrobe, then training his camera on their private parts. And yet the funny thing is he’s not a bad director, per se. Individual scenes within The Flesh and Blood Show have genuine merits, from clever camera angles to moody lighting. All this is for naught, however, since the story is dreary and predictable and silly. When The Flesh and Blood Show begins, several young actors (male and female) receive notices from a mysterious producer that they’ve been cast in a new play. Traveling to an abandoned theater on a pier, the twentysomethings rehearse by day and screw by night. (Seriously, these characters seem averse to sleeping alone or even wearing clothes after sundown.) When someone starts killing the actors one-by-one in gruesome ways, the survivors inexplicably remain at the location and continue rehearsing, at least until the bizarre black-and-white climax during which the killer reveals his identity and does the bit of chasing the nude cutie around the theater. Whatever. Plenty of slasher flicks are just as dumb as The Flesh and Blood Show, but Walker somehow manages to make sex and violence dull simply because the pacing is slow and the tone is flat. While none of the actors is of special note, the ladies are all quite shapely, and Australian-born costar Tristan Rogers later became a fan-fave regular on the American daytime soap General Hospital.

The Flesh and Blood Show: LAME

The Comeback (1978)

          British writer-director Pete Walker was a prolific source of sexploitation and horror movies throughout the ’70s, developing a lurid style filled with nasty gore, overcooked plots, and plentiful shots of attractive women. Although most of Walker’s pictures were indigenous to his home country, featuring UK actors and locations, many found their way to American screens. For one of his final ’70s movies, however, Walker catered overtly to US audiences by featuring an American leading man and a pair of American supporting players. The Comeback, alternately titled The Day the Screaming Stopped, stars cheeseball singer Jack Jones—perhaps best known for crooning the Love Boat theme—as Nick Cooper, an aging but successful pop singer who emerges from a long hiatus to record a new album. For plot reasons that aren’t worth explaining, Nick lives in the UK, having just vacated a posh London penthouse for a remote country estate.

          When the story begins, Nick’s estranged wife, Gail (Holly Palance), visits the penthouse and is murdered—or so it seems. Thereafter, Nick is haunted by strange noises and visions, most of which manifest while he’s trying to sleep in his new home. Adding to Nick’s tribulations, his only companions in the estate’s sprawling main bulding are a demented housekeeper, Mrs. B. (Sheila Keith), and her addled groundskeeper husband, Mr. B. (Bill Owen). The plot also involves Nick’s hard-driving manager, Webster (David Doyle), as well as Webster’s sexy assistant, Linda (Pamela Stephenson), who becomes romantically involved with Nick. Written by Michael Sloan and Murray Smith, The Comeback has a handful of interesting notions and some decent atmosphere, but these things never coalesce. Vignettes of Nick roaming around the estate while listening to weird noises drag on tediously, partially because nothing really happens and partially because Jones is such a non-presence. Conversely, the super-gory scenes involving Gail’s murder and its aftermath—anybody in the mood for a close-up of maggots crawling around a corpse’s eye socket?—feel like they belong in a different movie.

          On the plus side, the music-industry stuff is somewhat interesting, with Nick contemplating lyrics at home and trudging through recording sessions at the studio; one can almost see glimmers of an offbeat thriller predicated on the tensions associated with the creative process. Moreover, The Comeback is not without meager distractions, because Keith gives an amusingly campy performance as the housekeeper, and because Stephenson is quite fetching. Incidentally, she’s also a unique figure in popular culture. After launching her career as a UK starlet, she did a short stint on Saturday Night Live in the ’80s, married wild-man Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, and then expanded her career to include authoring books and practicing psychology.

The Comeback: FUNKY