Blood and Lace.

Review #1208: Blood and Lace.

Cast: 
Gloria Grahame (Mrs. Deere), Melody Patterson (Ellie Masters), Milton Selzer (Mr. Mullins), Len Lesser (Tom Kredge), Vic Tayback (Calvin Carruthers), Terri Messina (Bunch), Ronald Taft (Walter), and Dennis Christopher (Pete) Directed by Philip S. Gilbert.

Review: 
The key tips to making a good slasher film (if there really is much of a key) is to make one that has a sense of balance, where you can find just the right amount of tension along with at least one interesting character to go along with some gore. There has to be at least something to care about for a film besides just an assortment of scenes and occasional slashes. There are plenty of slasher films out there that fit most if not all of those requirements - this is not one of them, however. This is simply a bland slasher film that coasts on a cheap narrative and characters too empty for a black hole to swallow.  The best performance is from Grahame, which was her first appearance on screen in five years. She had won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), but her career had declined in the ensuing years. She proves game to play into the trashiness of the villainous role and make it stick out, doing so to the point where the killer is overshadowed near completely (saved only because of a silly mask). Grahame is okay, but the people around her aren't too particular interesting to follow with, verging from shells (the kids) to sleazy (Selzer, Lesser, and Tayback), which I suppose distracts from the fact that the film has no true scares. It never feels unsettling or shocking at any point, reading off as just a film made on the cheap, with this being done for roughly $200,000, which I suppose one could expect from production companies named Contemporary Filmakers and Carlin Company Productions - with distribution in America coming from American International Pictures. Music and sound effects were taken from free music archives. Blood and Lace served as a drive-in regular for horror double bills, but somehow it never had a release onto VHS or DVD, with a 2015 Blu-ray release being the first home media release in North America. The opening scene with the perspective of the killer is at least a bit interesting, in that it predates Halloween (1979) and its opening POV shot - although at least that one didn't have the weapon stick out in front of the camera. The lack of a big victim count, combined with a ludicrous twist at the end serves as just another nail in the coffin. Perhaps the film was aiming to be unsettling with its tone - after all, this is a movie where Grahame and Lesser try to keep the kid count at level by just taking kids back from storage in the freezer and just pass them off as sick. Honestly, it never really seems to go anywhere - the freezer stuff comes and goes while the stuff with the kids is pretty bland. One strange thing is that this is the only directorial effort of Gilbert. Writer/producer Gil Lasky served as writer/producer for three other films in the next three years - and he hasn't done anything since. On the whole, this is a fairly bland slasher film, managing to generate only the bare minimum of actual fright, seeming more of a joke than a true expression of shock.

Overall, I give it 5 out of 10 stars.