Bloodsucking Freaks: Director's Cut (Stomp Visual) (1976) (NTSC)

    Written and Directed by Joel M. Reed, Bloodsucking Freaks was inspired by Reed's visit to an S&M Ballet in an underground Soho club. The film was shot in 10 days at night, in 1975, and produced on a shoe-string budget by Alan C. Margolin. The film, then known as The Incredible Torture Show (T.I.T.S), was later acquired and renamed by Troma. On its initial theatrical release, the film caused a storm of controversy, especially the graphic depictions of violence toward women.

    Sardu: "Her mouth will make an interesting urinal".

    The story revolves around the evil, sado-masochist Sardu (Seamus O'Brien), who runs an off-Broadway Theatre of the Macabre. With the help of his sadistic blowgun-carrying midget assistant Ralphus (Luis De Jesus), Sardu kidnaps young women from the streets of New York. After a period of imprisonment and torture, the women are either brainwashed into being submissive slaves, and shipped overseas, or used in Sardu's shows, where they are tortured and killed on stage. The audience for these shows, however, assume the gross savagery is a simulated illusion.

    The deranged Sardu is deluded into believing all this torture, murder, and cannibalism is art, and he dreams of theatrical success, where he will be recognised as a great artist and genius.

    To achieve this aim, Sardu kidnaps Natasha DeNatalie (Viju Krem), a prima ballerina, and Creasy Silo (Alan Dellay), a respected New York theatre critic, who has openly mocked Sardu's work in the past. Sardu tortures both of them in his theatre basement of horrors, until they agree to be part of his S&M ballet.

    Meanwhile, Natasha's boyfriend and professional football player, Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster), suspects Sardu is involved in the kidnapping, and enlists the help of crooked Police Detective Sergeant John Tucci (Dan Fauci). Together, they venture into the depths of Sardu's dungeon searching for the truth.

    While the story might sound a little comical, there are constant disturbing images of truly disgusting and graphic violence. While I'm sure many readers will see this all as harmless fun, in my opinion, the danger (especially to younger male viewers) is that this film sexualises the violence by freely mixing images of graphic violence with images of nudity, sexual pleasure and satisfaction. After all, this is a film where a midget uses a girl's severed head for oral sex.

    Bloodsucking Freaks is definitely not for the squeamish, and even hardened B-Grade cult cinema film buffs might find it sickening.

Video

    In short, the transfer is terrible, largely due to the awful source material.

    The NTSC transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, pan and scan.

    The image is soft throughout, and sometimes (unintentionally) slightly out of focus. The black level is poor, with blacks appearing as a murky grey. The shadow detail is also poor - for example, consider the interior of the hallway at 22:09. Some low level noise is also present.

    The colour has suffered with age, and often appears washed out. As I've often spotted with older films in NTSC, the skin tones often have an orange tint.

    In terms of MPEG artefacts, obviously very cheap film stock has been used, and the source material has not been well cared for. As a result, the image is frequently grainy throughout, and also helps draw attention to the pixelization throughout.

    Film-to-video artefacts are present in the form of telecine wobble, most noticeable during the opening credits.

    Plenty of film artefacts appear throughout, and some of them are quite large.

    No subtitles are provided on the DVD.

    This is a single-sided, single-layered disc, with the feature divided into 10 chapters.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The limited audio sounds flat throughout.

    Originally released theatrically in Mono, the DVD has two audio options: English Dolby Digital 2.0 (384Kb/s), and English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (384Kb/s).

    The dialogue quality and audio sync are reasonable for the age and condition of the source material. Sometimes the looped dialogue is very obvious.

    The freaky musical score is credited to Michael Sahl, who was a composer of music for porno films in the 1970s. Sahl has cleverly mixed carnival-like theme music with a variety of electronic instruments, bagpipes and cymbals to create something that is as disturbing to our ears as the imagery is to our eyes.

    As the audio is not surround encoded, there is no surround presence or LFE activity.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    There are some interesting extras included, the most notable being film historian Eli Roth's enthusiastic audio commentary. All extras are presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with English Dolby Digital 2.0 audio.

Menu

    Animated with audio.

Introduction-Lloyd Kaufman

    The President Of Troma, and creator of the Toxic Avenger, introduces the film, which he describes as now being more shocking than the version originally released.

Audio Commentary

   Film historian and Troma fan Eli Roth provides a very interesting and informative screen specific audio commentary. Well researched, Roth is very knowledgeable and chatty.

Featurette-Tour Of Troma

    The tour is hosted by The President Of Troma, and creator of the Toxic Avenger, Lloyd Kaufman. The four-story Troma Building in Hell's Kitchen, New York contains the Troma Film Studios. By selecting the following, viewers are treated to either short snippets from a past Troma film, or some mocked-up, behind-the-scenes footage.

• Sex Department
• Executive Washroom
• Violence Department
• Wardrobe
• Boardroom
• Special FX
• Theatrical Releasing
• Sound Stage
• Script Department
• Gateway to Troma
• Commissary

Freaks On Film

• Aroma DuTroma - Clips from the Troma Collection
• Lloyd Kaufmann's Autobiography - a short advertisement for the book
• Interviews-Cast & Crew - Eli Roth provides some recent interviews with some of the original cast, who share their recollections of the short filming period
• Radiation March - A short film
• Public Service Announcement - Surely one of the strangest 'extras' ever on a DVD, this is a short clip of a topless woman, to be used for viewer masturbation. True!
• Public Service Announcement 2 - A comment about global warming, with girls in bikinis
• Web Link - A link to the Troma site, www.troma.com

Gallery-Photo

    Seven photographic stills from the film

DVD Credits

    There is censorship information available for this title. Click here to read it (a new window will open). WARNING: Often these entries contain MAJOR plot spoilers.

    We same to have the same, non-region coded, version of Bloodsucking Freaks as released in R1, but one of the extras, Troma Intelligence Test (T.I.T) did not seem to work.

    One of the most graphic sexploitation shockers ever released!

    The video quality is poor.

    The audio quality is also poor.

    The extras are interesting, and genuine.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall