"Don't you dare ruin my dinner!"

In these socially aware days, with all its spoiler alerts and trigger warnings, with the kids and their campus safe zones, with feminists and their cries of rape culture, with meninists and their cries of, of.... look, a man can cry, too, OK? Back off before he starts swinging. Trust me, bro, you do not want to call this dude out on his latent homosexuality. Just because a guy rants on the Internet about how badly he doesn't want to look at Charlize Theron for 90 minutes, doesn't mean he can't lay you out... in a man's way.... with violence, I mean.... Good, old-fashioned, heterosexual violence... properly done by a man....

We good, bro?

Good, because I'm trying to say the words "torture porn" get clumsily tossed around by today's kids to describe gore-infused suspense-thrillers like Saw 2. Come on, have you never been to a Times-Square grindhouse, or a drive-in, or even seen the inside of a store that rented out VCRs?

Torture porn, indeed. This week's Thursday Thriller is Bloodsucking Freaks.

Here's your trigger warning: This 1976 Joel M. Reed film is specifically designed to shock and offend you.

If you object to nude women being tortured and degraded while a jaded audience looks on and laughs, this movie will offend you.

If you've been raised to believe it's not okay to paint a target on a woman's backside and use her, down on all fours, as a dartboard, this movie will offend you.

If you appreciate good acting, this movie will offend you.

However, if you can overcome these minor moral obstacles, you're in for a hell of a show because they don't make 'em like this anymore.

The story is about Sardu (Seamus O'Brien), a human trafficker who runs an off-Broadway "Theater of the Macabre" in his spare time. His audience watches him narrate as his dwarf sidekick Ralphus (Louie De Jesus) cuts off a nude woman's fingers and crushes her skull in a vice. Sardu assures them what they are watching is real, while the audience generally assumes it is not and has a good, hearty laugh at the poor woman's expense. One person who isn't laughing, though, is art critic Creasy Silo (Alan Dellay), who says the whole thing is not only fake, but badly done at that.  He refuses to give Sardu the dignity of any review, even a negative one.

So Sardu sends Ralphus to kidnap Silo, as well as prima ballerina Natasha Di Natalie (Viju Krem). His plan is to break both of their wills, so he may force Di Natalie to dance in his show, and thus force Silo to review it. Meanwhile Di Natalie's boyfriend, football star Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster) and Police Sgt. John Tucci (Dan Fauci) search for the missing dancer.

Alas, all S and no M make Sardu a dull boy, so in the evenings he likes to unwind by letting his slaves torture him.

 

Bloodsucking Freaks streams on Amazon Prime and in various alternate language formats across YouTube. The special effects should keep you from taking it too seriously.