This 60’s horror comedy is very much in the mould of the pioneering gore flicks made by Herschell Gordon Lewis. It shares the specific combination of schlocky, excessive bloodletting with wacky humour. It’s this strange and often totally inappropriate combination that gives this flick some enduring cult film appeal. It opens pretty strikingly with three psychopaths in motorcycle clobber conducting a home invasion where they violently kill a young woman and then proceed to take her severed leg away with them. This opening scene gives you a pretty good indication of the tone of the film as a whole though, as while the basic idea is pretty mean spirited it is offset by the picture of the girl’s boyfriend changing continually as he registers his shock at events being carried out in front of him in a series of increasingly zany expressions. In other words, like the films of Lewis, the excessive violence can’t really be taken very seriously when the tone is so wilfully ridiculous.

The three biker maniacs do make for quite interesting villains though. And the decidedly sick subject matter of serial murder and cannibalism is pleasingly tasteless. There are limb decapitations, an impaling, a victim being dipped into a vat of acid, body parts being fed into a meat grinder, a chain whipping, a meat cleaver to the head and a woman having her innards…fondled; the latter scene is the grimmest moment on offer as it splices in actual open heart surgery! Throughout all this mayhem there is a fairly high quotient of pure nonsense. You just know that a slapstick scene or silly jape can never be very far away, often involving skateboards, pies to the face and comedy sound effects. The combined result is a film of considerable camp value. It also has the good manners to only clock in at just over an hour, so it hardly outstays its welcome. For anyone interested in the early genesis of the gore film, I would say that this crazy flick is a must.