The Flesh & Blood Show

A group of struggling actors and a struggling stage director are all recruited by a mysterious theatrical company to appear in the improvisational play The Flesh And Blood Show. Beginning in a small Essex seaside town, the show would begin here on a theatre at the end of a deserted pier before moving on to the West End. Having travelled from across the UK the group of performers arrive in the small town, where no hotel rooms are available. Opting instead to bunk in the old theatre, than to actively look for accommodation the group are soon very aware that things on the show are not as they seem, especially when they discover that the play is so improvised that there is not even the most basic of scripts. When one of the group goes missing, and shortly after a beheaded body is found under the stage; this soon get considerably worse.

The Flesh And Blood Show is a 1972 movie by Pete Walker, it has a group of familiar cast of the day including Ray Brooks, Robin Askwith, Jenny Hanley and Patrick Barr. For the director it was his first really risqué move into creating a synergy of erotic movie making and horror; while not being over the top in its sexual reference (especially from modern standards) the movie was for its time quite a notorious piece, involving some full frontal nudity. Beyond the use of horror the movie pushes the boundaries beyond typical 70’s horror expectations for the day, revolving around a sex mad serial killer picking off victims at a seaside resort.

If you are familiar with the wider world of horror you’ll easily make some comparisons to Michele Soavi’s 1987 movie Stagefright or Stagefright: Aquarius if you prefer. Both featuring an unknown killer while a group of actors perform on a stage play, unlike Stagefright however the cast of this earlier offering have the opportunity of escape for some bewildering reason don’t bother to even try.  Sadly there is not an owl headed killer at the heart of this movie either.

In terms of storylines The Flesh And Blood Show is a prime example of a slow burner, a movie that seems to take ages to really achieve its point; it is not Pete Walker’s finest work that much is for sure.  When the movies first murder occurs it’s pretty underwhelming, oh dear very much a case of who really cares. Then you are first to wait another 45 odd minutes before the movie moves on any, until that point you are stuck in slow developing story plots that don’t seem to have much rhyme or reason to them. Suddenly though you are almost teleported into a very 21^st century style of horror, the sight of a woman struggling for her life on a set of steps beneath the pier, and people racing to save her is straight out of more modern horrors like Saw or Hostel, it’s pretty chilling stuff.

The movie is very much on the sexist side; this is a movie that most women would consider was made by a male chauvinist; opening with a scene of two women in bed “They are only friends” although one is completely naked, a state in which she opens the front door in. After a small prance about with a character that appears to have been stabbed she finally decides it’s time to put something on. Scattered around the movie are the odd breast shot, a
scattering of pubic areas, and the odd backside. As if to address this, maybe
someone on set had a word with Walker, he chucks in a naked man towards the end.

Despite the blatant uses of sex from a look and feel, the movie is the most like the style of Hammer movies that the director achieved, something he clearly did not want to mimic. There were at least three or four occasions that you could literally smell the Hammer feeling that had invaded this movie that so clearly wanted to distance itself from the world’s biggest horror movie company.

Where The Flesh And Blood Show really wins out though is in its score by Cyril Ornadel who later contributed music to ITC’s Sapphire And Steel. Ornadel’s music in this movie is nothing short of breathtaking, if a scary music score has ever been put to a movie then this is the prime example,
better still the more you hear it the increasingly creepy it gets, this makes
Walker’s movie instantly recognisable to the ear. Starting like a conventional
Hammer horror piece of music, it suddenly flips countries and becomes very
European in its sound, no castanets or anything, but far from British in its
styling. I would go as far as to say anyone who has ever had as much as a
shudder from this movie, I’d suspect the music paid a large part of that
sensation.

The movies final sequence of the movie was shot in 3D something that Walker was keen to embrace believing it to be the next big thing, and later the same year filming The Four Dimensions Of Greta with lengthy 3D scenes whenever sex came into play.

While I cannot speak for the rest of the world, the recent UK release of the movie by Odeon Entertainment  features the longest version seen of the movie in the UK, and for the first time the movie receives a lower 15 certificate, having previously being certified as firstly an X certificate and secondly an 18 certificate in the 1980’s.

I should mention that despite being set in a fictional Essex location, the movie was in fact filmed in Cromer, Norfolk.

As I said this is not the best of Pete Walkers works, but sit down and look at the movie next to about 9 other movies from the same year and you’ll see that Walker was light years ahead of his time.