Well, Netflix tells me I just finished watching Bloodsucking Freaks. Which is good, because otherwise I wouldn't be entirely sure whether I imagined it or not.
By which I mean, that was seriously weird. It was made all the weirder, I think, by virtue of being substantially better than I expected. Maybe it's the effect of watching two Herschell Gordon Lewis movies as my primer on early modern exploitation horror, but that was actually a pretty entertaining hour-and-a-half. Its legendary perversity was of course tamer than a lot of modern BDSM porn, but that's kind of expected, given its time.
The real surprise was how charming Sardu was. (A friend I described the film to made a connection to Zod. "Kneel before Zod!" Yeah, that might not have been a coincidence, actually.) He reminded me of no one so much as Dr. Pretorius, mincing around in his dungeon dressed exactly like the director's assistant from The Producers and camping it up like there was no tomorrow.
Which, from the film's point of view, there isn't. It's bizarre that something so gleeful could also be so nihilistic, and it quite warms my heart to witness fatalism enacted with such good humor.
I suppose I ought to say something about the misogyny at work here, but honestly, this is one of those rare cases where I feel like the misanthropy is truly so predominant a theme that the misogyny is trivial by comparison. People make that argument to me a lot -- so-and-so doesn't hate women particularly, just humanity in general -- but I usually think it's bullshit. You can hate people generally and still hate women in particular. And I notice it's an argument rarely made when women are accused of hating men. But I think Bloodsucking Freaks is truly a pretty stunning work of wholesale misanthropy. Absolutely everything human in this film is utterly loathsome -- Sardu perhaps less so, but when the Marquis de Sade is the best example of human morality you can find because he, at least, is honest about his evil -- that's a fairly bleak universe.
Yet somehow, again, I enjoyed this. Reasonably good pacing, a great deal of filmmaker energy, and morbid curiosity kept me pretty thoroughly entertained through the whole of this movie. Call me demented, but to tell the truth, I'd probably watch it again.
