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Director: Ray Dennis Steckler
Screenplay: Ron Haydock and Ray
Dennis Steckler
Cast: Carolyn Brandt (as Carol); Ron
Haydock (as Tim); Jason Wayne (as Daniel); Laurel Spring (as Connie); John
Bates (as Charlie)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #11
What image stands out from Blood Shack? A man in full black
costume called the Chooper suddenly materialising into camera frame to kill
someone with what appears to be a sharpened stick. While the figure is
connected to the titular shack, killing anyone who goes near it for over a
hundred years according to legend, the abruptness of his appearances including
jumping off the shack's roof at one point is funny for reasons I can't put my
finger on. The Chooper's appearances feel like theatrical stage appearances
than actually wanting to kill another character on-screen.
Blood Shack is an oddity. The seventies is growing as one of the
best decades for horror for me both for the films being made in Europe and the
US, and part of that is to do with the latter's independent productions and how
strange and unique they could be. Blood
Shack is a lesser example but it's my introduction to the world of Ray Dennis Steckler, most well known
for Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966) and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who
Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), one of the most
memorable and infamous titles for a genre film. One major trait of his career,
documented in Jonathan Ross' The Incredibly Strange Film Show (1988-9)
in an episode devoted to him, was his habit to not follow scripts at all and improvising
the content, which is a likely explanation for how erratic Blood Shack is even at less than sixty minutes long. It starts off
as a Southern fried horror story where a woman makes a bet to stay in the
shack, the local ranch hand Daniel (Wayne)
complicit in burying the bodies left from the shack if they don't heed his
warnings. The tone jumps however when the female protagonist Carol (Brandt)
appears, the owner of the property who leads to the film suddenly being
punctured by her internal narration that feels closer to an introspective art
house drama about self discover than for a horror movie.
From here the result is a
peculiar mix; a man called Tim (Haydock) continually
pesters Carol to sell the property to her and people are randomly killed by the
Chooper but Steckler starts splicing into
this narrative with what was clearly him taking advantage of rodeo that was
also taking place in the small town he was filming in at the same time. The rodeo
footage is actually more interesting at points than the story itself, the
characters weaved in abruptly to visit it multiple times, feeling like a time
capsule unexpectedly threaded into a short movie to pad out the time. Seeing
the real cowboys riding horses, and children riding ponies in competition is
actually fascinating merely to see what this kind of culture was like in the US
in the flesh. The resulting film in general, because of this but also Steckler's odd pacing choices, goes possess a weirdness to it in
places - a murder is followed by the heroine describing the lovely pony given
to two young girls in a way that's as ridiculous a tonal change as you could
get. I also suspect the aforementioned young girls, as he cast relatives in his
films constantly, were related to Steckler
or a friend's children, sweet in how they play along to what they're supposing
to be doing on camera, one merely a toddler, and acting out scenes like playing
musical chairs with only themselves and one chair in a way that confuses
whether they were play-acting or just playing around the set on-camera. The resulting
film is less interesting as a proto-slasher it's plot suggests, too thread bare
and assaulted by random tangents to work, but for its curio home-grown quality
in aspects like this.
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