3-D Thursday: The Flesh and Blood Show (1972)

The poster for The Flesh and Blood Show, a 1972 part 3-D slasher film directed by Paul Walker, promises "an appalling amalgam of carnage and carnality". If you're a gorehound and you read that sentence and got palpitations of excitement, please calm down. I can guarantee that you will find the movie a shattering disappointment. I'm no gorehound and I found it to be a shattering disappointment.

The Flesh and Blood Show is the old saw Agatha Christie used for And Then There Were None. A group of people are invited to remote location by an unknown person who starts picking them off. In this case it's a group of actors and the location is an abandoned seaside theatre. They're there to rehearse a Grand Guignol style review called The Flesh and Blood Show.  When one of the actresses is murdered, instead of leaving, the cast and director stick around to continue rehearsals and maybe find the killer. Unlike Christie's classic, the cast isn't stranded at the theater. They can leave anytime they want to. Well, no one ever accused characters in a slasher movie of being intelligent.

As much blood as you will see

Conventional stupidity of slasher movie characters to one side--including those that wander off all alone knowing full well that a killer is nearby--there's a larger problem with the movie. If you haven't seen it and, as I say, are a gorehound, you'd probably expect there to be a lot of gory murders. But there aren't. Point in fact, all of the killings are off-screen. The poster shows us a woman being decapitated and while there is such an incident, she's decapitated offscreen and when we she her head, it doesn't look any different from the other wax heads it's next to. There's maybe six murders in this and not a single one of them happens before our eyes or is even remotely bloody. The bloodiest the movie gets is at the beginning when a guy walks into the room of two of the actresses with a knife in his gut. However, that scene is a practical joke and a fake out. For a movie called The Flesh and Blood Show, you'd expect at least some blood and will likely be confused by the lack of same.

On the other hand, the film does deliver a fair amount of Flesh for that part of the title. Virtually every young actress in the film takes off their clothes at one point or another. One even opens her apartment door in the middle of the night stark naked because of course she does. So, if you like movies with lots of beautiful naked women, you'll like this. If you're hoping those naked women get killed off creatively a la Friday the 13th, you're not going to like this movie.

The Flesh and Blood Show was one of those Part-3-D movies released back in the 60s and 70s. The vast majority of the movie is in 2-D, with a ten minute segment towards the end in black and white 3-D. Why black and white, besides the fact that it was a flashback to the 1940s? Because the 3-D segment was originally in anaglyphic 3-D. Even Paul Walker knew that anaglyphic 3-D in color looks rotten, so he shot that segment in black and white. The only problem is, the segment is so dark that the 3-D is practically non-existent. Kino released the movie on 3-D Blu Ray with both the anaglyphic version and the 3-D TV version and they both look pretty poorly. There's maybe three well lit shots in the entire segment. To make matters worse, to watch this sucker in 3-D, you have to watch the 2-D parts up until the flashback begins, go to the menu, select the 3-D way you want to watch it, watch that segment, go back to the menu, and find the end of the film in the chapter selections! It's too much work for a film this poorly done with 3-D this bad.

This, by the way, was Walker's second 3-D film. He had earlier shot a soft-core sexploitation film called The 3-Dimensions of Greta, also using anaglyphic segments. Something Weird Video has that one on DVD, but after this film, I have no desire to seek that one out. It doesn't help that I've seen Something Weird's other anaglyphic 3D DVDs and they all stink.


One amusing piece of trivia for fans of General Hospital. Both this movie and Greta have a very young Tristan Rogers in them, ten years before he played Robert Scorpio. This explains how I came to watch this movie, too. Being one of the very early vintage 3D Blu Ray releases, I bought it just to support vintage 3D releases. I never had any interest in nor any intention to actually watch the dumb thing. However, a friend of mine came over one day and learning of this movie and Mr. Rogers being in it, begged to watch it. The moral of the story is that if you happen to buy this movie just to support 3D Blu Ray and you have a friend who watches General Hospital every day of his life, don't mention it to him or you, too, will be sadly subjected to this.