• Directed by Gary Graver
• Written by Mikel Angel
• Starring
  • Karen Black
  • Arte Johnson
  • Virginia Mayo
  • Michael Berryman
  • Martine Beswick

In one of those funny little happenstances, Karen Black and Michael Berryman have shared the screen in three movies made between 1990 and 1993: Haunting Fear, Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies, and this one. (They both also starred in 1985’s Cut and Run, but their scenes were shot in different locations and their characters never interacted.) Seeing both of these well-known visages on screen at once is more than a little disconcerting. Berryman, of course, had a host of congenital medical problems which contributed to his odd and very recognizable appearance. Black, on the other hand, is just plain ugly. (Yes, I know. Karen Black has feelings too, and she very well may drift across my site one day and see a spate of my reviews calling her names like an insensitive grade-schooler and burst forth into tears at my cruelty. Boy, you just take all the fun out of being a hatchetman critic, don’t you?)

Hey, slow down! That jug’s got to last the whole movie!

After the brief spate in insanity in Tinseltown that had Karen Black appearing as a sultry seductress, she immediately joined the ranks of slumming former stars who paid the rent by appearing in anything at all. There’s something about her close-set eyes (and her willingness to genteelly chew scenery) that makes her a natural for semi-crazed roles, so many of her roles have been in low-budget horror films, appearing as a matronly but less-than-balanced individual. So here we have a movie which, I can freely tell you up front, is a Psycho ripoff.

You know, it takes an uncommon man to make this ensemble work so well.

Several possible records are set in the first few minutes. As soon as the credits are over, a hapless fellow opens his front door and BAM! gets a knife shoved into his eye. Then Karen Black shovels dirt on top of his corpse in a hastily-dug grave in the backyard, and immediately comes inside to wash her hands and quench her thirst by hauling a big ol’ gallon of product-placed Gatorade from the refrigerator. Black is Mrs. Purdy, proprietor of this here boarding house full of the requisite odd individuals (according to Hollywood, no boarding house is filled with boring people), all of whom are receiving some kind of welfare, disability, or Social Security check. She also talks quite frequently to her husband Mr. Purdy. Even when he’s not present. And when he is present (in her private apartment), he’s in his dress Marine uniform in a wheelchair facing into the corner. And his voice always has an unreal reverb effect to it. If you’ve figured out that Mr. Purdy is dead and Mrs. Purdy is more than a little crazy… well, give yourself no points, because it’s pretty obvious.

The poor corpse just planted was Mr. Stevens, one of her boarders. The remaining tenants are Willie (Mikel Adams, who also wrote the script), a perpetual drunkard; Mr. Balzac (Michael Berryman in a cravat), a hungry and perpetually frustrated novelist; Vanya (former Bond girl Martine Beswick), the resident New Age mystic; and Tina (Debra Lamb), the mute ballerina who dances all over the house. It’s a jolly bunch, who are more than a little disconcerted by Mr. Stevens’ abrupt “departure.” And well they should be, as part of Mrs. Purdy’s standard rental agreement is that her boarders sign over to her their maintenance checks. (I missed one other — Hans, the skinny rag-clad cannibal chained to a wall in the basement, but I don’t know if he’s an official tenant.)

“Bring… cue card… closer!”

In fact, according to Mr. Potts (Arte Johnson), Mr. Stevens’ Social Security caseworker who starts nosing about in Stevens’ disappearance, there are at least fourteen other checks she’s collecting monthly for those who’ve “moved on.” Vanya also starts causing trouble, having “visions” of the deceased Mr. Stevens, and insists on having a seance with all of the residents, including the newcomers Mr. and Mrs. Wilson (Bert Remsen and Virginia Mayo), who are quite freaked out by the spectacle. Mr. Wilson, I should note, is completely sane. Mrs. Wilson, on the other hand, appears to believe that she’s on a first-name basis with the cream of Hollywood royalty. The general character of the boarding house community doesn’t seem to be the kind of place that Zsa-Zsa or the Matthaus would drop in to visit, so they decide to cut their contract short and move. Wanna lay bets on whether they make it out the front door?

With the Social Security snoop not giving up, grave portents and offers of exorcism from Vanya, and a nosy neighbor (Yvette Vickers) complaining at the smell coming from the Purdy backyard, Mrs. Purdy starts getting desperate and ramping up her efforts to do in them with suspicions. Mysteriously, we never see Mrs. Purdy directly kill anyone; we just get flashes of someone done up in a dress Marine uniform. Could Mr. Purdy still be alive? Or could someone else be committing the actual murders?

Yeah, I’ll just let you come up with your own caption. You were going to anyway.

It’s a slight movie, which fortunately tempers its derivative nature with lightheartedness. Balzac has a peephole into Tina’s room, which serves him well when she gets her frequent urges to dance around her room topless. Watching Michael Berryman press his face against a wall and blink excitedly through a peephole is a form of entertainment all to itself. (He’s also got a peephole into Mrs. Purdy’s room. Yes, that’s fully as horrifying as you might think.) There’s also a low-key running gag about how besotted Willie keeps not dying — either because his pickled guts have built up such a resistance that he’s immune to poison, or because he believes that Hans in the basement is an hallucination and offers him a friendly drink. And of course there’s Tina, who will dance with, around, and against anybody at all with a combination of ballet and stripshow grind.

I had a sneaking suspicion that credited director Gary Graver was actually a pseudonymous Fred Olen Ray, merely from looking at the names in the cast; aside from the headliners already mentioned, the cast features small roles for other Ray regulars like Hoke Howell and Robert Quarry. In this I proved close, but misguided; Graver is indeed a real person, who has served as cinematographer on close to thirty of Ray’s films, giving him access to Ray’s habitual cast. (Graver is also otherwise known as porn director Robert McCallum, credited on the IMDb with over seventy-five adult films. This is a very busy man.)

“It’s that damned health food she’s forever feeding me!”

I can’t in good conscience give this movie a full recommendation, but I can credit it with not doing too much damage to my psyche (aside from that inflicted by seeing Karen Black show waaaaay too much leg — can anything erase that image from my memory?). Of course, my movie-watching brain is approaching a state not unlike that of Willie’s ironbound innards, capable of shrugging off films that might kill a normal person. So, as always, consider the source.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Michael Berryman (Balzac) played “Starfleet Display Officer” (under tons of latex) in Star Trek 4, and “Captain Rixx” (under blue makeup) in the TNG episode “Conspiracy”
  • Bert Remsen (Mr. Wilson) played “Kubus” in the DS9 episode “The Collaborator”