In honor of the Spooky Season, ‘From the Vault’ will examine Horror movies throughout October, from slashers to ghost stories and other eerie tales of fright.
I love movies that take place in movie theatres. Perhaps because I’ve worked in two theatres, but there’s something about movies set in movie houses that sparks a feeling, not of nostalgia, but more akin to walking into a baseball stadium. It feels like returning home.
Rick Sloane’s 1984 Blood Theatre is an homage to the underpaid, overworked toils of working in the theatre. It’s also a low-budget, frightfully bad horror movie to boot. Sloane is a director known to Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans as the director of the infamous Hobgoblins. But beyond that, he’s known for the Vice Academy series, a series of soft-core comedies starring adult film actresses.
He also did Babe Watch: Forbidden Parody. It’s a movie about, you guessed it, a low-budget soft-core parody that tried to poke fun at the 90s TV hit. However, Sloane, like the 2017 Baywatch, failed to understand that it’s hard to make fun of a show like Baywatch because it never took itself all that seriously. The only thing forbidden about Sloane’s parody is the run time.
But anyhow, Blood Theatre, Sloane’s debut, has been labeled by many as ‘inept’ and ‘one of the worst movies ever made.’ Blood Theatre, also known as Movie House Massacre, is not very good; it’s hardly Sloane’s most inept movie; that honor goes to Babe Watch: Forbidden Parody if you sickos were wondering. Nor is it the worst movie I have ever seen.
Though, I’ll be the first to admit my trek through the shlocky sleazoid trash available on Tubi might have left my cinematic compass slightly warped. Still, I have to say Blood Theatre, for which Sloane directed, wrote, edited, produced, and did the music, is one of his better works. It’s not good; good heavens, don’t get that idea. But there’s something akin to a gleam of inspiration that doesn’t seem to exist in his other work.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around Spotlite theatre owner Dean Murdock (Rob-Roy Fletcher) buying an abandoned theatre and assigning the teens–I think they’re teens….I’m not sure–to clean it up and have it opened by the end of the week. A difficult task considering that the theater wasn’t a movie theater to begin with. To say nothing of the fact that it closed down because the last owner caught his girlfriend with another man and started a fire that trapped and killed everyone in the theatre. But not before said crazed manager, played by David Millburn, kills the poor girl working the ticket booth.
The three employees, Adrian (Andrew Corfin), Jennifer (Jenny Cunnigham), and Malcolm (Daniel Schafer), then proceed to treat the strange happenings of the theatre in a shockingly blasé manner. There’s also a subplot involving two girls Selena Joanna Foxx) and Darcy (Stephanie Dillard), who exists to pad the runtime, cause drama between the characters, and raise the body count. The age of the characters is a baffling mystery, as they look like young adults but the shots of them at the local school could either be a college campus or a high school campus. The way the characters behave, it’s up for debate.
Credit where credit is due; the teenagers, young adults, or whatever they are aren’t just horny teenagers waiting around to be killed. They’re lazy, combative, and apathetic to the horrors around them. But they’re not just walking horn dogs waiting to be grits for the genre mill.
One of the many mysteries of Blood Theatre, in addition to the character’s age, is why exactly any of this is happening. Sloane’s script is riding on the rails of absurdity, which befits the slasher genre but fails to keep itself from falling into an insensible pit of narrative miasma.
For example, we see the pale-faced older version of the murderous manager played by Jonathan Blakely. Yet, as the story begins to unspool, like a VHS tape caught in the VCR player, it becomes hard to tell whether the older version of the owner–who has no name–is real, a ghost, a zombie, or some paranormal avatar sent forth by the theater itself.
In many ways, Blood Theatre reminded me of Renato Polselli’s The Monster of the Opera (aka The Vampire of the Opera). The Monster of the Opera is a low-budget Italian movie about a haunted theatre that is more dreamlike and erotic than anything Sloane could hope to conjure. But still, there’s an overlapping sense of the same sort of dream-like horror that percolates under Sloane’s opus that feels reminiscent of Polselli’s more successful attempt.
The only thing Blood Theatre has going for it over Polselli’s film is the legendary Mary Woronov’s Miss Blackwell. She’s Murdock’s long-suffering, sometimes co-conspirator slash Greek Chorus. Woronov is a Dick Miller-type actor, someone whose visage you see in a film and smile, like seeing an old friend. No film has ever been poorer for having her in it, even if the film isn’t all that rich. Here, Sloane and his cameraman, legendary independent director Bill Fishman, seem to relish capturing her legs as she struts about in heels while mugging for the camera with wicked, conniving grins.
If it seems like I haven’t said much about the movie, it’s because what happens is of little to no consequence. The compelling aspect of Blood Theatre is hardly the story or even the scares, neither of which work on any level. But what does work is the community theatre charm Sloane manages to cobble together.
His debut feature, Blood Theatre shows the promise of a director with a broad slapstick sense of humor unbothered by good taste and political correctness. The movies shown in the Spotlite Theatre have names like The Clown Whores of Hollywood, Chainsaw Chicks, Amputee Hookers, and others. These titles aren’t parodies but short films Sloane made during film school.
At one point, Sloane even finds a way to show a trailer for The Clown Whores of Hollywood. The trailer depicts sex workers in clown make-up and big funny hats smashing banana cream pies into the faces of passersby. I can’t lie, I laughed. I have and always will be a sucker for a pie in the face.
A beating heart exists underneath the protracted story-telling, drawn-out staging, and miscalculated pacing. Blood Theatre is a sincere love letter to the movie theatres that used to exist before the multiplexes—the ones that seemed to run on wings, prayers, and exploitation but nonetheless housed magic in those darkened rooms.
The way Fishman and Sloane capture a reel-to-reel projector operating or the hectic feeling of working concessions on an opening night stems from a real, recognizable place. Sloane can’t dramatize any of this effectively to save his life, but he nails down the feeling of these moments.
Still, Blood Theatre is also just laughably bad. Blood Theatre ends on a slow-motion that eases into a freeze frame. But does it in so awkward a manner I thought my computer was freezing up on me. It took me rewinding it multiple times before I realized it was intentional. I know it makes me sound like a broken man, but that’s the kind of perpetual havoc that makes me hit play in a heartbeat.
Yet sometimes, inspiration strikes in the oddest of places. Jennifer has nightmares about the haunted theatre and imagines herself trapped in a popcorn machine. Sloane and Fishman frame Cunnigham in the popcorn machine surrounded by pitch black, lending the image a surreal, nightmarish quality. Little moments like these or the way the office door flies open, revealing a bright white light, making it appear as if the door leads to another dimension, make Blood Theatre crackle with possibilities. None of these are seized, but that’s part of the charm.
Blood Theatre, for all its faults, feels like a shot from the heart. For all its technical flaws, I can’t help but love this badly made love letter to the local movie theatre.
Images courtesy of Moore Video, Retromedia Entertainment, and Active Home Video
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