Blood and Lace

Blood and Lace, directed by Philip Gilbert (not to be confused with Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace from 1964) is a movie that is less a coherent story and more of a jam-packed mishmash of macabre twists and turns. Whatever idea that screenwriter Gil Lasky decided to include evidently made the cut. Nothing was excised. Everything–including the kitchen sink–was thrown into this film. The film begins with a graphic murder: A prostitute and her john are brutally bludgeoned by an unseen killer with a hammer. The prostitute’s daughter, Ellie (Melody Patterson of TV’s F Troop) is then sent to a crooked home for orphans where the horrors only just beginning for her.

The house is run by Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame, veteran of both classic films and exploitation cinema alike), and Tom (Len Lesser, perhaps best known as Uncle Leo from Seinfeld). It’s an awful, evil place where children who step out of line are brutally punished. Worse yet, when they try to run away, they’re killed and their frozen corpses are still counted as attending, so they keep collecting the money for housing that dead child.

Somehow, and I kid you not, that’s not all! There’s also a mysterious killer, donning a mask made up to look like a face mangled and ravaged by old age, running around the place and offing people with a hammer. A hammer not unlike the one that killed poor Ellie’s mom and her client all those years ago. Are these incidents related? Or is it all just one, big coincidence?

Blood and Lace is one of those mysteries where the identity of the mystery killer is hidden by a plot loaded with despicable characters. Whoever the mystery killer is, that’s anyone’s guess. It may be one of the people we know actually murders children, a crooked police officer, a crooked social worker, a jealous orphan, or even Ellie herself. Fear not, for all will be revealed at the end!

Before Halloween formally introduced the world to slasher films in 1978, there were a number of intersecting genres leading up to it that helped form the slasher movie as we know it. European filmmakers were combining Grand Guignoll thrills with detective stories in pulp Giallo films. In the United States, there were a number of movies referred to as “proto” slashers, that had all the ingredients of a typical slasher but hadn’t quite refined the stories to that point yet. They weren’t a pure distillation of cheap thrills and bloodletting, they still favored story over spectacle and had some old-fashioned filmmaking that had more in common with Norman Bates than Michael Myers. 

Blood and Lace is a fun, wild movie that wisely never succumbs to plot doldrums. It moves too quickly for that. The movie shifts gears every few minutes and the story twists into something else. The worst thing a movie like this can be is boring. Blood and Lace would rather be stupid than boring and is, frequently, quite stupid… which is part of its overall charm. It’s a dumb, goofy movie that could almost pass itself off as a parody, but has too sincere of a goal in mind to thrill its audience at all costs.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Kino Cult brings Blood and Lace to Blu-ray in a single-disc release housed in a standard case with a removable slipcover. The case contains reversible artwork, with one side identical to the removable slip, and alternate poster art on the other side.

Blood and Lace is presented in 1080p high-definition video in a transfer that looks about as good as I could imagine it looking. The cinematography is crisp, clear and sharp. Color levels are beautifully realized–this being an early 70s film, the color palette has a lot of soft pastels. The entire presentation is awash in a fine layer of organic film grain. Blood and Lace isn’t the prettiest movie I’ve ever seen, but damn if this transfer doesn’t look great. The team over at Kino Cult have done a wonderful job on this restoration. Some dirt and debris is present, but mostly the video is nearly immaculate in how clean it looks.

Blood and Lace comes with one audio mix, a 2.0 mono mix encoded in DTS-HD MA. While the sound is mixed kind of low, you can just turn up the volume to adjust for it without fear of having additional elements mixed significantly louder and blowing out your eardrums with a blast of music. Sometimes, the classic-sounding musical score (that even boasts a spooky, warbling theremin) can be a bit loud, but for the most part all elements are layered in quite nicely. Dialogue is always clear and favored, and sound effects like screams or the thwacking sound of a deadly hammer pack a punch without being overly loud. My subwoofer also got a lot of play from LFEs through the musical score, using bass to create a sense of dread.

Supplemental features are a little lacking on his disc, but there is an audio commentary that’s a wealth of knowledge on the film, its history in early 70s horror and its lasting impact. There is also an alternate opening and an original theatrical trailer.

• Audio Commentary - Film historian Richard Harland Smith
• Alternate Opening Titles (SD 1:13)
• Theatrical Trailer

Blood and Lace is a very fun, ambitious horror movie that never takes itself too seriously. It’s only firmly committed to one cause: To entertain an audience. Don’t think about the movie too much because, brother, it doesn’t hold up under any scrutiny. No matter, movies like this aren’t intended to be analyzed under a microscope. They’re meant to get swept up in. Boasting a terrific video transfer, decent sound and a very informative audio commentary, Blood and Lace from Kino Cult comes Recommended.
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