Watch the Sparrow Bleed (1989) [short]

Directed by:

Gareth Jackson

You've heard of wearing your influences on your sleeve? This one has them tattooed on its forehead. Opening with Texas Chainsaw-style flashes of corpses and miscellaneous bloody body parts, accompanied by pilfered music from an Argento classic (Goblin's familiar main theme from DEEP RED), this backyard SOV amateur short from the UK is a valentine to all those films gore-loving, Fangoria-reading, video-store-horror-section-haunting 80s kids couldn't get enough of back in the day. Though primarily filmed in 1989, this had some later additional work done to it to create a "final 2013 remastered edit" and get it all spruced up for YouTube. And by spruce it up, I mean mostly adding text to provide something of a loose structure to tie all of the amateur gore scenes together. Obviously no one is gonna be watching this for the story. We're here instead to have a warm, nostalgic chuckle seeing the stuffing fly out of a papier-mâché severed head as someone kicks it, and other such assorted sights.

The year is 1988. The setting is a nameless small town in northwest England, where mutilated corpses left in "lonely places" have been turning up. A long-haired serial killer is busy at work and we get see him in action as he beats his latest victim with a rock, slices his face up with a utility knife, decapitates him with a saw and then stuffs a gasoline-soaked rag into the severed head's mouth and sets it ablaze. A posse of teenage locals wearing white hoods then hunt him down and stone him to death while the FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III disco music plays.

A year later, the killer emerges from his shallow grave in the woods as a skull-faced zombie looking for revenge. As snippets from Goblin's DAWN OF THE DEAD score play, he pushes his first victim's head down on a spike, which then pops out of his mouth. The next guy is chased down and gets his eyeballs poked out. The zombie then ventures on over to a house to gather some weapons, including a hatchet that he uses to chop up a sleeping teen right after he rips off his dick off with his bare hands and shoves it in his mouth (!) The boy's mother (played by Doreen Jackson, probably the director's real-life mother) finds his body, grabs a shotgun and prepares to get her own revenge.

Before mum can blast the bad guy, the zombie gets to slaughter a few other folks. A girl gets her throat cut with a knife as exaggerated amounts of blood pour from the wound. Her boyfriend has his tongue ripped out, is stabbed repeatedly and then has some internal organs yanked out. And, naturally saving the "best" for last, the killer attacks a young mother and her newborn baby. He power drills the babies eyeballs out, rips it in half and then uses its intestines to strangle the mother to death (!) So, I'll at least give this props for going places most other films would not back in 1989 (except maybe Troma), even if they didn't bother creating any fx baby and just used a regular ole baby doll instead.

Aside from not having much of a story, this also thankfully doesn't have much dialogue either. And good thing for that! You think Brit teens are difficult to understand without subtitles? Well, try Brit teens being recorded from too far away by a VHS camcorder's built-in microphone as stolen music blares on top of that. And while this has all of the technical ineptitude one may expect from a home movie, some of the camerawork, camera placements and editing choices are actually not too bad. The gore make-up (also done by the director) ranges from terrible to passable. Much of it is really no worse than what can be found in many of the Italian films this took inspiration from.

Other scores used include HALLOWEEN, THE FOG and TENEBRE, so even though the taste levels aren't too high overall, at least the taste in borrowed music is. How do you even rate something like this?

★★

Secta siniestra (1982)

... aka: Bloody Sect

Directed by:

"Steve McCoy" (Ignacio F. Iquino)

Frederick Payne (Carlos Martos) likes to boast about his past, which wouldn't be an issue if his past didn't involve all kinds of war atrocities! During "the war in Uganda," he was captured, imprisoned, abused ("They enjoyed beating the shit out of me!") and sentenced to death, but was somehow able to get his hands on a sword and proceeded to slaughter everyone and escape. From there, it was off to a South American guerilla boot camp followed by a stint as a bodyguard for an Arabian prince (!) All of that was cut short after he was shot and wounded. Now, in middle age, he's decided he's had enough excitement for one lifetime and just wants to settle down with his girlfriend, Helen ("Mery Kerr" / Emma Quer), and start a family. Mementos of his past "glories" (?), including a stockpile of weapons and framed photos of him torturing captives (!) on the walls will just have to suffice. However, Frederick otherwise hasn't been completely honest with his new lover...

Unbeknownst to Helen, Frederick and his trusty maid, Ana (Montserrat Miralles), have been keeping his heretofore unheard of first wife, Elizabeth (Diana Conca), locked upstairs in a hidden room. Years earlier, he got drunk, crashed their car and ever since she's been a little loony. Make that a lot loony. The crazed Elizabeth manages to overpower the maid, sneaks downstairs, catches her husband and Helen lying in bed naked together, gets her hands on a large fork and then gouges out both of his eyes with it! Frederick is blinded and she's hauled off to prison. Though any sane person would be running for the exit doors screaming over all of this, Helen stays with him. Cuz love.

After the two are married, they're hit with some more bad news: Frederick is infertile. The couple decide to go to a sperm bank, where Dr. Gerard (Juan Zanni) and his nurse wife, Isa (Teresa Manresa), hook them up with a donation that meets the future father's strict criteria ("Caucasian, young and strong"). After the procedure, Helen finds herself with child and then this goes down an almost exact ROSEMARY'S BABY route, with her being stricken with debilitating pain, becoming depressed, craving raw meat, etc. Unbeknownst to the rest of the hospital staff, a Satanist named Leonard (Henry Ragoud) has infiltrated the clinic and swapped out the sperm of "Hans... a tall, blonde Germany guy" with that of Satan!

Thus far two other women have received the tainted sperm aside from Helen. Sick of all of the nasty side effects, the first, Eva, goes to an abortion clinic and terminates the pregnancy. Immediately after, Leonard and his pal, Olivier (Santi Pons), show up and use their supernatural powers to smash the female doctor who performed the procedure (Asunción Vitoria) to death with the operating table, send shards of exploding glass into Eva's face and slash her husband's throat with a razor. The other recipient, Emma, has already died by suicide by the time they reach her, so they briefly reanimate her corpse long enough for her to pull her grieving hubby into the coffin with her! And that leaves poor Helen...

Leonard and Olivier (who are often hilariously lit in red so we know whose side they're on) show up at Helen's home posing as priests working for the "Church of the Eternal Angel." They pretty much spill the beans about what's going on, tell her they now worship her and give her one of their bibles along with a special necklace. No, not with tannis root inside. Afterward, she feasts on raw bunny straight from the fridge and then chases the maid away with a butcher knife. More "help" soon arrives in the form of Sister Margaret ("Josephine Varney" / Concha Valero), a mysterious woman with short black hair who barges into their home unannounced and insists on staying. She's kind of like Miss Baylock from The Omen, except she doesn't even bother faking being well-mannered and polite. In fact, she issues her list of demands right away, starting with moving Frederick up to the attic so she can sleep right next to his wife in their bed! And the couple just goes right along with this!

Soon after Margaret's arrival, things start dying in the home, including all of their plants and a pet parakeet. There's also a worse change in Helen. She begins mocking her husband's condition ("Don't you see? Of course you don't! Are you blind?"), complains about her skin tightening all over her body and starts developing bruises and sores on her face. As for her tummy aches, it's nothing massaging in some fresh green frog's blood won't cure! Margaret keep promising she'll feel better after she has the baby. Meanwhile, psycho wife #1 manages to escape from prison, heads back to the house, sneaks back into her hidden room and plots to kill Helen with an axe in between attempts at seducing the husband.

Along the way we get a hilariously exploitative shot of a panty-less Helen thrashing around on bed in a short hospital gown, a ridiculous rubber-bats-on-strings attack, a real frog getting stabbed repeatedly with a knife, death by being forced to inhale car exhaust fumes, a stabbing in a parking garage, an impalement, an attempt to run over an 8-year-old with a car, stock footage of a forest fire, a hanging, a ghost (I think), a female postal employee whose uniform consists of denim cut-off short shorts, a plastic baby doll with horns glued on its forehead passing itself off as the newborn Antichrist and one of the worst, least exciting and most anticlimactic non-endings on record.

Coming off the very productive 1970s, Spanish horror film production was virtually cut in half the following decade when it should have been booming due to the home video market. I'm not sure exactly what happened there, but most of their 80s output was downright awful! Some of the all-time worst slasher films, alien films, cannibal films and zombie films were produced in Spain during this time and now we can add one of the worst Satanism / occult films with this title. Thankfully, Bloody Sect sucks in all of the right ways to make it enjoyable. It's fast-paced, busy, stupid, cheesy, sleazy and filled with cheap, bloody gore effects and nudity. What really tips it over the edge into SBIG territory though is the hilariously awful dialogue and insane, bug-eyed overacting from much of the cast.

The director / writer had been active in the Spanish film industry since the mid 1930s and amassed well over 100 credits, which is quite surprising given the amount of ineptitude on display here! The bulk of his early career consisted of comedies and dramas. In the 60s he switched to spaghetti westerns and then, after the loosening of censorship in Spain, he delved into more exploitative fare, primarily soft-core erotica. This appears to be his only straight-up horror film, though a few other titles (namely Aborto Criminal and The Dawn Rapists) may be borderline. Having slightly more experience in the genre was the film's co-writer, Juan Bosch. He'd previously written and directed The Killer Wore Gloves (1974) involving a slasher-killer, and EXORCISMO (1975), an awful Exorcist copycat starring Paul Naschy.

Prior to the 2019 Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray release, this only had a single VHS release in the 80s in Spain. The BR doesn't have many notable features, nor any material from any of the people involved in making this. Instead they throw on a commentary track from Kat Ellinger.

SBIG