The Flesh and Blood Show (1972)

A group of actors and actresses are invited to rehearse a new play that they are to improvise themselves.  After arriving at an old, long closed theater to get things ready before moving the show to London they begin to get picked off one at a time.  The first couple of deaths are explained away as a prank and then a random act of violence.  But soon the whole company realizes someone is victimizing them with a grudge against actors.  Instead of leaving they work with the police to catch the killer of their friends, but will it be quick enough to stop another murder?  More importantly who is killing them and why?  All these questions are answered by the final act.

This is an interesting effort from British filmmaker Pete Walker.  It really feels like he was attempting to make a Giallo style mystery with a black-gloved killer doing away with the beautiful actresses.  But in my opinion the movie tries just a bit too hard to be clever and ends up with a couple of silly twists.  Not only that but the movie does a terrible job of hiding the identity of the killer and any fan of these sorts of movies will have it figured out pretty early on, which kills a lot of the suspense the movie tries to build.  The performances are decent with the entire cast doing a passable job.  There are several beautiful women in the cast and the movie definitely delivers on the Flesh part of the title.  All of the attractive females in the cast get naked; in fact there is a surprising amount of female nudity in this movie.  You can’t argue with that!

There is something that really disappointed me with The Flesh and Blood show.  As I stated above the movie delivers on the Flesh as well as any genre movie I’ve ever seen.  But as far as the Blood goes it fails miserably.  We never get to see a single kill, only the body afterwards.  In fact other than a single attack on the pier that ends when the vagrant is chased away nothing at all violent happens in the movie.  I have pretty reasonable expectations for a movie from 1972, but even by the standards of the time this movie is pretty lame.  Additionally when we do get to see the bodies there isn’t much to it at all.  So we have a movie called Flesh and Blood with a crazed killer and no gore.  Call me crazy but that really disappointed me.

Now to be fair this isn’t a bad movie.  The movie has it’s moments and there is quite a bit of skin.  At best this is just an average film that could have been pretty cool with some gore and a few on screen kills.  Still it is worth checking out because it is a Pete Walker movie and can be had on the cheap with three other films in the Shriek show 4 pack of British Horror films. 

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2008 John Shatzer