TERROR AT RED WOLF INN ** USA 1972 Dir: Bud Townsend. 90 mins
Some folk rave about 70’s and 80’s horror films. Some today want to bring back that look, the naïve feeling, the simple look of those productions. All well and good even when there were those video nasties to push the ideas to an extreme.
Terror At Red Wolf Inn was produced by Michael Macready who would also give us the superior two Count Yorga films and directed by Bud Townsend. The film opens with a rather ridiculous wholesome Seventies love ballad that turns out to be a sanctified version of ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ by Serge Gainsbourg originally recorded by Brigitte Bardot and then Jane Birkin in 1969. Regina (Linda Gillin) is a college girl who comes off rather empty-headed when she gets a letter saying she won a free vacation to an old-fashioned resort on the beach. Sheer idiocy as she runs around her apartment complex shouting that she is a winner surrounded by her Let it Be Beatles period photos and Jean-Paul Belmondo poster.
The resort turns out to be an old house with only two other female guests Pamela (Janet Wood) and Edwina (Margret Avery). Add to this mix someone called Baby John (John Nielson) running the place the owners Uncle Henry (Arthur Space) and Aunt Evelyn (Mary Jackson).
The emphasis seems to be on eating large meals in all their glory with slurping sound effects and crunching of meat. Not giving things too much away it seems, like butchering the young girls for their food. Before each girl’s departure, Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Henry throw a party complete with completely idiotic dialogue and songs. Regina suddenly becomes wiser, and the picture becomes different. In some ways, it ups the stakes with a look and feel in the sound and camera work of the latter The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) plus the work of Norman J Warren and Tony Tenser. Those moments go away, and the picture becomes chase, catch release and retribution. Regina and Baby John with whom she had a romantic entanglement and senseless sexless dreams even by seventies standards don’t get ahead.
Terror At Red Wolf Inn (1972) is not a Tod Slaughter homage, that would have been an interesting idea that perhaps will happen. Instead, the 70’s kitsch look comes together in something of a hybrid of the odd but fun Spider Baby (1967), EC comics and lurid illustrated pulp horror magazines with the exciting ‘think tank’ thought-out title Horror Tales. These were cheap paper products with lots of blood. Axes, head rolling with defenceless women or philandering or gangsters as their prey. Cheap imitations of Warren Publishing magazines Creepy and Eerie without the quality of art and the stories.
Terror At Red Wolf Inn (1972) offends me and others on two levels the first being its ridiculous portrayal of mental illness with the role of Baby John. Infantile, screams, tantrums and general wide-eyed make up this sordid portrait in a sordid film. Oddly the premise was also in The Baby (1973) about a childlike 21-year-old man starring the late-in-career Hollywood leading woman Ruth Roman. Concepts get around it seems.
The worst for me and perhaps others is the picture has an occurrence of animal cruelty. Granted this was made in the age of those odious Italian films in which real animals were subject to actual pain. For me, there is no excuse for garbage barbarism on the screen like that. Morons may laugh and say that’s what it’s supposed to do well not it’s this is real, in front of you and not something that happens to a living creature. I will argue this point till this sun burns hot in space and this planet goes spiritually down with anyone anytime anyplace. Spider Baby (1967) this is not. View this film with an open mind and a closed heart of stone.
Review by Terry Sherwood
TERROR AT RED WOLF INN is available on DVD in the USA