Night of Bloody Horror (1969)
Directed by Joy N. Houch. Jr.
Starring Gerald McRaney, Evelyn Hendricks, Gaye Yellen, Herbert Nelson, Lisa Dameron, Charlotte White, Nick Krieger

This is a title that I remember renting back in the VHS days and wondering what the hell was going on in the film. Not because it was an intricate or confusion plot, but because it was so damn dark! I honestly didn’t remember any of the film from back then. It’s been released on DVD before, but the quality always looked the same. When this new Blu-ray from Leomark & Shoreline Entertainment came out, I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, it looks exactly the same. Dark as hell. Any time there are night shots, you can barely see anything. Even indoors, the lighting isn’t the greatest. Very disappointing. But let’s get to the actual movie.

This is the first film directed by Joy N. Houch Jr., who would go on to direct other grindhouse and drive-in fair like Women and Bloody Terror (1970), which has one hell of an exploitive title, The Night of the Strangler (1972), which starred Mickey Dolenz from The Monkees, The Brain Machine (1972), which stars James Best, and Creature from Black Lake (1976), which is probably his best film, as well as his best known film. So, I’ll have to give Bloody Horror a little bit of a break since it was Houch Jr.’s first feature, and maybe he didn’t realize what filming at night meant needing lights.

But just getting to the plot, there’s not much there. A troubled young man named Wesley, who gets these excruciating headache attacks, takes off after a night of sex with this finance. She feels guilty and goes off to church the next day to confess her sins of pre-marital sex and gets murdered by a needle in the eye for her trouble! This seems to start a pattern with every girl Wesley seems to have a relationship with that they end up getting murdered. Of course, the fact that Wesley spent over a dozen years in a mental institution might have something to do with it. It’s a game of is Wesley the killer which they make seem pretty obvious, or is it someone else, and then who exactly might that be? It is all revealed at the end, with a couple of decaying corpses, to at least tie in what is on the poster art! Well, sort of.

In his feature debut, actor Gerald McRaney is a long way away from making it on TV, appearing in a ton of different episodic series over the years, before hitting two big series of his own, Simon & Simon (1981-1989) and Major Dad (1989-1993). Before he’d get to those though, he would appear in Houch Jr.’s next two features, Women and Bloody Terror and The Brain Machine. But we all start somewhere, right?

Another curious note is that if this played in theaters in 1969, a few years before Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972). While Craven’s feature was known for using the line “It’s only a movie” over and over on the posters, on Bloody Horror, even in the pressbooks, it had the line, “It’s only a picture” repeated. And of course, when you advertise that it was filmed in “Violent Vision”, that is definitely going to get you to want to see it. Unfortunately, both of those lines really were better suited for Craven’s movie.

The only way I could recommend this film, or this release, is if you’re a fan of the low-budget grindhouse type of films, and/or are a fan of Creature from Black Lake and want to check out the director’s previous works. I can’t say I recommend it, but I’ve done crazy things like that myself, so who am I to judge! But unlike some of the other Leomark, this quality is no improvement over any of the previous released I’ve seen.

There are absolutely no extras on this disc either. Just like Leomark’s other releases, there isn’t even a menu, with the movie just starting when you put the disc in. In fact, the second the film is over, it starts replaying again. So careful if you dare fall asleep during this… you’ll never know if it is still the first screening or the third! Shout out to AV Entertainment for sending us this review copy, which you can purchase by going to http://www.moviezyng.com.