Lake eerie

"Flesh Feast"
(1970)

I just about shit when I came upon this on DVD for $5 at the Weekend of Horrors. This is the other "horror" film by Florida director Brad F. Grinter, the man responsible for "Blood Freak," the anti-marijuana killer turkeyman epic which you surely remember from last summer's bad film blowout. It's often noted that "Flesh Feast" was the last film for Veronica Lake, once a ridiculously beautiful screen and pin-up icon who was by this time ravaged by years of alcoholism and paranoid ideation. One popular story was that she claimed the FBI was stalking her, which is fascinating considering the goofy government conspiracy business that makes up much of "Flesh Feast." After all, Lake co-produced this Z-grade oddity, so she must have been attracted to the material. She looks like absolute hell in this movie, and if you've ever seen "Sullivan's Travels," you will find watching her in "Flesh Fleast" as depressing as seeing the cancer-stricken Lon Chaney Jr. stumble drunkenly through Al Adamson's "Dracula vs. Frankenstein." Lake's deteriorated countenance aside, the picture itself is as insane as I had hoped.

We begin with the most ham-fisted political murder since the exploding cigar got Castro (come on, we all know he's dead). A shady guy arrives at the airport, and a reporter gets knifed by a janitor as he's reporting the guy's appearance to his editor. The editor is played by Grinter in what seems like a rehearsal for his role in "Blood Freak," i.e. sitting behind a desk and smoking, and he's also a spy or something. He vows to discover the truth, and contacts his girl in the field, Christine. One busy dame, Christine also works at a hospital and for Veronica Lake, a scientist who the shady airport guy sprang from an asylum to conduct secret experiments in her stately Florida manor. Lake's specially breeding maggots as a treatment for aged skin, and she has Christine steal corpses from the hospital so she can check their progress. To pad the running time, there's a whole lot of subterfuge about some underground leader's imminent arrival, a psychosexual asshole of a test subject, hilariously stupid revolutionary and nurse characters, harsh lighting that casts dual shadows, body parts that look like papier-mâché, groovy horn-fueled music and Lake drinking like they're about to outlaw Cutty Sark. All you need to know about "Flesh Feast" is the amazing finale: the leader shows up for his treatment, and it's... Adolf Hitler! Turns out the doc's mom was killed in a Nazi experiment using maggots! The very type of maggots she tosses in revenge all over the squealing, geriatric dictator! Thus ended the storied career of screen legend Veronica Lake, cackling and hurling rice on a guy dressed like Hitler. The trailer, for your amusement: