The drive-ins got a whole lot bloodier when this pioneering slasher flick came out. In the first three minutes, our body parts-collecting psycho killer stabs a bathing beauty in the eye (we see him pull back the knife, which still has a piece of flesh dangling from it), chops off her leg and then jams the meaty stump into a bag. And it just gets better from there. This is the one with the infamous scene of a girl getting her tongue ripped out.
Director Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer David F. Friedman were looking for something new to exploit after their nudist camp films stopped making money and they settled on ultra-grisly blood-and-guts marathons, which no one had ever done before in movies. Throw in a great ad campaign and this became a drive-in success. By today’s standards this is still a splatter-iffic good time, with gross-out effects that amount to little more than dumping (literal) gallons of bright red stage blood on everything and using stuff bought from the butcher shop as human entrails. Even the talking scenes here are entertaining, if only because of the appalling acting and dialogue, along with Lewis’s usual slapdash directing style.