There are two perfect things about low-budget legend Ray Dennis Steckler’s second film. The first is the great title. The second is its wholly zonked, hallucinatory atmosphere. This is a lousy horror film and its story of a man who falls under the hypnotic spell of a murderous carnival gypsy with a giant wart on her face doesn’t make a dime’s worth of sense, but you get over that eventually.
You see, Steckler pads out the movie with about eighty-seven music, dance, burlesque and stand-up comedy performances from amateur lounge acts (performers on the Long Beach, California amusement park midway here), each one of whom pulls you further out into the Twilight Zone. Its like someone slipped something in your drink. You start to get tipsy by Carolyn Brandt’s second leotard-and-easy-listening dance number. By the time the bouffant balladeer comes on, you’re slurring your words. When the spear-wielding African exotica dance troupe stumbles around to some bawdy jazz later on, you’re near the blackout stage and will believe anything anyone tells you.
Meanwhile, Steckler and cinematographer Joseph V. Mascelli (with camera assistance from a young Vilmos Zsigmnond and László Kovács!) shoot this in brittle color that time has aged, faded and beaten into fine B-movie scuzz-o-vision. This is a film that drags you into the swingin’ 1960s drive-in, drops a fog in your face and then blocks the exits. For eighty minutes, at least. It’s an essential brain cell killer.
On a trivia note, one of the film’s alternate titles—old low-budget movies always have a few different titles—is just as good as the original: Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary!