FLESH FEAST aka TIME IS TERROR
USA. 1970. Director - Brad F. Grinter, Screenplay - Grinter & Thomas Casey, Producers - Grinter & Veronica Lake, Photography - Casey, Special Effects - Douglas Hobart, Makeup - Gayl Doucette & Bill Rogers, Art Direction - Harry Kerwin. Production Company - Viking International. Veronica Lake (Dr Elaine Frederick), Phil Philbin (Ed Casey), Heather Hughes (Kristine Powell)
Plot: When a journalist is murdered while following an arms dealer, his editor Ed Casey follows the trail to Dr Elaine Frederick who is secretly conducting age rejuvenation experiments using flesh-eating maggots. Gradually Casey discovers that her backers are really Nazis and her intended test subject Adolf Hitler himself.
Veronica Lake, currently enjoying a revival of memory thanks to `L.A. Confidential', was one of the great cinematic beauties of the 1940s. After that decade though she fairly much faded from sight. `Flesh Feast' was her comeback after nearly twenty years and her last film before her death in 1973. It is anybody's guess what possessed Lake to choose such a dire and impoverished production for a comeback. In it she looks sad and aged - the film shoots her unglamorously and shows none of her former beauty. The climax of the film does offer the mildly fascinating spectacle of her going bonkers and laughing her head off like a maniac - it's sort of like one of the films that were the in-thing for awhile in the 1960s after the popularity of `What Ever Happened to Baby Jane ?' featuring aged stars going batty, but it comes without the layer of self-conscious freakshow appeal. The film is really dire. It has clearly been shot in someone's house where guest bedrooms double as hospital wards. The laboratory consists of a bench with two straps, an oxygen cylinder and two pieces of radio equipment. The whole film hangs on its twist ending - the revelation that the secret benefactor of Lake's flesh-eating maggot rejuvenation treatment is Adolf Hitler - but even though the film was the first to use such a twist, by the time it did it felt old hat. Sad.
Screening at the Christchurch 1998 Incredibly Strange Film Festival Reviewed by Richard Scheib
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