Hopeless American expatriates inhabit a small Spanish village where residents are mysteriously dying after the arrival of a religious cult.Hopeless American expatriates inhabit a small Spanish village where residents are mysteriously dying after the arrival of a religious cult.Hopeless American expatriates inhabit a small Spanish village where residents are mysteriously dying after the arrival of a religious cult.
- Salt
- (as David Carpenter)
- Susannah
- (as Alibe)
Storyline
Did you know
- Quotes
Treasure: I bet you thought my name was Treasure, huh? Treasure Evans. Just like the rest of the world thought. My fans; my public. Bet you thought that there were my parents, looking down at this cuddly little baby and saying "Ah, isn't she a treasure?" Why don't we call her that? No, that ain't the way it happened.
Treasure: [she continues] No, there I was on my lovely, little sixteen year old backside. Or was I on my belly? I really don't remember. Well, anyway, right side up or upside down, there I was, stretched out on the casting couch. Oh, yeah - they had casting couches.
Treasure: [she continues] And there was this fat, ugly, old producer. Well, he was important, I don't know, he was more than a producer, he was like a studio head. And he says to me: "Mary" - my real name, Mary - at any rate there he is looking down at me and drooling, and he says "Mary, you're a treasure".
Treasure: [she continues] Well, not long after that I became a star. Big house in Beverly Hills. I had a swimming pool; three pictures a year to do; jewellery; oh, good jewellery. And telephones - telephones everywhere. Ring-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling. "Hello, hello" - my telephone voice - "Hello, this is Treasure Evans".
- ConnectionsReferenced in Adjust Your Tracking (2013)
- SoundtracksNatural Me
by Georgann Rea and Marian Montgomery
For leading man Dennis Hopper (called "Chicken" here!), it was no big stretch to play this after his self-directed THE LAST MOVIE (1971) and TRACKS (1977) – what is more, he seems to have kept his APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) look for it – nor, for that matter, appearing as a junkie. For his co-star, too, Carroll Baker – here sending up her own image of a has-been Hollywood diva (dubbed "Treasure" in her case!), it was basically a continuation of her "Euro-Cult" outings of a few years earlier. Way-past-his-prime Richard Todd, however, must have kicked himself for accepting to appear in such a 'depraved' film, where he has to call his hard-drinking suicidal wife a "bitch", gay hanger-on Alice a "whore", and is even seen ogling an Oriental girl about 40 years his junior! Todd's wife is Faith Brook, an unknown name to me but, looking up her resume' to IMDb, she has been featured in films as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock's SUSPICION (1941), Joseph Losey's THE INTIMATE STRANGER (1956) and Anthony Mann's THE HEROES OF TELEMARK (1965)! With respect to the transvestite, apparently the actor was himself so inclined, since he went by the name of Win(ifred) Wells: actually, it was the latter who supplied the script and that of another strange Narizzano film i.e. the Italian-made REDNECK (1973)!
What plot there is essentially develops into a quartet of couplings: Hopper with a good-looking blonde, Baker with a bland-looking macho (who's almost always stark naked), Todd with the afore-mentioned Asian and Wells with a black stud (unflatteringly referred to as "Turd")! For what it is worth, a fleeting character in the film announces herself as "Carrie Nation", but whether this was a direct nod to the pop group at the center of Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) is hard to tell under the circumstances! Anyway, all four protagonists come to a sticky end: WWII vet Todd goes willingly before a firing-squad, spurred on by his girl, in full official regalia(?!) – his wife is thus left alone; Wells is gored by a bull in his lover's shack (how the animal came to be there is anybody's guess); Baker is drowned in a pool following an orgy; and Hopper stumbles dead on the beach, having shot up once too many (he frequently hallucinates about his parents, with whom he seems to have had an oedipal relationship – worshipping his mother while hating his evangelist father).
The rest is a semi-improvised wallow in hedonism: this Spanish production bore the original title LAS FLORES DEL VICIO – which, translating to THE FLOWERS OF VICE, links it with Jose' Ramon Larraz' no less outrageous THE COMING OF SIN (1977); the BLOODBATH moniker, then, is hilariously misleading and, for the record, the film is also known as THE SKY IS FALLING (an appropriately bleak line in a song Baker is constantly crooning). In fact, it is overflowing with local color in the form of peasants' toil-ravaged faces and solemn religious rites, to say nothing of violence – animals being nonchalantly slaughtered or beaten and, in the best (if tellingly irrelevant) sequence, the Bunuelian image of a child getting trampled by a crowd (even if we had already witnessed the discovery of the same kid's drowned body!). That is not forgetting the expected moments of Hopper lunacy: notably, squashing a handful of eggs early on squarely in the face of his black lover and then forcing her to sing a traditional 'from the old plantation' tune(!) and a remarkable dialogue exchange by the sea-side between him and his latest partner, which I quote verbatim: "You look beautiful like that" – "What?" – "I said 'You look beautiful like that'" – "I can't hear you" – "I said 'I wanna rape you'!" – "Then you should!"
- Bunuel1976
- Aug 15, 2011
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