By the 70s, British horror audiences were growing tired of creaky old Gothic horror-bad news for Hammer, whose stock-in-trade was vampires and man-made monsters, but good news for Pete Walker, whose more exploitative brand of horror featured homicidal maniacs that more than satisfied the viewers' blood-lust.
Frightmare (1974) is one such film, a demented tale of a crazy married couple, Edmund and Dorothy Yates (Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith), committed to an asylum for murder and cannibalism, but released fifteen years later, supposedly rehabilitated. Of course, doctors are known to get things wrong from time to time, and dotty Dorothy turns out to be not quite as sane as she had led people to believe.
Dorothy's stepdaughter Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) is convinced that she has matters under control, feeding her stepmother brains bought from a butcher's shop, but she hasn't counted on the involvement of her delinquent 15-year-old half-sister Debbie (the aptly named Kim Butcher), who turns out to be a chop off the old block.
With a drilling, a pitch-forking, a hot poker impalement, and a dead guy with an eye missing from the socket, Frightmare certainly delivers gruesome entertainment by the bucket-load, yet also features stylish direction and some winning performances, particularly from Keith who is genuinely frightening as nutso Dorothy, and jail-bait Butcher, who is equally as scary but also adds a little titillation by prancing around the kitchen in her scanties 7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.
Frightmare (1974) is one such film, a demented tale of a crazy married couple, Edmund and Dorothy Yates (Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith), committed to an asylum for murder and cannibalism, but released fifteen years later, supposedly rehabilitated. Of course, doctors are known to get things wrong from time to time, and dotty Dorothy turns out to be not quite as sane as she had led people to believe.
Dorothy's stepdaughter Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) is convinced that she has matters under control, feeding her stepmother brains bought from a butcher's shop, but she hasn't counted on the involvement of her delinquent 15-year-old half-sister Debbie (the aptly named Kim Butcher), who turns out to be a chop off the old block.
With a drilling, a pitch-forking, a hot poker impalement, and a dead guy with an eye missing from the socket, Frightmare certainly delivers gruesome entertainment by the bucket-load, yet also features stylish direction and some winning performances, particularly from Keith who is genuinely frightening as nutso Dorothy, and jail-bait Butcher, who is equally as scary but also adds a little titillation by prancing around the kitchen in her scanties 7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.