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| Maria De Aragon |
VINEGAR SYNDROME’S BLOOD MANIA AND POINT OF TERROR SET RIPS THE SCREAMS RIGHT OUT OF YOUR THROAT!
BLOOD MANIA / POINT OF TERROR
Blood Mania
Starring: Peter Carpenter, Maria De Aragon, Vicki Peters, Alex Rocco, Leslie Simms
Written by: Peter Carpenter, Tony Crechales, Toby Sacher
Directed by: Robert Vincent O’Neil
Point of Terror
Starring: Peter Carpenter, Dyanne Thorne, Lory Hansen, Leslie Simms, Joel Martson
Written by: Peter Carpenter, Ernest A. Charles, Tony Crechales, Chris Marconi
Directed by: Alex Nicol
“We’re very young souls. Very young and evil.”
“Yes, very evil…You’ll probably live to be a hundred and ten.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Only the good die young.”
Currently, going to the movies is a single-film event but it was not always that way. My dad told me that when he was a kid during the Depression (I am that old), going to a picture show meant featurettes, a newsreel, and two movies, sometimes even singing, all for a dime! When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, that sort of thing was long gone. But drive-ins will always have double bills where a current feature is coupled with the return of something from last year or the year before, that were thematically linked (Stallone/Schwarzenegger pairing of Raw Deal and Cobra in 1986 taught me everything I needed to know about being a man.). Sometimes they were odd pairings, such as the Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein and psychological slasher Toolbox Murders double feature that I convinced a friend from church to get his dad to take us to see. Mr. D. lasted about 7 minutes into the The Toolbox Murders before pulling the plug on the evening.
Sometime during the mid 1970s, a horror triple feature of Blood Mania (1970), Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972), and the 1974 Vincent Price meta-horror film Madhouse made the drive-in rounds. I was around ten or 11 at that time, so there was no way to see it. But the TV spot was filled with enough weirdness to fuel my imagination for decades. Replete with the most brain bending bizarre images: undead monks crawling from graves, frightening monsters gathered in a living room, and all the distorted shadows and shapes that can be derived from descending a spiral staircase in the dark, I felt a need to go to those places and explore their environments. While Tombs of the Blind Dead and Madhouse are better known, it was Blood Mania that packed the most punch.
