Okay, so full disclosure: when I picked this week's "Monster Monday" selection, I did something I rarely do anymore- I went off the poster. Let me qualify that for my younger readers who might not quite know what I mean.
You see, back in the olden days of yore, pre-Netflix and the like, you used to pick out movies in an actual store, and if you didn't know what you want, you tended to look at the cover art and/or description on the back to make your choices.
I imagine it was similar for my older readers when it came to going to the movies, pre-home video: you went to the theater or looked in the paper, and whatever looked cool, you went and saw it. Simple as that.
Of course, as anyone knows who's been there before, oftentimes the movies themselves came up short in comparison to the posters, cover art or tag-line/descriptions.
What's worse, unscrupulous film distributors would often repackage films under different titles, and sometimes even shoot additional footage to take advantage of a certain market.
Pigs is such a film, on many of those fronts. For one thing, despite that poster above claiming "cannibal pigs" on the loose, accompanied by an appropriately lurid drawing of said pigs terrorizing a young, scantily-clad woman, that is not what this movie is really about at all.
So, my apologies in advance, but this really doesn't fit the bill of a "monster movie," per se, or even the broader intended description of a movie involving a beast of some sort gone wild, a la my last selection, Rats: Night of Terror.
I mean, there are pigs, and they do eat people, but it's nothing like what you see in most of the posters above.
I know! What a rip! You've heard about fake news- now, I welcome you to the wonderful world of misleading posters. I wasn't the first to be duped by such things, and I won't be the last, no doubt, even in this day and age.
So, anyway, my apologies that the movie doesn't really adhere to the whole "Monster Monday" thing- what are you gonna do? I would have watched something else, but I didn't quite have the time. Oh well.
The good news is that it doesn't necessarily mean that Pigs is a bad film, it's just not what I was expecting. But if you want killer pigs on a rampage, you've come to the wrong place, I'm afraid- those posters lie! Might I suggest you check out the excellent pigs-gone-amok opus Razorback instead? (I'll try and cover that one before too long to make up for this misstep, I promise.)
In the meantime, there's this film, also known by about a half-dozen other titles, at least, including (deep breath): Daddy's Deadly Darling, Horror Farm, Blood Pen, The 13th Pig (probably the most apropos title, actually), Daddy's Girl, The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart, The Strange Love Exorcist and my personal favorite, Roadside Torture Chamber, which makes it sound like one of those torture porn movies, lol. It's not.
The distributors of Pigs simply slapped a wig on an actress that moderately resembled the leading lady here and shot a brief prelude showing her being possessed by a demon and supposedly exorcised of it but bolting before it was complete, I guess, leading the the events of the rest of the film, or something like that.
A similar sort of thing was done with Mario Bava's Lisa & The Devil, which became The House of Exorcism with its added footage. As with Pigs, this was done without the participation of the original director by the producers, in an attempt to wring more profits out of their film.
I have, in fact, seen this film before, under the title of Daddy's Deadly Darling, which is slightly closer to what the film is actually about. I'm pretty sure I saw it on Elvira's original late-night show, Movie Macabre, so I wasn't that upset about seeing it again under a different title, as I never paid money for it the first time around, anyway.
Spoilers ahoy, for those who want to go in cold, but know this- the film is pretty incomprehensible no matter which cut of it you see, so this may just be my interpretation of events, TBH. I'll do the best that I can with what I have to work with here. For the record, the cut I watched this time clocked in around 80 minutes, so there was no "bonus" footage, though I wouldn't mind seeing it, just for the hell of it.
Pigs tells the tale of a young woman named Lynn Hart (hence one of the film's alternate titles), who we first see ditching a nurse's outfit in a field somewhere before heading into a small town, presumably to disappear from whoever she's on the run from.
Lynn gets a job at a diner, run by a former circus worker named Zambrini. It's never made entirely clear what he did there, but given the outfit he sports in one scene, I'm going to go out on a limb and say magician or something to that end. This may also explain some of the more supernatural goings-on that happen later in the film.
Zambrini is shady personified, but then, so is Lynn, so against all odds, they find a sort of kindred spirit in one another. This comes in handy when things take a turn for the worse, which doesn't take long.
Zambrini is known in town for his noisy pigs, which his superstitious neighbors have a theory about: they think that Zambrini lets the pigs out at night and they kill people, with each person they kill adding to their overall numbers, as the soul of the person they kill goes into one of the pigs. There are twelve pigs, so one assumes, there are twelve victims. Or something like that.
However, as we see, Zambrini actually only feeds the pigs dead bodies, not live ones, with one notable exception. One night, a drunkard had the misfortune to pass out in the pig pen. When Zambrini went to check on the pigs, he saw the drunk's remains, and realized they'd eaten him alive. (Alas, this happens before the events of the movie, so we don't get to see it.)
Now, the pigs supposedly have a "taste for it," so he has been feeding them corpses from the local cemetery. Even crazier, when the neighbors tell the slightly too laid-back local sheriff, he says that, even if it's true, there's nothing he can do about it, as "the dead have no rights." Not so sure about that! 😱
To make matters even crazier, it turns out that Lynn is an escapee from a mental institution that was raped as a child by her father, who she subsequently killed after. (Hence the Daddy's Deadly Darling title.)
Fast forward a few years and she kills her doctor and escapes the nuthouse, donning a nurse's costume and stealing a car to make her escape. I guess whoever gave Michael Myers driving lessons did the same for her, lol.
To say Lynn still has issues is putting it mildly. For one thing, she keeps trying to call her dead father, who she clearly thinks is still alive. In addition, whenever anyone tries to take advantage of her or makes her uncomfortable in some way, she kills them. Obviously, this would be a problem under normal circumstances, but here, it just provides Zambrini with more pig chow.
Inevitably, someone comes looking for Lynn, who she also takes out, but then the Sheriff also gets wind of what's going on and finally decides to do something about it. Zambrini tries to get Lynn to leave for her own sake, but this only freaks her out and she kills him, too. This, in turn, riles up the pigs, who, as far as I could tell, rise up and kill Lynn to avenge their master.
From what I could infer, the clue to all this comes via an exchange of dialogue, in which Egyptians are discussed and how they believed that they could be resurrected via animals. Note that Lynn prominently is shown to be wearing an Ankh necklace, the Egyptian sign for "life."
Later on, when she disappears, her necklace is found in the pig pen- along with a mysterious "13th pig" (hence that title). So, my guess is that her soul went into a new pig after the others killed her. Or something. Hey, like I said, the movie is hella confusing.
But you know, that surreal quality is also what makes Pigs stand out from the rest of the litter, as it were. By not spelling things out, the viewer can come up with their own interpretations of events, and I kind of dig that, especially as a hardcore David Lynch fan, who is the king of leaving things up to the viewer. (Actually, there's a scene in the movie that's straight-up like one in Wild at Heart, where our crazed heroine paints her face with lipstick, so maybe he's a fan!)
Pigs has a truly bizarre vibe that's of a piece with its other early 70's cult movie brethren, including Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Tourist Trap, etc. As with those films, it has a sort of docudrama feel to it, as if you aren't watching a piece of fiction, but rather found footage of stuff you were never meant to see.
I mean, don't get me wrong- it's nowhere near the classics those films are, but it's definitely in the same ball park, in that you kind of want a shower after watching it. Everything's so grimy and sleazy and backwoods, you know what I mean?
Interestingly, the movie was a labor of love for star Marc Lawrence, who plays Zambrini and who also wrote (albeit under an alias) and directed. He also cast his own daughter in the role of Lynn, which makes for some iffy scenes here and there.
Although it's nowhere near the level of ick of, say, Dario Argento's work with daughter Asia, who has done nudity, sex and even rape scenes for her dear old dad, which is one seriously messed-up family. (No wonder she seems so troubled!)
Granted, Toni Lawrence has some scantily-clad scenes and is nearly raped in another, but she doesn't outright do nudity, which might have been even skeezier than it already is here, obviously, given the overall plot-line Marc cooked up for her. That said, he does have her kill several guys, who she thinks of as her father, one of which she semi-seduces first, so... still a bit questionable.
You have to hand it to Marc Lawrence, though- the guy put up a mortgage on his house to get it finished. He also traded an expensive painting to composer Charles Bernstein to do the score for free. That's also Bernstein singing the title tune, which is really catchy and cool, complete with extensive use of the Snoopy Machine- aka what I call the Jaw Harp.
Lawrence was a noted Hollywood character actor, with an extensive list of over 220 credits to his name. His specialty was underworld-types, in films like Million Dollar Baby, I Am The Law, Blind Alley, Lady Scarface, Public Enemies, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle and lots more where that came from.
However, you might know him better from some of his more mainstream (and more recent) work, including the Bond flicks, Diamonds are Forever and The Man with the Golden Gun; Marathon Man, A Piece of the Action, Foul Play, Night Train to Terror, From Dusk Till Dawn and End of Days.
Meanwhile, daughter Toni's acting career was decidedly more short-lived, unfortunately for her. After Pigs, she did some guest-starring roles on various TV shows and the occasional TV-movie, such as M.A.D.D.: Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, along with a few more movies, such as Sole Survivor and Beyond Reason, but that's about it. These days, she's probably better known for being actor Billy Bob Thornton's second wife.
Beyond that, there's Jesse Vint, who played the Sheriff, and has a fairly decent line of credits himself, notably roles in the classic Little Big Man, Silent Running, Chinatown, Macon County Line, Earthquake and a host of B-movies where that came from, including Bug, Bobbie Jo & The Outlaw (with "Wonder Woman" Lynda Carter), Deathsport, Forbidden World, Dark Angel and The Temp.
After that, things get a bit iffy, actor-wise. As is the case with a lot of these no-budget flicks, this was one of the only credits (if not the only one) to their resume, with only a few exceptions. Iris Korn, who played Annette, was also in White Lightning, Big Wednesday and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, along with a fair amount of TV work.
Erik Holland, who played Hoagy, was in Trader Horn, The Outlaw Josey Wales, More American Graffiti, The Lonely Guy, Maniac Cop, Ghostbusters II, Stargate and Titanic, along with lots of TV work, from the 60's well into the 80's.
Jim Antonio, who played the man who comes looking for Lynn from the hospital, was another character actor that worked in TV from the 60's until well into the 2000's, as well as appearing in such films as The Terminal Man, The Fortune, Futureworld, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, The River, Big Shots, Eve of Destruction, Outbreak, Pleasantville, Crazy in Alabama and Catch Me if You Can.
That's about it for notable actors. As I mentioned before, the composer Charles Bernstein was quite a talent, and even if you don't know the name, you know his work, especially if you're a horror fan. He was the man behind the scores for Sweet Kill, Invasion of the Bee Girls, Look What Happened to Rosemary's Baby, Are You in the House Alone?, The Entity, Cujo, A Nightmare on Elm Street, April Fool's Day, Deadly Friend and way more where that came from.
For a film that was shot in only eight days with a nothing budget, Pigs is pretty impressive, with some genuinely creepy moments, notably the beyond bizarre scene where Zambrini pays a mask-clad visit to his nosy neighbors and the scene with Zabrini feeding his flesh-eating pigs, whose squeals are appropriately chill-inducing, even if they don't technically do much.
So, what the film lacks in man-eating pig action, it more than makes up for in dread-inducing atmosphere, solid character actors, an oddball script that really does defy description- it's even more whacked-out than I could possibly describe, honestly.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it an overlooked classic, but it's certainly something cult movie fans should enjoy, particularly if you liked the movies I compared it to earlier. Factor in Toni Lawrence's admitted sex appeal- the girl knows how to fill out a negligee, that's for sure- and Marc Lawrence's genuinely weird performance, and you've got yourself a nifty little cult movie worth a look.
Pigs is readily available on both DVD and Blu-Ray, including one from Vinegar Syndrome that features the alternate scenes shot to open the film under some of its other titles, (including the exorcism one), an alternate ending, plus various interviews with the cast and crew, including Toni Lawrence.
Check it out!
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