-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies…and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!
Directed by Brad F. Grinter
Written by Thomas Casey and Brad F. Grinter
Starring:
- Veronica Lake as Dr. Elaine Frederick
- Phil Philbin as Ed Casey
- Doug Foster as Carl Schumann
- Harry Kerwin as Dan Carter
- Brad Townes as Tyler
- Martha Mischon as Virginia Day
Rating: 
If there’s one thing old Hollywood actors share, it’s that they almost always wound up in some trashy exploitation reel or generic B-picture. Veronica Lake, once a vision of studio-era glamour, landed squarely in the trash pile. Co-produced and headlined by Lake herself, this final performance was intended as her grand return — a last grasp at relevance before her untimely death from alcoholism. Sadly, the film floundered; not necessarily in the seedy drive-ins where such fare might thrive, but in fulfilling her own hopes for redemption. Brad F. Grinter, cult horror’s accidental auteur, delivers a parade of talky characters marooned in a sea of lifeless, empty frames. Any prospect of camp appeal is swiftly undone by the film’s relentless narrative disarray. Still, Veronica Lake is Veronica Lake. She’s far from her prime — for reasons that don’t need spelling out — but watching her portray a deranged doctor in league with neo-Nazis almost makes the rest of this clumsy mess bearable. It’s not so-bad-it’s-good, and it’s certainly not a guilty pleasure. Even with worms devouring flesh and a few stabs at grotesque flair, the film’s overwhelming clumsiness keeps it from earning its place in the hall of glorious exploitation filmmaking. It’s all ominous mumbling and hollow dread — with Veronica Lake rattling off pseudo-scientific nonsense about a flesh-based experiment that sounds wild but never pays off. The grotesque promise fizzles into suggestion. It stays elliptical rather than explicit. It’s only in the film’s climactic shock twist that narrative cohesion briefly asserts itself, posing the question: could a sharper focus on this vengeful finale have yielded a stronger film? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s the only moment, besides Lake herself, that comes close to saving this long-winded trainwreck.
