So saith foxy biker babe Michelle Bauer after entering the spooky and supposedly abandoned Hollywood mansion of silent film star Lance Hayward (John Ireland). Although her reaction is a bit more than the place deserves (it’s basically four empty rooms with a curtain and a few spun-sugar spiderwebs), the Hayward mansion has earned a reputation thanks to its enigmatic owner, who mysteriously disappeared after quitting showbiz in the ‘40s. Now he’s back in the news after the mansion has been slated for demolition, and a crew of curious twenty-somethings (along with Bauer and her cycle savage boyfriend) decides to crash the mansion before it falls to the wrecking ball. Supposedly, Hayward’s fortune is still somewhere on the property, but as the kids prowl the estate, they’re picked off by a shadowy figure who dispatches them using props from Hayward’s films (bow and arrow from his Robin Hood movie; scimitar from an Arabian Nights film; axe from his King Arthur pic). Is Hayward himself the killer?

Well, the answer is…I really don’t know. Bloody Movie quickly devolves from a competent if not particularly original slasher film into a 30-minute clusterfuck of unconnected images, colossal leaps in logic, Cameron Mitchell as a babbling police detective (Cam and his giant eyebrows repeat the same three questions over and over), and a finale which has John Ireland as Hayward (maybe…it’s not clear) walking a dog down a street for a very long and unbroken take. It’s my understanding that this was the final directorial effort of Andre (the ’53 House of Wax) DeToth, and while it’s not known how much of the final product is DeToth’s and how much is producer Nick Marino (who gets the on-screen credit, and also reportedly stepped in on John Saxon’s Zombie Death House—see review), but the finale smacks of last-ditch efforts to reach a feature-length running time with lots of raw footage and loose ends.

If movie malaprops like these float your boat, you’ll probably get a good laugh from these scenes. Me, I was kinda disappointed, ‘cause while the preceding hour isn’t Halloween, it’s also not a total turd. The gore flows freely, the cast (which includes ‘80s porn star Jamie Summers, who’s billed as Denise Stafford) has some idea of how to deliver their lines, and Bauer is cute as a fucking button as the biker gal, and does a full frontal scene to boot. Had Bloody Movie called it a night at the hour mark (and there’s a perfectly serviceable ending at that point), it might’ve been a surprisingly fun horror nugget from the always interesting ‘80s. As it stands, it’s another 90 minutes of my life that I’ve given to a dumb killer-on-the-loose movie. I thought I’d stopped doing that in high school…

Oh, well. Retromedia’s DVD looks good, and the packaging plays up the handful of elderly character actors that flit through the movie in brief cameos, including Aldo Ray, Alan “Skipper” Hale, and Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty, as well as the fact that producer Nancy Paloian went on to give the world Dude, Where’s My Car? Not mentioned on the box cover (and for good reason) is second unit director Fred J. Lincoln, who achieved sleaze immortality as Weasel in Last House on the Left before directing and producing a tidal wave of direct-to-video porn over the last thirty years, including Abducted by the Enema Bandit, The Pussy Tamer (and its sequel) and Leatherbound Dykes from Hell*. One can imagine the conversations that came up during lunch breaks.