Horror Double Feature: Mantis in Lace & Breeders!

In today’s Shocktober Double Feature, we will be faced with an LSD freakout, a meat-cleaver murder, bare-nekkid ladies, and extraterrestrial insectoids! It’s Mantis in Lace and Breeders!

MANTIS IN LACE (1968)

Mantis in Lace is, in four fairly equal quarters, a soft-core skin flick, a psychedelic drug movie, a slasher horror film AND a police procedural. In it, we meet Lila (Susan Stewart), a young and gorgeous topless dancer who takes LSD one night with a guy she’s picked up. After hallucinating pretty severely for a while, Lila kills the young dude with a screwdriver and chops him to bits with a meat cleaver. This scenario is repeated three or four times while a pair of (surprisingly UNdorky) L.A. cops tries to track the maniac down. Yup, that’s pretty much all this film has to offer. One of Lila’s victims, I might add, is Stuart Lancaster, who might be a familiar face to all the Russ Meyer fans out there; another, a macho rapist, most certainly deserves to be diced at Lila’s hands. The picture feels very padded with numerous topless dance numbers (the opulently cantilevered legend Pat Barrington looks pretty impressive, actually, doing a frenzied belly dance; come to think of it, she would do a bit of “tripping out” herself that same year in the film The Acid Eaters), long makeout scenes, a lovemaking bout between the topless club’s manager and a job applicant that adds nothing to the plot whatsoever, and loads of colorful hallucinations. It has been lensed by Laszlo Kovacs, who would depict an even more harrowing lysergic experience in the following year’s great great Easy Rider. (Actually, I found the aural component of Lila’s trips much more freaky than the visuals.) Sadly, the viewer never learns anything concrete about Lila’s background, or why the drug sets her off the way it does; indeed, the only thing we can discover about her comes from the film’s admittedly hypnotic theme song. Concluding with an ironic albeit extremely telegraphed ending, Mantis in Lace is ultimately a real mixed bag; a psychedelic psycho curiosity that should have been better. Oh  …the Something Weird DVD that I recently watched features over 100 minutes’ worth of alternate film footage. Far out, man!

BREEDERS (1986)

My old buddy Rob, who probably knows more about “psychotronic” movies than anybody I know, recently told me that he’d just seen a terrible movie called Breeders, in which an extraterrestrial insectoid goes around NYC raping young virgin women and turning them into entranced zomboids. These gals later convene in the creature’s lair beneath the Empire State Building, and bathe naked in a tub of what appears to be alien semen. Well, all I had to hear was ” naked girls bathing in alien semen,” all-American pigdog that I am, and I started to search this one out. But does the movie offer anything besides this memorable tub spectacle? Well, not really. All we pretty much get in this short, 77-minute cheapie is a series of virgins getting undressed (yeah, there’s a lot of bared flesh on display here) and being attacked by an unseen creature. The film also boasts almost uniformly bad acting, an unsatisfying script with more holes than a screen door, silly-looking creature FX (we DO finally get to see one of the nasties around an hour in), some unconvincing bloodletting, and lots of screams. As regards the acting, is is SO very bad that it almost seems as if the director had told his cast to play this script for laffs. But sadly, there are no laffs to be had, or scares, or even mild suspense, and not a single situation plays as the slightest bit credible. Who, for example, would believe that every single attractive female character in this film is a virgin? And even that much-discussed tub scene is something of an unexplained headscratcher. I myself used to work in the Empire State Building, and felt no compulsion, after having watched this lame movie, to go down to the sub-basement there to check things out. That ought to tell you something right there!

COMING ATTRACTIONS: A haunted house! A creepy séance! An evil witch! David McCallum! It’s The Changeling and The Haunting of Morella, in the Shocktober Double Feature #21…