There is a reason for watching bad movies, apart from the fact that they’re often found streaming for free. Sometimes that reason is that they’re so bizarre that they’re almost surreal. And sometimes the circumstances surrounding them are equally strange. Michael Findlay’s Shriek of the Mutilated was included in the set of movies I bought for Zontar: Thing from Venus. Not one to be wasteful, I’m finally dutifully watching these before allowing myself to purchase new fare. Given the fact that this had a theatrical release, I’m surprised that it’s not compared more often with Ed Wood’s oeuvre. In any case, this is a very convoluted story and spoilers will follow. You’ve been warned.
An international group of demon worshipping cannibals have a member who’s a professor that takes students on a “yeti hunting” expedition every few years. The students are all killed but one, so that the yeti story can continue. Viewers (if any) aren’t clued in to this until the last few minutes of the film but early on you can spot the cannibal theme. So four students in the professor’s Mystery-Machine-like van, go on a hunt while staying with a “colleague.” Naturally the students start getting killed.
Using some of the worst dialog ever written, the clueless coeds keep allowing themselves to be led into situations no sane person would. The chosen “survivor” discovers the plot and is amazed that the creature was (blindingly obviously) a guy in a suit trying to scare them to death. The cannibals prefer their meat with no bruises. Much more could be said about the ineptitude of the movie but it ends up having an interesting, if tragic, coda.
Michael Findlay, who made exploitation films with his wife Roberta, was actually sliced to death in a helicopter accident on top of the (then) Pan Am Building in Manhattan. This happened three years after this movie was released. In those three years he’d directed eight more films, so his last movie before being mutilated was not the one in my Beast collection. Quite often when I watch bad movies I have trouble finding any discussion of them at all. Shriek of the Mutilated is discussed at some length in two books—not surprisingly published by McFarland (they have great pop culture titles). Until I discovered this movie, in with ten others in a collection, I’d never heard about it. Of course, the theatrical release was for drive-ins and was limited to Texas, Florida and California. There can be a lot of information to dig out when people stoop to talking about bad movies.
