Horror Movie Review: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

Directed by Andy Milligan, who co-wrote it with John Borske, and starring Michael Cox, Linda Driver, Jane Helay, and Bernard Kaler, Bloodthirsty Butchers is a loose adaption of the Sweeney Todd tale. Approached with very little finesse and putting the focus on crude gore over everything else, it’s not a quality film.

If you know your Demon Barber of Fleet Street story, then you’ll be familiar with the story beats of Bloodthirsty Butchers.

John Miranda play Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber who enjoys killing his customers and passing on their remains to his mistress Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) and the butcher, Tobias (Berwick Kaler). Where they take the bodies and bake them into meat pies. An arrangement that benefits all parties, until soap-opera style drama threatens to undermine the entire operation.

Try and keep up here. You see there are tons of extraneous characters, some of which are barely in it, but are apparently crucial to the plot. Most of who are having an affair with someone else.

Sweeney Todd is married to Becky (Susan Driver), a violent drunk who is desperate to prove his infidelity but spends most of the film being gaslit to the extreme. She’s right to suspect Todd of being a cheat though, as not only is he sleeping with Lovett, but he’s also head over heels for stage performer/singer, Anna (Susan Cassidy). She is getting tired of being the other woman but is also sleeping with her manager. Then there is Tobias, who is having an affair with Rose (Ann Arrow), but also doing everything possible (and creepily) to bed Johanna (Annabella Wood), who is happily engaged to be married to Jarvis (Michael Cox).

Maddening, isn’t it? All of this added to try and give this film some substance, but not only are all the threads incredibly confusing, but most of them are irrelevant.

It certainly doesn’t help that the story is told in lazy fashion, with characters given the most basic of introductions and plotlines to follow. Which, in turn, means an already struggling cast turn in some dire performances. Some are better than others (John Miranda and Jane Hilary do ok), but the majority are pretty poor.

Which makes the endless scenes of chatter, where characters say nothing while speaking non-stop and repeat themselves over and over again, hard to watch. It’s padding of the worst kind, where it’s clear the goal is to just play for time to make this a feature film in length.

Of course, this means the film is a mess when it comes to editing. Scenes stitched together at random, no coherency to the plot, and no cohesion with characters. These issues rear their heads very early on too, so it quickly becomes a struggle to get through. No amount of coarse gore scenes jammed in here and there can change that.

Looking cheap and sounding even worse, especially for 1970, there is very little to recommend here. Aside from the fact that it’s a re-telling of the Sweeney Todd story that many may not have ever seen. Although it’s probably best you keep it that way.