TTT: Scream Baby Scream (1969)

The oldest of the Toxie's Triple Terror movies, written by my man Larry Cohen. While it's no God Told Me To, Scream Baby Scream ain't a bad way to kick things off. It tells the tale of a pair of lovebird art students who meet professional painter Charles Butler. Butler paints ridiculously amateurish paintings of mutilated people... and he creates his own real, live models for these paintings out of innocent victims!

That all sounds like a standard horror movie and it has a nice horror movie title, but a chunk of of the middle of the film is pure, '60s hippie-movie. There's a party at a hip club for young, '60s kids complete with a crappy rock band playing their hit single and dancers in front of a psychedelic backdrop. My favorite part is when the lovebirds and their friends decide to try acid for the first time. They immediately jump on motorcycles -- riding double on motorcycles while on LSD?! -- and the film goes into double-exposure mode as trippy jazz plays on the soundtrack. Cut to: the trippers petting a baby elephant. What the f... ah, they're annoying the hell out of animals and people at a zoo. How considerate. It ends with, unsurprisingly, a "have you ever really looked at your hand, man?" comment. Awesome.

Vaguely similar to 1965's Color Me Blood Red, but much more fun due to the hippie stuff. Verdict: a good-bad movie.



aka Nightmare House
d. Joseph Adler