Reform School Girls (1986)

Pigs! was unleashed in Detroit on May 23rd, 1973, and died a dismal death without further distribution deals working out. The film did the Grindhouse routine and other trash and porn in theatres on 42nd Street, but it never broke beyond the “dark anorak” crowd.

Some canny distributors thought of repackaging the film with a new name and poster for the slasher boom of the 80s, and it might have better luck subsequently. Finally, when that failed, exhibitors were happy to tinker with names as long as the punters were fooled into parting with their money. It adorned cinemas in various Avatars, including Daddy’s Girl, The 13th Pig, Blood Pen, Horror Farm, Roadside Torture Chamber, The Killer, The Killers, Lynn Hart, The Strange Love Exorcist, Lynn Hart, the Strange Love Exorcist, The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart and The Secret of Lynn Hart. Finally, the film has found a home with those fine folks at Troma and classics such as Zuma, Mother’s Day, Tox Avenger, Class of Nuke’ Em High, Redneck Zombies etc.

The film is set in run-down rural California, where a mysterious man holds the attention of the entire townspeople due to his nefarious activities. Neighbours swear they have seen him drag dead bodies to feed his pigs in the early hours of the morning and that each time he feeds the pigs the human flesh, quite miraculously, an extra pig appears the next morning. With each further disappearance in the community, the number of pigs seems to be increasing. However, there is no evidence of any wrongdoing, so the police are forced to continue investigating even if they appear to be stumped for the moment.

The mysterious Zambrino, a withered old man with some dark secrets that weigh down on his psyche, triggers his demented obsession with feeding his beloved pigs freshly killed human flesh. He runs the town’s sole Diner, and one fine morning, a rather perky Lynn appears out in the sticks to try and secure a job at Zambrino’s Diner. Despite knowing nothing about who Lynn is or where she comes from, he signs her up, and her presence excites a number of the randy locals unused to the company of a sultry young thing among them.
Lynn has a nightmare of being stabbed and ripped to shreds by Zambrino, and in trauma, she seeks solace in phone calls to her Daddy, begging for his understanding and his love but also pleading that he leaves her alone to try to find her way in life. Daddy seems to be a distant, cold fish, and his daughter is desperate to please him and gain his approval. Lynn takes on some of those sniffing around her, but things turn nasty, and there is much blood splatter and appalling violence. Zambrino helps her cover up and forms a solid bond of understanding together. Both bear the burdens of a miserable event in their past and find comfort and solace from each other for their deviances. Eventually, Lynn’s past starts to catch up on her as various people begin asking about her, especially her past. Zambrino finds himself strangely endeared to Lynn and continues to protect her even though he gets a report that she is an escapee from a lunatic asylum for the criminally insane and is a highly dangerous operator.
As the disappearances mount, though, the investigators slowly close in on the source of the horror.

Pigs! is a woefully inept cinematic experience. It’s lumbering and tedious in unfurling its tale of terror and drags insufferably despite its short running time of around 80 minutes. The film has zero production values, and the gore and makeup are embarrassing.

Despite all the tedium, the film is a delightful throwback to the type of eclectic cinema that was the mark of the cinema of the early 70s. All sorts of strict rules and regulations were being relaxed, and the Porn and Grindhouse films were avidly pushing the boundaries of Grand Guignol even if on shoestring budgets and cut price blood.

After the first scene, the audience knows Zambrino is a complete Psycho. Most of the film’s remainder is about Lynn, the unravelling of her personality, and the revelation of her true character and the story behind it. The pigs occasionally appear at feeding time and are incredibly noisy and quite ferocious-looking beasts at feeding time. The circle starts to close around Zambrino, and then Lynn is confronted with facts about her past that leave her few options. Will the mad Zambrino and his equally deranged new friend find a way to continue their blood-thirsty obsessions, or will they find a way or carry on?

Perhaps the one startling feature of the film is that a young Katherine Ross appears in a bit role, and she became the projected superstar of the decade that never quite materialised as expected. Toni Lawrence, daughter of director and Zambrini, does her deranged mysterious woman fairly well, but the film is dull. Very passive, with dreadful effects, little if no atmosphere and terrible gore effects. There is a fabulously dreadful title song that adds to the 70s cheese factor, but overall the film is way too languid and dull, and though there are some fun scenes silly enough to enjoy, on the whole, it is just far too dreary. On the flip side, how glorious that in the early to Mid-70s, films such as A major studio paid for The Baby. Movies like Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly created different directions for commercial cinema to follow. Pigs! may be very far from exemplifying the chaos, disorder and resulting brilliance of cinema of the 1970s, full of vitality and content. Perhaps the best thing about Pigs! Ultimately is that it exists at all.