Entry 110: Pigs (1972)

Pigs (AKA The 13th Pig, Daddy's Deadly Darling, The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart, Love Exorcist-1972)

Dir: Marc Lawrence

"It's horror!  It's murder!  As daring as has ever been shown before!"

I can't find a sharable trailer for this one online anywhere, and I looked pretty goddamn hard.  Anyway, this is a strange one, folks.  Grab a bucket of slops and jump the fence; down here in the basement, we're gonna spend a little time wallowing with Pigs.

Young runaway Lynn (Toni Lawrence, the director's daughter and a future ex-Mrs. Billy Bob Thornton) takes a job as a waitress at a rural southern cafe run by Zambrini (director Lawrence, best known as an actor in movies like The Asphalt Jungle and The Virginian), a down-on-his-luck former circus performer.  In addition to restaurant entrepreneurship, Zambrini also owns a swine farm stocked with 12 boars to whom he feeds human flesh, either bodies dug up from the local cemetery or the corpses of his own victims.  The only folks who have any inkling of what Zambrini's up to are a couple of nosy old biddies who live down the lane, who believe that the pigs are the transformed bodies of Zambrini's victims (clearly, they're confusing the abilities of a carny with those of a warlock).  Thankfully, affable Zambrini has made nice with the local Sheriff, Dan (southern character actor Jesse Vint, Chinatown, Macon County Line), and he dismisses the claims of these old coots as a load of hogwash (forgive the pun).  In a scene that'll have you doubting your sanity, one of the old women dreams that Zambrini comes into their home at night, resplendent in tuxedo and shitty pancake makeup to threaten them with magic.  Dan nurses a little crush on Lynn, but she goes out with a local oil field worker instead, but castrates and murders him when he tries to rape her on her second date.  Zambrini, sensing a kindred spirit in Lynn and looking on her with fatherly affection, reveals to her the secret of his hogs and they dispose of the body together.  A sleazy PI (Jim Antonio, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, Outbreak) arrives in town and informs Sheriff Dan that Lynn is, in fact, a mentally unbalanced escapee from a nearby mental institute who had been repeatedly raped by her father as a child.  When the PI confronts her alone, Lynn kills him.  A panicked Zambrini begs her to flee town, but she has an episode, mistakes him for her father and butchers him with a straight razor.  As Dan and his men close in, the enraged hogs break free, kill Lynn and consume both her and Zambrini's corpses, leaving only her necklace for Dan to find among the swarming swine.

This is a strange one, folks.  Not really a horror film, it's more of an off-kilter character study/rural slice-of-life picture with some horror elements thrown in.  With it's eerie, cluttered, run-down southern gothic sets it MUST have been seen by Tobe Hooper and at least partially inspired the look of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  Hooper, however, was focused on the visceral impact of the horror in his film, using every opportunity to amp up the claustrophobia and dread of his setting, while in Pigs, Lawrence really isn't concerned with the killings/horror aspects at all and his direction is relatively flat/pedestrian.  As a low-rent portrait of a severely damaged woman, this film reminds me most of previous Basement entry The Witch Who Came from the Sea.  While Lawrence's performance here is nowhere near as intense and impressive as Millie Perkins in that film, she does good work here as Lynn, moving easily from quiet and vulnerable to vicious and deadly.  Vint is welcome as always as the Sheriff and the elder Lawrence makes Zambrini, undeniably a murder, gruffly likeable.  Speaking of Lawrence, he's an interesting guy-he started out as a promising young actor in '30s Hollywood, then was blacklisted and named names before HUAC (I'm not going to call him a piece of shit for doing so because I don't know the particulars of his situation).  He fled the country and worked in Europe for several years before returning to the states and working as a reliable character actor for directors like John Schlessinger, Joe Dante and Robert Rodriguez.

Like so many indie/regional genre pictures of it's time, Pigs was chopped up and rereleased several times under several different titles, including one that shoehorned exorcism footage into the beginning and end and tried to pass this off as an Exorcist cash-in!  In it's unedited, original state, Pigs is a little slow-moving, and gorehounds and dolphin-floggers will find insufficient blood and nudity here to satisfy them.  Fans of off-kilter, strange cinema won't want to miss it, however; it's certainly unique.