I’ll admit to loving an actress when she really goes for broke, especially in a horror film. Now restraint is not in the vocabulary of an actress like Susan Tyrrell.
Her turn as a skid-row drunk in John Huston’s Fat City was so unbearably raw and heartbreaking it got her nominated for an Oscar. But it also typecast her, and she kept eccentrically popping up in cult and exploitation movies like Angel and Forbidden Zone– often a welcome sigh of relief for those films. It was hilarious to see Tyrrell and Iggy Pop as a punked-out Ma & Pa Kettle in John Waters’ Cry-Baby. Tyrrell was truly one-of-a-kind and she chronicled her wild ways in a one-woman performance piece entitled, “My Rotten Life: A Bitter Operetta.”
But for me, her performance in Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker takes the ever-loving cake. Is this 1982 film batshit crazy? Thank God, yes.
And you have to keep remembering, to your astonishment, that it was directed by William Asher– the same man who directed 102 episodes of I Love Lucy, 131 episodes of Bewitched, and was even married to Elizabeth Montgomery. It’s now reissued on Blu-ray from Code Red/Kino Lorber Studio and, trust me, you need to see it to believe it.
The film begins with Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell) and little baby Billy waving goodbye to his parents as they head out in their car for a trip along the Pacific Coast Highway. But the brakes give out on their vehicle and a logging truck in front of them plunges a log through the windshield and sends the car careening off a cliff.
14 years later and Billy (played by teen idol Jimmy McNichol) is a rising basketball star at school and hoping for a scholarship at a Denver University where his girlfriend Julie (Julia Duffy) will be going to school. But Aunt Cheryl is hell bent on keeping Billy at home with her. She even stabs a TV repairman to death, accusing him of rape in an attempt to show Billy how much she needs him.
But this is when Detective Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson) shows up, suspicious of the crime and especially of Billy. And when he finds the repairman was gay and lovers with the school basketball coach (Steve Eastin) he comes up with a theory that Billy was somehow involved in a twisted love triangle. What’s fascinating is that the movie portrays the coach in a surprisingly gay positive way for its time. But the homophobic detective gets more rabid and ugly as the movie progresses. When Carlson questions Billy about the coach he snarls, “Doesn’t it bother you that he’s a fag? Are you a fag?” Watching Billy play basketball he even snidely offers advice on how to throw the ball, “You want to keep it limp,” he says of Billy’s wrist. Even Aunt Cheryl chimes in, “Don’t you know that homosexuals are just sick?” Pot calling kettle.
It’s clear from the get-go that Aunt Cheryl is bonkers- she’s always talking to herself, or pickling something in a jar or acting inappropriately with Billy. Not to mention drugging his milk so he’ll screw up at the game and dash his dreams of a scholarship. She even keeps a grisly altar in a hidden room in the basement where she lights candles and talks to a mummified corpse about how she will never let Billy go.
Tyrrell gives a go-for-broke kind of performance. It’s almost jaw-dropping in it feverish lunacy. In one scene, she hacks off her hair with a pair of scissors, leaving her looking like a crazed punk, and it’s hilarious to watch her friendly neighbor (played with gusto by Marcia Lewis) try to compliment her on her new “look.”
But the whole deranged finale, on a stormy night no less, is when Aunt Cheryl goes on a bloody rampage, hitting Julie over the head with a meat tenderizer, popping out of bushes wielding a machete, or racing around outside with a hatchet, leaving bodies piled up everywhere.
I only discovered this movie on a VHS tape under the title of Night Warning, and I remember thinking I’d lost my mind after I finished watching it and could not wait to show it to friends. But I’d just about given hope that I’d ever see a good print of it on any home media when this gorgeous Blu-ray (care of Code Red and Kino Lorber) miraculously appeared. There are fun interviews with Jimmy McNichol, producer Stephen Breimer and Steve Eastin (the Coach). There is audio commentary moderated by Nathaniel Thompson (Mondo Digital) and commentary with Jimmy McNichol. But there’s also a riotous interview with Susan Tyrrell who says about making the film, “I hated every damn minute of it. So, that being said, I have a lot of horrifying stories to tell you..” Then we proceed to see her watching the film (with her pet parrot), voicing rude, hilarious commentary.
