Bloodbath in the House of Knives strikes up an interestingly strange psychotronic atmosphere. The film opens with a quote from Leo Tolstoy, which you cannot be sure shows either a promising literary grounding by the filmmakers or a film with grand pretensions. Moehring then kicks in with a nastily sordid opening where a girl (Nicola Fiore) returns to her apartment and is attacked by a masked figure in black who promptly rips her top off and despatches her by repeatedly stabbing a knife into her vagina, all of which sits the film in good stead as something prepared to push the envelope. There’s an even nastier scene in the middle of the film where the killer ties Brandy Lee up in her apartment half naked, pokes steak skewers into the skin of her arms and side and then rips them out. One of the film’s most bizarre elements is the character of the hypnotist played by John Link, a scruffy man with bug eyes and most of his teeth missing who delivers his commands in a sleepy voice, something that makes Ray Sager, the hypnotist of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s similar The Wizard of Gore (1970) seem like a good actor. All of this gives Bloodbath in the House of Knives a tone of decided psychotronic weirdness, not to mention a decidedly disturbed edge when the bloodletting kicks in.

Bloodbath in the House of Knives is passably well conducted for the most part, albeit with an occasional amateurishness in the photography and lighting. There’s the odd moment where the low budget shows through – the nightclub owner’s office consists of no more than a workstation desk with shelves, while an apartment is denoted simply by a handwritten note pasted on the door. The main problem comes in the two lead performances from heroine Ann Weiss and detective Joseph Michael. Both play earnestly but their delivery of dialogue falls flat. I’m not entirely sure if it is Ted Moehring’s writing and direction or simply their performances but there is an undeniable feeling of rote blankness to the delivery. The film’s elements could have worked well but these aspects drag it down to an amateurish level. The worst performance however comes from the film’s most high-profile cast member – Lloyd Kaufman, the cult head of Troma films. Kaufman seems badly miscast as Ann Weiss’s lawyer where he plays the part in a hopped-up mostly off-the-cuff performance that makes him seem like a Mongoloid clown.

And unfortunately, Ted Moehring fails to sustain the film. The two extremely out there despatches dissolve into cheap red herring gimmick shots – a hand creeping through Amy Weiss’s flat with a bloodied knife that turns out to only be a cop, a point-of-view shot with a gloved hand creeping up to Brandy Lee proving only to be her boyfriend and so on. The atmosphere of strangeness regarding hypnotism, mysterious secrets about the heroine’s past and the black masked killer dissipates in a mundane ending that first has a red herring suspect wrongly shot thought to be the killer, followed by a predictable revelation of the real killer. For that matter, we don’t even get to visit any titular house of knives. The entire film feels like an Italian giallo thriller – the extravagant psycho-sexual killings, the contrived end psychological motivation – played out on a cheaper, more prosaic level. Still, Bloodbath in the House of Knives is a film with promise. Hopefully with his next couple of films, Ted Moehring will have polished things to the point that he is capable of delivering on such promise in bigger ways.