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FLESH FEAST
aka
TIME IS TERROR
Rating: 
USA. 1970.
Director – Brad F. Grinter, Screenplay – Brad F. Grinter & Thomas Casey, Producers – Brad F. Grinter & Veronica Lake, Photography – Thomas Casey, Special Effects – Douglas Hobart, Makeup – Gayl Doucette & Bill Rogers, Art Direction – Harry Kerwin. Production Company – Viking International.
Cast:
Veronica Lake (Dr Elaine Frederick), Phil Philbin (Ed Casey), Heather Hughes (Kristine Powell), Dete Parsons (Sharon), Otto Schlessinger (Benito Paris), Chris Martell (Max Bauer), Bill Rogers (Jose), Doug Foster (Carl Schulman), Dianne Wilhite (Gail), Harry Kerwin (Dan Carter)
Plot: A journalist is murdered while following an arms dealer. His editor Ed Casey investigates. The trail leads Casey to Dr Elaine Frederick who is secretly conducting age rejuvenation experiments using flesh-eating maggots. Gradually Casey discovers that Dr Frederick’s backers are really Nazis and that her intended test subject is a very much alive Adolf Hitler himself.
Veronica Lake, who has enjoyed a revival of memory in recent years thanks to L.A. Confidential (1997), was one of the great cinematic beauties of the 1940s, known for films like Sullivan’s Travels (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), This Gun for Hire (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946). After that decade though, Lake fairly much faded from sight. Flesh Feast was her comeback after nearly twenty years and the last film she made before her death in 1973.
It is anybody’s guess what possessed Lake to choose such a dire and impoverished production for a comeback, let alone to act as producer. In it she looks sad and aged – the film shoots her unglamorously and shows none of her former beauty. The climax of the film does offer the mildly fascinating spectacle of her going bonkers and laughing her head off like a maniac – it’s sort of like one of the films that were the in-thing for awhile in the 1960s after the popularity of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) featuring aged stars going batty, but it comes without the layer of self-conscious freakshow appeal.
Flesh Feast is a really dire film. It has clearly been shot in someone’s house where guest bedrooms double as hospital wards. The laboratory consists of a bench with two straps, an oxygen cylinder and two pieces of radio equipment. The whole film hangs on its twist ending – the revelation that the secret benefactor of Veronica Lake’s flesh-eating maggot rejuvenation treatment is Adolf Hitler – but even though Flesh Feast was the first film to use such a twist, by the time it did it felt old hat. Sad.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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