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THE LOVE BUTCHER
Rating: 
USA. 1975.
Directors – Mikel Angel & Don Jones, Screenplay – Mikel Angel & Jim Evergreen, Producers – Micky Belski & Gary Williams, Photography – Don Jones & Austin McKinney, Music – Richard Hieronymous. Production Company – Desert Productions.
Cast:
Erik Stern (Caleb/Lester), Jeremiah Bleecher (Russ McNulty), Kay Neer (Flo Leonard), Edward Rohm (Captain Donald Stark)
Plot: Police are at wit’s end unable to catch a killer who is slaughtering women. Behind the killings is Caleb, an ugly and socially maladroit gardener, who is taken over by the insane personality of his brother Lester who imagines himself as sexually irresistible and then goes out to kill the women he desires.
This is a splendidly lurid piece of schlock. It has been conceived in the wonderfully sensationalistic, melodramatic spirit of the way they used to make films in the 1970s and don’t seem to anymore – everything from its B psycho-movie psychology to the acting to the direction – and quite manages to live up to it.
The film would be nothing however without the amazingly demented performance from Erik Stern. Stern alternates between playing the ultimate geek in bald wig and Coke bottle glasses to a blonde stud who disguises himself and adopts accents. Watching him conduct conversations with his alter egos, which are variously represented by a fashion dummy and a pair of glasses and a set of overalls on a clothes rack or going nuts in front of the various women victims while raving about being an Adonis and a sex god and laughing maniacally proves irresistibly entertaining. Priceless piece of sample dialogue – “You’re going to make love to me, satiate me, fill me with nymphoid satisfaction”. It would have been a rather more forgettable film without Stern.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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