Daddy's Deadly Darling (a.k.a. Pigs)

🐖 Part One: A Pig’s Appetite and a Lady’s Touch

One of the most inhospitable things I can think of is inviting someone over to dinner simply to bash in their skull and, when they fall over into the gravy, drag them outdoors to the hog shed, strip them, gut them like a fish, hang their bloody carcass up by a meat hook, and then feed their innards—eventually the whole carcass (what can't be put to other purposes)—to pigs.

No, I don't reckon that's right neighborly.

Indiana's first female of serial homicide, Madame Belle Gunness, who owned a hog farm in LaPorte and who invited numerous men via the "Lonely Hearts" column of the newspaper (the era's equivalent of a dating site) to visit—only to have handyman Joe Lamphere murder them and, well, feed them to her hogs—was infamous as being a good friend to human-hungry walking sides of bacon long before anyone else caught on to the idea.

But we all always knew pigs were wicked big pissers: fat, smelly, and full of legions of demons. Christ knew it, and, verily, did send the devils packing and the pigs over a cliffside. Clive Barker just took up the quill passed down to him from writers of the gospels when he authored the charming little homily called "Pig Blood Blues" in the seminal horror anthology classic The Books of Blood.

Later, Thomas Harris invited Hannibal Lecter onto the "Feed 'em to the Pigs" scene, when he had Hannibal feed pieces of the whacked-out Mason Verger's FACE to a convenient herd of porcine flesh enthusiasts.

🐷 Part Two: Daddy’s Deadly Darling and Cinematic Slop

All of that brings us to Pigs!—or Daddy's Deadly Darling (among other titles it's known as)—a traumatic, Tromatic sleazoid of Southern charm and 1973 weirdness starring Toni Lawrence in a film directed by Marc Lawrence… and starring nobody else anyone has ever heard of.

Zambrini (played by director Marc Lawrence), a sort of Joe Ball–like figure—though, to be fair, he doesn’t feed living victims to his hogs—gets his bodies from the local cemetery. Joe Ball, the real-life saloon owner and serial killer, famously dumped his victims into a cement pond full of pet alligators behind his bar. Same idea, different species.

For reasons never quite explained, Zambrini feeds these corpses to his pigs—who, if you believe the nosy, batshit spinsters next door (played with gusto by Iris Korn and Catherine Ross), somehow become pigs. It’s metamorphosis by way of madness—Circe would be green with envy. She only turned Odysseus' men into swine. Zambrini turns corpses into pork. (Though in all fairness, Circe also fed her guests to each other, so… points for flair.)

Toni Lawrence plays Lynn Webster, a woman that seems to be running away from something. She's on the phone all the time talking to "Daddy," whom we do not hear. She goes to work at Zambrini's diner. I guess he continues his perplexing hobby of feeding corpses to pigs (man has to pass the time somehow, and, as a quaint little old man of my acquaintance once told me: "Whatever turns you on, baby!").

Lynn sort of zombies around in a film that seems way, way longer than what it actually is. She almost gets raped by some blue-collar hero ("Ben," played by Paul Hickey) oil field worker before being "saved" by a local sheriff (Jesse Vint), borrowed from all of these movies. There are a few gory killings, sort of POV, and a lot of grindhouse-colored stage blood. A real Grand Guignol scene. There are stereophonic pig squeals emanating on the soundtrack from Lynn's tortured brain.

We get the idea that "Daddy" did something really, really bad to Lynn—something that gave her a need to destroy the pig-like males that the pigs in the film are a symbolic stand-in for: unbridled and unchecked naked sexual aggression.

What with the bloody murders and whatnot, you shouldn't be fooled into thinking Daddy's Deadly Darling is entirely without entertainment value—it's just that it's squeezed between the swinging teats of boredom and cinematic crawling, going as slowly as the single shot of a roach crawling across the floor in a pool of spilled blood. Nice image. Mediocre film, otherwise.

Distributed by Troma, of course—known for acquiring the cinematic offal of the universe. Real barnyard pictures.

Ha.

I'm over here happier than a pig in, well, you know what.

Daddy's Deadly Darling

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

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