Halloween and Black Christmas are widely considered to be two of the most influential slashers to ever hit the genre. Rightfully so, as both are great movies that helped shape and define the sub-genre that many of us love so much today. Blood and Lace is a film that was released three years before Black Christmas and seven years before Halloween. While Blood and Lace doesn’t get the respect or admiration of these later films I think we can safely say it played a large role in influencing the both of them.

Blood and Lace opens with a POV shot walking through a house and into a kitchen. The person searches through the kitchen until they find a hammer and begin to make their way to the second floor of the house. This opening scene is very similar to shots seen in Halloween and Black Christmas. The audience is placed in the killer’s shoes. The interesting thing about this shot, and other first-person shots similar to this one, is that the killer holds the hammer out in front of them as they walk. I get why this is done, to let the audience see the potential murder weapon, but if you really think about this it’s kind of silly. Would anyone ever hold out their weapon that way while walking? I don’t think so. This isn’t really a complaint though and rather an observation.

Moving back to the story, we see our killer continue their trek upstairs. They enter a bedroom and find two people sleeping in bed. The hammer is then raised up and repeatedly smashed into the faces of these poor, unsuspecting people. Their faces are bashed into one big bloody mess. Then we quickly cut to a hospital room and a young girl screaming in bed.

This girl is Ellie Masters (Melody Patterson). Those victims we just witnessed meet their end are Ellie’s mother, a prostitute named Edna (Louise Sherrill), and her latest john. We soon realize what we saw wasn’t the actual crime but a nightmare Ellie was having. Still her mother was murdered in that fashion so we can assume that’s a pretty accurate portrayal of how it all went down.

Ellie is spending a few days in a hospital before being transferred over to an orphanage. She’s underage and doesn’t know her father so at this point she is an orphan. Social worker Mr. Mullins (Milton Selzer) explains to Ellie what is happening and she doesn’t care for it one bit. She attempts to run off but is pretty quickly captured by detective Calvin Carruthers (Vic Tayback). Calvin takes her back to the hospital and the next day Mr. Mullins drops her off at the orphanage.

The detective doesn’t seem quite on the level from the get-go. When he grabs Ellie he says he used to work at the movie theatre that Ellie would frequently attend. He has since moved on to working for the sheriff’s department and was promoted to detective when they had an opening that no other cop wanting to take. I’m not sure that’s how law enforcmenet works, but whatever. Calvin does end up taking Ellie back to the hospital, so maybe he’s ok.

The day next at the orphanage things begin to take a really odd turn. The orphanage is run by Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame) and her handyman Tom Kredge (Len Lesser). These two are complete creeps. They punish kids in the worst ways imaginable and every kid that attempts to run off ends up in a giant freezer. What exactly their plans are by freezing these kids is never made clear, but it’s certainly strange. Seriously, they put kids in a giant freezer and we never find out why. They give a few weird hints that suggest they may be trying to bring back the dead, but nothing ever comes from it.

As if things couldn’t get worse for Ellie she realizes that the man she believes is responsible for killing her mother begins stalking her and others at the orphanage. As far as slasher villains go, Blood and Lace has one of the scariest. He’s a big guy who kind of lumbers around, hammer in hand, but he does so while wearing a truly hideous mask. It sort of looks like burned skinned. Almost like Freddy Krueger but more terrifying. It’s really thin and has a very wrinkly texture. It’s incredibly disturbing. If I saw someone in this mask I would totally freak out.

To recap: Ellie recently lost her mother who she already didn’t like because she was a prostitute who was rumored to have slept with every man in town. She doesn’t know her father or even anything about him other than he was the first man to ever sleep with her mother. She gets sent to an orphanage to stay there until she’s of age but it happens to be run by a couple of weirdos who for some unknown reason are freezing kids. She’s being stalked by the hammer-wielding lunatic likely responsible for killing her mother. And worst of all the older man in her life, including the detective allegedly trying to help her out, keep making uncomfortable advances on her, this all while she’s underage.

Needless to say Blood and Lace is a weird ass movie. To make things weirder director Philip S. Gilbert has never done anything else, at least as far as I can tell. I would love to know what he’s up to these days. How does someone make just one really insane movie and then never do anything else? I find that very odd.

I won’t spoil it for you, but the ending of Blood and Lace is abolutely fitting for a movie of this ilk. I just felt filthy after everything came to a close. Even though you can tell the story is going in the direction it ends up going, you really don’t want it to because it’s bad news for everyone. Weird, just weird. That’s basically all that needs to be said. Weirdness aside, I think this is worth checking out. It’s not nearly as good as slasher kings it clearly influenced, but it’s without a doubt a unique viewing experience you won’t soon forget.

Blood and Lace is now available on Blu-ray from Scream Factory.