By the 70s, British horror audiences were growing tired of creaky old Gothic horror—bad news for Hammer, whose stock-in-trade was vampires and man-made monsters, but good news for Pete Walker, whose more exploitative brand of horror featured homicidal maniacs that more than satisfied the viewers' blood-lust.Frightmare (1974) is one such film, a demented tale of a crazy married couple, Edmund and Dorothy Yates (Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith), committed to an asylum for murder and cannibalism, but released fifteen years later, supposedly rehabilitated. Of course, doctors are known to get things wrong from time to time, and dotty Dorothy turns out to be not quite as sane as she had led people to believe.Dorothy's stepdaughter Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) is convinced that she has matters under control, feeding her stepmother brains bought from a butcher's shop, but she hasn't counted on the involvement of her delinquent 15-year-old half-sister Debbie (the aptly named Kim Butcher), who turns out to be a chop off the old block.With a drilling, a pitch-forking, a hot poker impalement, and a dead guy with an eye missing from the socket, Frightmare certainly delivers gruesome entertainment by the bucket-load, yet also features stylish direction and some winning performances, particularly from Keith who is genuinely frightening as nutso Dorothy, and jail-bait Butcher, who is equally as scary but also adds a little titillation by prancing around the kitchen in her scanties 7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.

Pete Walker's 'Frightmare' is a gloriously gory mix of psychopathic and cannibalistic killings and pretty English cottages, all topped with all those naff '70's fashions, haircuts and British cars.Walker regular Sheila Keith is the woman sent to an asylum fifteen years ago, along with her abetting husband. He's helpless when her cravings come back and assumed cured, she now reads tarot cards. Their daughter gets romantically involved with a young psychiatrist and when her younger, adopted sister starts going off the rails, the young doctor naturally wants to help.She's actually helping find feeding matter - and their brains - for her step mother. And step mother uses an array of everyday tools and appliances to get to her subjects' juicy bits. Electric drills, pitchforks, you name it. There's plenty of reasonable looking blood at the right times and some great make up effects of everyday folk with half their heads missing.Now, nearly forty years on it's more a chiller than a screamer but very effective nonetheless and certainly one of the better Brit horror flicks I've seen. I saw it on The Horror channel.

"Frightmare" is definitely one of the better horror films of the 1970's. I'd say it ranks right up there with "The Exorcist" in terms of how effective it is for the time it came out. It remains effective too, though comes off a little campy in spots.It reminded me in some scenes of a Herschell Gordon Lewis flick, ridiculous and pretty gratuitous gore, people's eyes gouged out, people gored up with pitchforks...yea I liked this one. I was surprised at how much gore there was, I wasn't expecting it. I certainly haven't seen a British horror flick from the 70's with that much gore.The plot is simple: a married couple is released from a mental hospital after serving decades for cannibalism and murder. They have two daughters, but the older is only related to the man. Her stepmother and sister sort of exclude her in the end...it has to be seen to be believed, I thought it was really shocking and the kind of film you see that sits with you for days.Unexpected.8 out of 10, kids.

This is a superbly savage and utterly bleak study of generational insanity and the fatuousness of the medicine that seeks to heal it. The world of this movie is realised with such economy and concision (no pointless repetition or endless discovery process) and the settings are so exactly right, from the funky flat to the farmhouse, yet not located in any particular area.Two characters stand out - Debbie, the younger daughter, and the father. The way in which the performance of the former veered from little girl to pseudo-grown up to almost a woman, primarily through voice and accent alone, was compelling and convincing, as she shifts from tough little vixen to teenage sexpot to needy child. But central to this movie is the father and his enigmatic, ambivalent persona. Evil (or madness) is actually much less interesting than complicity and greyer shades of guilt.So the gore is primitively rendered, the support acting lame and the cars a bit sad. This is ten times as smart and politically informed as Hostel or its ilk. And it lingers long in the memory, not for the blood splatter, but with Why? questions.