The only film to have been directed by veteran actor Marc Lawrence is a curious affair. Technically inept (it looks like it was edited with a rusty hatchet and roll of duct tape) it nevertheless is an atmospheric and offbeat film with much to commend it. It exists in a bewildering array of versions, all with different titles and the version under review here goes under the title The 13th Pig and appears to be the so-called “director’s cut.”
Lynn Webster (Toni Lawrence, Marc’s daughter) arrives at a dead end town where she takes a job as a waitress at a diner run by former circus artist turned pig farmer Zambrini (Lawrence). At first, Lynn is unaware that Zambrini is feeding dead bodies to his pigs and he in turn is initially unaware that Lynn is in fact on the run from a psychiatric hospital where she was incarcerated for murdering her sexually abusive father. When their secrets are eventually revealed, they develop a strange relationship, he helping her to dispose of the men she murders when they remind her too much of the father she still craves the love of. But their lives are about to be turned upside down by the suspicious Sheriff Cole (Jesse Vint) and a private investigator (Jim Antonio) sent after her by the hospital.
Full of odd details (Zambrini dressing up in clown make-up and sporting an echoey voice to intimidate interfering neighbours) and weird psycho-sexual subtexts (Freudians will have a field day with this), Pigs is more atmospheric than scary, Lawrence disconcertingly switching back and forth between reality and dream without any warning. The odd, often hallucinatory feel is enhanced by the disjointed and muddled screenplay, apparently the product of a troubled shoot, that can’t quite make its mind up about Zambrini (grave robber, murderer or both? We’re never sure…) and which keeps dropping hints about him that it never develops properly. Locals suggest that Zambrini has been up to no good for some while. “Zambrini always gets the pretty girls,” observes a bar fly. “They come here and work for a while and then they disappear. They say he feeds them to the pigs.” Elsewhere, nosey neighbour Miss Macey (Katherine Ross) concurs: “He feeds those pigs dead people, and then he eats the pigs.” But we’re never really sure what he’s up to, an ambiguity which, in any other film may have been a liability but here it just adds to the film’s eccentricity.
The strange relationship between the two main characters, with its hints of incest made all the more unsettling for the leads being father and daughter, is actually quite touching. Lynn is clearly damaged beyond any repair and, as with so many victims of abuse, still needs her father’s approval and love, When she can’t get it (she tries calling him on the phone several times but it never goes well) and fails, she turns to Zambrini as a surrogate. He in turn recognises her madness as a reflection of his own and a strange entirely non-sexual love story develops, the couple covering up each others crimes but their relationship only making their mutual disconnect from reality all the worse.
Toni Lawrence is very good as the crazed but vulnerable Lynn, initially presented as a potential victim until the real extent of her madness and the dangers it presents become obvious. Co-star Jesse Vint told Psychotronic Video magazine that the film was designed as an extended audition reel for Lawrence and she certainly brings her A game to a potentially difficult role. Sadly, if it was destined to be a show reel, it was one that wasn’t seen by many casting directors – her subsequent career was sporadic, mostly in television (though she turned up in Thom Eberhardt’s ghost story Sole Survivor (1984)) and petered out altogether in 1990. Marc Lawrence occasionally stumbles over his lines (possibly distracted by having to direct as well as act) but is also impressive as Zambrini.
His direction is pretty good too, the film zipping along at a decent enough pace and it’s certainly never boring. He’d directed several television episodes during the 1960s and the crime drama Nightmare in the Sun (1965) (co-directed by John Derek) but Pigs was to be has last outing in the director’s chair. In later years he seemed less than impressed with his work on the film (“It fell short,” he noted in his autobiography) and perhaps the way the film was subsequently treated by various distributors dissuaded him from putting himself through all the pain and stress of directing a film again. As already noted it exists in a number of versions under numerous titles.
The original screenplay was titled Menu for Murder and the film first played in cinemas as The Pigs in May 1973, Lawrence remembering distributors Classic Films offering audiences free packs of bacon at the Detroit premiere. Producer William Rowland subsequently picked up the film and persuaded Lawrence to shoot a new scene for the beginning of the film featuring a priest in an attempt to tie the film into the then burgeoning trend for “Devil movies” in the wake of The Exorcist (1973). This new version, known variously as The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart 1, Love Exorcist, The Secret of Lynn Hart and Blood Pen was a staple of drive-ins and double bills for many years. Then, in In 1977, yet another new opening was filmed by Donald Reynolds that brought the incest theme much more to the fore and this version briefly did the rounds as Daddy’s Girl before Aquarius Releasing got their hands on it, trimmed down Reynolds’ prologue and re-released it as Daddy’s Deadly Darling in November 1984. This version then made it to video under a seemingly endless number of re-titlings: Roadside Torture Chamber, Horror Farm, The Killer…
The 13th Pig seems to be the most satisfying title given the ambiguous ending. In her rant about Zambrini, Miss Macey claims that his drift of twelve pigs are in fact “not pigs you know – they’re dead people.” The ending suggests – but never really comes clean about it – that Lynn has become the eponymous “thirteenth pig.” Like much else about the film, it”s ambiguous and we never do find out what really happens to Lynn – we last see her making another doomed attempt to reconnect with her father (she ends up talking to a recorded message telling her she’s reached a wrong number) before the sheriff and a pig farmer arrive to remove Zambrini’s pigs, finding thirteen of them and Lynn’s pendant inside the pen.
Pigs explores some of the same territory as Matt Cimber’s The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976) – both films revolve around an unhinged abused young woman looking for a replacement for the father who abused her, and in both films the woman disposes of at least one aggressor by castrating them. Cimber’s is arguably the better film but Lawrence’s remains an interesting if rather ragged and often mystifying affair that nevertheless remains oddly compelling.
- Confusingly, in the film Lynn gives her surname as Webster. ↩
The EOFFTV Review 