Fatsploitation! (If that isn't already a word, it is now!)

Utterly bizarre no-budget (I think all the money went on the camera) horror flick. The plot (seems a stretch to even call it that) revolves around Ethel Janowski (Priscilla Alden), '250 pounds of maniacal fury' (as it says on the poster) released from a psychiatric hospital (where she'd been committed for bouts of depression and violence) into the care of her grandmother. Ethel is instructed to attend outpatient appointments for electroshock therapy and to lose weight for the sake of her overall health. However, Ethel has no intention of doing either, and when it becomes obvious that grandmother is determined to make sure she does do them Ethel dispatches her with a kitchen knife. She then arranges for a delivery of groceries, but when she hasn't got the money to pay for them she kills the delivery boy with a broken bottle. And so it goes on; anyone who gets between Ethel and her food or who looks like they might be on the trail of what she's been up to get's stabbed/chopped/bludgeoned and added to the pile of corpses locked in her grandmother's bedroom. And that's pretty much it. We get a police officer (played by John Carpenter regular George 'Buck' Flower) investigating the disappearance of the delivery boy, plus Ethel's prostitute sister and her pimp who both decide they're going to move in with Ethel for a while (as well as the sister's 'clients' showing up at all hours). It's not hard to guess who will and who won't make it to the end of the picture. It's directed by prolific softcore and exploitation filmmaker Nick Millard (who seems to have had more aliases than Bruno Mattei!), here under the name of 'Nick Phillips'. There's plenty of blood, although most of it looks like someone kicked over a tin of red paint and the kills are pretty corny. It's by no means a good film, but as a grim, gritty, grainy, 'grubby' piece of 70s American cinema it has something. 5/10