We didn’t expect to start 2015 with the 81-year-old director of 1976’s Bloodsucking Freaks getting arrested for groping a woman on New Year’s Eve, but that’s the kind of world that we live in today. Some people would say that it’s still better than the kind of world that could have produced 1976’s Bloodsucking Freaks–which was both directed and written by Joel M. Reed, who’d go on to make the weird anthology horror movie Blood Bath before wrapping up his directing career with 1981’s Night of the Zombies.
Bloodsucking Freaks is still Reed’s most famous film, though. That’s stars Seamus O’Brien and sex dwarf Luis De Jesus above. Here’s what Joel M. Reed looks like nowadays. We’ve also met Reed a few times, and he seems a lot more like the guy in this photo from his Facebook page, so you can see why we’re surprised….
Reed has never seemed like the guy who made one of the sleaziest movies to ever play in the grindhouses of 42nd Street. If you haven’t seen it, Bloodsucking Freaks is a surprisingly intellectual gorefest about a loon who goes off-Broadway to make violent theater productions using his dungeon full of sex slaves. We’ve been in Joel M. Reed’s home, and we don’t even think he had keys to the basement. Still, these charges must be investigated, and we bet Reed is going to ask his attorney if filmographies are admissible in court.
Anyway, here’s the original Bloodsucking Freaks trailer below–and you can probably still watch the entire movie on a good looking print posted on Youtube. That link is very NSFW, of course, not to mention WTF…
