Bloodsucking Pharoahs In Pittsburgh

Sweeney Birdwell (Jake Dengel) and Joe Blocker (Joe Sharkey) are a rather creepy pair of Mutt-and-Jeff cops following brutal dismemberment murders that have rocked Pittsburgh. All the victims have been prostitutes, all had different organs removed by a fez-wearing figure wielding power tools, and all were acquaintances of the doleful Joe, who investigated a similar set of butcherings 12 years ago in Las Vegas. There the culprit, occultist Semmet Cairo, ended up riddled with bullets, but his body was never found, and Joe has suffered from chronic nausea ever since. Pittsburgh police decide to fetch Joel's old partner from Nevada to help out, but he's missing. Instead his two-fisted meter-maid daughter Deedee (Susann Fletcher) drops in, and traces Semmet's sinister brother Jackie Cairo (Shawn Elliott) to a ninja-filled cafe in Pittsburgh's "Egypttown" neighborhood. The actual murderer isn't he, but his buxom bimbo waitress (Jane Hamilton), secretly Semmet's sorceress daughter, who's piecing together a black-magic vengeance against all who hurt her father. The spectacle concludes with gushers of gore and a sweaty fight-to-the-death between the harem-clad leading ladies. There are, incidentally, no pharoahs; when the film was made in 1988 it bore the working title "Picking Up the Pieces."

The filmmakers obviously want to bring the go-for-broke comic mania of HOT SHOTS! or THE NAKED GUN to the splatter genre, and they're not the first. The difference between the AIRPLANE! team of Jerry Zucker, David Zucker and Jim Abrahams and their many imitators is that ZZ&A know how to be funny. The competition can only do silly. There's about 15 minutes of hilarious material in BLOODSUCKING PHAROAHS, mostly bunched together at the beginning. The rest just thrashes around onscreen, pulling what jokes it can out of the mess but more often slipping in a slush of absurdity. The funniest bits, in fact, involve not the gruesome main story but the peripheral character of Sweeney's ghastly chainsmoking wife Erma (Beverly Penberthy), whom tobacco has transformed into a gaunt ghoul with a gurgling electronic larynx. Seeking to kick the habit, she checks into a therapy center, where the stop-smoking treatments become progressively and unspeakably cruel. She spends the rest of the film in mummy-like bandages--still smoking.

Like Penberthy, the other actors get into the spirit of the thing with appropriately campy performances. Jane Hamilton, "introduced" in this film, has actually been exposed to viewers before: in porn she's know as Veronica Hart, although she stays clothed, however skimpily, herein. But for horror fans the real star will be gross-out makeup master Tom Savini, who contributed the plentiful effects, although mutilation buffs may be disappointed that the really nasty stuff occurs offscreen. Blood does flow, by the buckets, and in the end Joe overcomes his weak stomach and luxuriates in a shower of thick red human body fluids and viscera. Attentive viewers may discern a note at the end thanking Heinz Ketchup company, as well as the "Pittsburgh police department for their patience and sense of humor."

The film came to video late in 1991, and while onscreen the direction is attributed to art-director-turned-screenwriter Dean Tschetter, video-box art and promotions instead blame "Alan Smithee," a customary pseudonym, variously spelled over the years that filmmakers have used in cases of disputed or unwanted credits. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations.) leave a comment