Tony Mastroianni Review Collection
Tired "Blood and Lace" features Gloria Grahame
Cleveland Press March 27, 1971
"Blood and Lace" is playing at local theaters. Horror movie; adults, older teens. In the cast are Gloria Grahame, Melody Patterson, Len Lesser. Running time: 87 minutes.
Gloria Grahame has come out of retirement for a movie called "Blood and Lace." The picture is so bloody awful it can't do very much to further her new career.
She portrays the woman in charge of a county orphanage where strange things happen. Since she collects $150 per month per child no one is allowed to run away, even if they have to be turned into cadavers and hung in the meat freezer.
The picture strains hard for its shocks. It opens with a couple in bed getting their heads beaten in by a murderer armed with a hammer. It moves from there to a meat cleaver severing a hand, bodies being hauled around, screams and meaningless shadows.
The thread of a story concerns Melody Patterson as the girl in the first scene. She's dumped in the orphanage and the mystery amounts to (a) who killed her mother and (b) who is her father?
Both matters are wound up in an unbelievable closing scene.
Miss Grahame is only fair in a cast that seldom achieves even that level of competence.
