Blood Song Reviews

Lapsed teen idol Frankie Avalon tries his hand at the slasher film with this genre exercise, which certainly earns points for pop culture dissonance if nothing more. Fans of Avalon's beach party movies are sure to be appalled by seeing their heart-throb hero planting axes in foreheads and burying dismembered corpses, but this extreme career decision is one of Blood Song's few remarkable aspects. As an escaped homicidal lunatic, Avalon does his best to suggest manic intensity, glowering at his victims, straining every muscle during a shirtless strangling and obsessively tooting a crudely fashioned wooden flute. Donna Wilkes (Angel, Jaws 2) is cute and appealing enough as the angst-ridden psychic teen, but she also commits some of the phoniest crying jags ever caught on camera as well as a game leg that varies in gimpiness. Their co-stars are a professionally one-dimensional bunch who offer up anonymous characters to fulfill the film's quota of victims, innocent bystanders and policemen; only Richard Jaeckel provides any depth, playing Wilkes' alcoholic father as an angry, frustrated disciplinarian with real, but misguided, love for his daughter. Director Alan Levi has worked mostly in television (The Return of the Incredible Hulk, Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman), and he provides a solid, workmanlike pace but can't do anything about the confusing story. The "blood transfusion" conceit that results in a psychic connection between the serial killer and the sweet crippled girl is inadequately developed, and the shock ending is a cop-out cribbed from every other hack slasher film that was selling tickets at the time. Blood Song is dumb fun for those in the market for such and there is perverse enjoyment in watching Avalon's inexplicable performance, but don't expect chills or logic.