Pigs (1973)

aka Daddy’s Deadly Darling

A young, tense woman we will later learn is called Lynn (Toni Lawrence, fittingly enough the actual daughter of director, writer and male lead Marc Lawrence) ends up at the middle of nowhere, rural California, diner of former circus magician Zambrini (Marc Lawrence). As luck will have it, the place is in need of a new waitress, after the old one just up and left one day. The job offer is a bit strange, though, for it doesn’t look at all as if the place actually needs anyone apart from its owner. There is nary a guest in sight, what with the diner placed far from roads anyone actually uses, and Zambrini not being too well loved by anyone living in the area. His elderly closest neighbours for example believe that something is very wrong with Zambrini’s pigs (not to speak of the man himself). According to them, the animals regularly pop up outside of their house making an unpleasant racket. Supposedly, they are man eaters, but a special kind where the pig-eaten corpse somehow becomes a new pig. And let’s not even start on the weird dreams the ladies have about Zambrini.

Ironically enough, Zambrini does indeed feed corpses – some of which he digs up in the local graveyard – to his pigs, and he’s certainly not above murdering and turning the most annoying members of the local community to better use. He does get along rather well with Lynn though. There’s clearly something very wrong with her, too, something having to do with her father and a curious relation to sex. Still, Zambrini and Lynn fit together well, he doing his – creepy-crazy – best to be a father figure and she clearly getting into the role of being a daughter. Zambrini’s and Lynn’s respective dark secrets and that nosy outside world won’t let them end up as a Whedonesque family of choice, though.

Directed by its male lead, long-time character actor Mark Lawrence, Pigs is one of my personal favourites among the strange and lovely breed of US local independent film productions. It was apparently shot on an actual ranch in California, and is consequently set in what at first feels and looks very much like a real place. It’s not as decayed as this sort of creepy horror film rural spot usually is, but certainly looks like it is becoming a bit decrepit, lending the locations a sense of the kind of decay you only ever seem to notice out of the corner of your eye. This provides Pigs with copious amounts of instant atmosphere, as well as an air of reality that just might keep a viewer from realizing how bizarre (in all the best ways) parts of the film actually are.

And it does get bizarre: just look at the curious sequence in which Zambrini visits and threatens his nosy neighbours, dressed in the full regalia of his former magician alter ago The Great Zambrini. It is, most probably, a dream sequence expressing the ladies’ anxiety about their strange neighbour and his pigs, yet Lawrence neither starts nor ends it in any of the ways movies signal dream sequences, and their ends and beginnings to us. Given that the rest of the film is of a more than coherent and competent technical level, Lawrence surely is doing this on purpose, using the breaking of filmic rules to disquiet his audience, suggesting the seemingly naturalistic world the characters live in is deceptive, that madness or something much stranger might be closer to the surface than you’d suspect.

There are in fact quite a few intelligent directorial decisions of this kind throughout the movie, moments when small or big details suggest unsettling things, or when the bizarre (or perhaps even the Weird) nestles in among quotidian detail.

All of which elevates a film that is already a fine example of atmospheric, low budget psycho horror (with two psychos for the price of one) with a couple of scenes for the grindhouse audience, into stranger and higher realms. The main reason why this approach works out so well for the film does lie in its insistence on taking its two main characters seriously, treating what could be two cliché psychos as human beings, first securing this as a film about dysfunctional, enabling father daughter relations in extremis – with a quasi-feminist side-line, even – before adding the more exalted and the bizarre things on top.


Acting-wise, this is a nice showcase for both Lawrences, who manage to sell everything to the audience, actually making this viewer care for its two murderous main characters quite a bit. Poor Lynn at least never seems to have had much of a chance of a happy life thanks to her past as a victim of male abuse. And Zambrini? Well, what’s a guy to do when his pigs develop a taste for human flesh, and nobody leaves him and the girl he wants to protect in peace?