Veronica Lake Centennial "Flesh Feast"

for Veronica Lake's centennial we're revisiting a few of her films...

by Jason Adams

Veronica Lake’s final words on film are “Heil Hitler.” 

Nothing in the first sixty-five minutes of first-time director Brad F. Grinter’s schlocky 1970 mad scientist flick Flesh Feast will really prepare you for the final five minutes when a plot twist makes that line of dialogue possible, so I don’t feel particularly guilty spoiling the film’s ending up front – its ending is all it really has going for it...

Unless you count the spray-painted sets, mutilated dummies, and an inexplicable obsession with coat hooks, the only reason to watch Flesh Feast is to watch its finale. And so please, I beg of you, if you must watch Flesh Feast, if you’re feeling the need to be a Lake completeist, fast-forward. You won’t miss much, I promise you.

The last twenty years of Lake’s life were rough stuff – her alcoholism had gotten the best of her and she’d quit the biz. In 1962 the New York Post (ever the sleazy rag it remains to this day) outed her as “Connie de Toth” (her real name was Constance and her second husband was director Andre DeToth), a cocktail waitress working for the lounge of the NYC hotel she lived in. She gained some public sympathy from the story – fans sent her gifts and money which she supposedly returned out of pride, saying she paid her rent and was living a respectable private life. 

A little work also came her way because of the story though, and that she happily accepted. (A couple of turns on the UK stage, including a run as Blanche Dubois in Streetcar, were reportedly very well-received.) But her best windfall turned out to be the publishing of her memoirs in 1970, which helped her inexplicably see Flesh Feast over the finish line – the movie had been filmed in 1967 and she’d used her book's payout to produce the picture. Why this project? The mind reels – perhaps she was hoping to cash in on the “Grande Dame Guignol” craze that had given life to other past-prime actresses? Perhaps it was all that had come her way. Perhaps, and this seems the most likely option, she was just out-of-it drunk. It would seem the smartest course of action once one looked around at the movie she was making, at least.

Lake plays Dr. Elaine Frederick, a maggot scientist (yes, I said it) who’s evil-scientisting up some Very Special Maggots for what we are vaguely led to believe are a gang of South American Communist Thugs. In extremely scientific terms, the maggots are meant to rejuvenate human flesh by (you guessed it) feasting upon it. They’re a squirming skin treatment, a facial infestation, a fly-baby fountain of youth. To the Goop-ers of today this hardly seems outlandish - what’s the grub hubbub when bee-stings and placenta lasagna are all the rage today?

At the time though it would seem a plot reminiscent of Roger Corman’s delicious camp-fest Wasp Woman from ten years earlier (which saw “royal jelly” beauty treatments turn its leading lady into the titular monster) but coming here in the age of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ gore-fests, and with politics puzzlingly grafted onto the plot. It was the late-60s, I suppose. Perhaps Flesh Feast was prescient about the madness that lay just ahead? That’s easily giving it too much credit – broken clocks are right on occasion, and it’s not like a movie where Veronica Lake throws carnivorous maggots onto the face of Adolph Hitler while cackling maniacally predicted Watergate, for god’s sake. 

I know I keep skirting around the “plot” of this thing but it somehow makes no sense while being extremely uninteresting at the same time. There’s extremely static and banal intrigue for an hour, and then a big fake-out where the South American “leader” everyone is working for turns out to be a still living Hitler. I think. Possibly a clone? Who knows. But for the majority of the film’s runtime all of the assorted characters are trapped inside Dr. Frederick’s house where characters just sort of… stand around talking. And occasionally hanging coats on large prominently-framed coat hooks. There is a fun Weekend-at-Bernies-esque interlude where a corpse is stolen from a hospital in a wheelchair and sunglasses, but I fear telling you that will make this film sound watchable, and I couldn’t live with myself for foisting this Feast.

Two years after Flesh Feast director Grinter would go on to make a cult film called Blood Freak, about a Vietnam-vet turned pothead who eats genetically altered turkey meat only to wake up with a turkey’s head where his own used to be – a turkey’s head hungry for human flesh, naturally. And three years after Flesh Feast Veronica Lake would be dead of cirrhosis of the liver. The weird stories about her ashes being passed around among fans for the three decades following her death are more ghoulish than anything Flesh Feast ever musters, but one hopes she had a great day, that day on set, throwing those maggots in Hitler’s face while cackling maniacally. The legend with the wave-hair deserved that much at least.