"Blood Bucket Ballyhoo"

"Blood Bucket Ballyhoo," a triptych of Grand Guignol shorts adapted for schlock-horror impresarios Thrillpeddlers by Rob Keefe and Eddie Muller, explores the twilight zone of 19th-century French taste with the help of some of the most elaborate props you're ever likely to stumble across outside of a dominatrix convention. A rat-infested Museum of Horrors -- equipped with a real, working guillotine and a coffin for those unfortunate enough to be buried alive -- is the setting for Lips of the Damned, a story about a cuckolded husband's revenge upon his wayward wife and her lover, suggested by the 1906 French comedy La Veuve by Eugène Héros and Léon Abric. In The Drug (adapted from René Berton's La Drouge, first performed in 1930), a bored, high-class lady is forced to confront a hideously disfigured ex-lover one night in a seedy Oriental opium den. Blood splatters and prosthetic body parts fly, but the lady -- quite literally -- cannot keep her eyes off the man she once destroyed. And in A Slight Tingling (inspired by the 1907 comedy Les Opérations du Professeur Verdier by Elie de Bassan), a surgeon's daughter attempts to find a pair of lost surgical scissors in the bodies of three of her father's patients with the aid of an amazing magnetic contraption. Director Russell Blackwood and his cast of dedicatedly damned souls present a danse macabre of ketchup-red theatrics. "Blood Bucket Ballyhoo" is in the best of the worst of all possible tastes.