The Flesh And Blood Show (1972) Pete Walker Original UK Quad

  
The Flesh and Blood Show is a 1972 British horror. Directed and produced by Pete Walker.

It follows a group of actors being stalked and murdered by an unseen assailant while rehearsing a play at a derelict seaside theatre. The film achieved a minor cult following. In the years following its release.

Wrote: Despite the standard interpolation of some unconvincing sex and a dismally unsuccessful 3D finale which is literally painful to the eye, The Flesh and Blood Show has an unexpectedly pleasing, old-fashioned quality about it, deriving partly from its elaborate Agatha Christie. Type plot, and partly from its setting in a dilapidated old theatre at "Eastcliffe-on-Sea"(actually Brighton pier).

The situations which develop from the classical elimination of suspects do become tiresome and are not helped by some coy humour, but at least the film makes good use of its theatrical setting. Patrick Barr livens things up enormously as the villainous Sir Arnold Gates, who apparently entombed his wife and lover after a particularly spirited performance of Othello; and there is a promising opening sequence in which the camera surveys the ominous black outline of the theatre on a stormy night to the sound of Gates' crazed Shakespearian ranting. Practically all of this atmosphere is dissipated in the subsequent intrigues of the young cast, but the basic situation and setting remain sufficiently atypical to sustain interest until the crushingly banal denouement.

André Loiselle, writing in Theatricality in the Horror Film: A Brief Study on the Dark Pleasures of Screen Artifice (2019) calls the film "A minor cult favorite".