The Scottish Chainsaw Massacre, Without The Chainsaw
Originally titled Sawney: Flesh of Man, Lord of Darkness is based on the legend of (Alexander) Sawney Bean, who lived in 1500s Scotland. He and his wife had a huge family of inbred cannibals, who reportedly ate hundreds of travelers over a number of years. One of the Bean’s escaped punishment, and now his future offspring are munching their way through many more victims. I heard of this family as I was growing up in Scotland but as to just how much was really true, we’ll never know (Wikipedia?), but Sawney Bean appears to have been the real thing. I’m not so sure about this tongue in cheek horror though.
A girl is snatched by a taxi driver as she leaves a nightclub, and we see the London taxi bounce from side to side as something untoward happens to her. Next, were at the girls funeral where her sister and a reporter friend Hamish MacDonald (Samuel Feeney) attend. A detective is feeding Hamish clues, and now he wants to get to the bottom of all the disappearances, that also occurred in the same area as his friends. The Bean family are a crazy lot of characters, who you just know were created by a fan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because they feed and kill in very similar ways. Sawney Bean (David Hayman) and co consist of a dwarf and quite strangely, a tumbling cannibal, which you have to agree is pretty original. Not much else is with Lord of Darkness, as it borrows too heavily from all the other gore flicks ever made.
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Even though it is cliche ridden, it’s still worthy of a gander, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it. It has plenty of gore, but that’s simply not enough to do justice to a true story, that could have been something special. The last true story about this sort of thing, covered real life leather face, Ed Gein, so there is indeed a market for this, but only if done better than Lord of Darkness. Not great, but not bad.
Grade: C
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