FrightFest review – A Blind Bargain (2025)

FrightFest review – A Blind Bargain (2025)

Director/writer Paul Bunnell made the 1950s retro science fiction film The Ghastly Love of Johnny X in 2011.  He’s back with a film which digs even deeper into genre history – though it doesn’t credit Barry Pain’s story ‘The Octave of Claudius’ or Wallace Worsley’s 1922 film adaptation A Blind Bargain, this is a ‘re-imagining’ of the lost Lon Chaney vehicle (in which he played a dual role as a mad doctor and an ape man) as a psychedelic 1970 programmer with Crispin Glover as a mad scientist (though, sadly, not an ape man) and an excellent shared performance from Amy Wright and Annalisa Cochrane as Joy Fontaine, a silent film siren (star of Egypt After Dark) who undergoes a sinister rejuvenation treatment.

In the teens and twenties, there was a whole genre of ‘monkey gland’ movies and stories (there’s even a weird Sherlock Holmes tale ‘The Creeping Man’) based on the schlock science idea that transplanting bits of ape into people will make them young and limber again.  The trickle of talkies on the same theme – from The Wasp Woman to The Substance – are all throwbacks to this mostly forgotten trend (mostly forgotten because most of the films are as lost as A Blind Bargain).

Bunnell, who co-wrote with John Falotico from a story by Bing Bailey, gets into the plot via Vietnam vet junkie Dominic Fontaine, who is willing to sell out his devoted mother to Dr Gruder (Glover) so he can pay his obnoxious dealer (Rob Mayes).  As a sweetener, Gruder has his nurse Ellie (Lucy Loken) vamp the feeb, assuaging his minor pangs of guilt by taking him on a Hollywood party whirl … though he is taken aback to meet a younger version of his mother, who is also making the scene in a big way.  It’s as devoted to its 1970s pastiche look as The Love Witch was, not just in costume, décor and music but in editing choices, colour palette and general trippy vibe … which is an odd way of reviving a 1920s property, but sort of works.  Glover almost underplays his visionary villain role – perhaps staking a claim to be the John Carradine of the 2030s.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.