TORONTO BOOM TOWN
Director: Leslie
McFarlane
Year: 1951
Country: Canada
Runtime: 10 minutes
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THE BLOODY BROOD
Director: Julian
Roffman
Year: 1959
Cast: Peter Falk, Jack Betts
Country: Canada
Runtime: 80 minutes
Directed by Julian Roffman (best known for the 3-D horror film, The Mask), The Bloody Brood focuses on a group of strange beatnik-hipster types, led by the manipulative psychotic Nico (Peter Falk). Bored with the usual kicks, Nico decides to up the ante, feeding a young delivery boy a hamburger garnished with broken glass. But the delivery boy’s older brother soon arrives from the provinces to find his sibling’s killers. Of a piece with many films made in Toronto in the Fifties (including Sidney J. Furie’s A Dangerous Age), The Bloody Brood played off the currency of beats and hipsters as well as the juvenile delinquent craze. The look of the film isn’t too far off from contemporaneous studio product one might have found on the bottom half of a double bill, but the hysteria, sexual undertones, and near gleeful interest in aberrant psychology separate it from the pack (and link it to later Toronto films about dysfunctional, makeshift families). Needless to say, it boasts a certain camp charm as well. There’s a memorable turn by Falk, who seems to have just graduated from Method school, determined to chew up every piece of scenery in sight. Preceded by Toronto Boom Town, which records several key moments in the city’s history (including digging out tunnels for the country’s first subway), and floridly proclaims Toronto to be a “city on the move.”
TORONTO BOOM TOWN is rated PG.
THE BLOODY BROOD is rated 14A.
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