🐖 Pigs (1973) — Sty-Stained Schlock with a Side of Bacon-Flavored Madness

Every so often, a film crawls out of the 1970s cinematic muck that makes you ask, “Why does this exist?” Pigs (also known as Daddy’s Deadly Darling, The Secret of Lynn Hart, Blood Pen, and probably This Movie Again?) is one such oinking catastrophe—an incoherent slice of rural exploitation that never met a tone it couldn’t completely mangle.

🪦 The Plot: Bacon-Wrapped Banality

Set in a sun-bleached, brain-dead nowhere corner of rural California, Pigs begins with Zambrini (played by director Marc Lawrence), a decrepit diner owner and amateur swine sommelier who’s allegedly feeding corpses to a pen of twelve pigs. But don’t get too excited—this isn’t Motel Hell, it’s more like Motel Meh. The mystery? Every time he feeds them a corpse, a new pig shows up. Riveting.

Enter Lynn (Toni Lawrence, doing her best in a role that feels written by a haunted typewriter), a wide-eyed young woman with all the charm of a stunned rabbit and the backstory of a daytime soap opera antagonist. She’s on the run, of course—from an asylum, from trauma, from exposition. She takes a job at the diner, gets nearly assaulted by a local creep, and then, naturally, murders him with a straight razor. Girlboss moment? More like gaslighting the audience into thinking this was going to be a revenge flick. It isn’t. Or maybe it is. It’s hard to tell between the ham-fisted editing and the pig squeals.

🎭 The Performances: Swine and Cheese

Toni Lawrence walks a razor-thin line between sympathy and blank-stare insanity. The film wants us to root for her, but it also wants her to be a mystery, a murderer, a victim, and an exorcist, depending on which version you’re watching. She ends up being none of the above—just a twitchy cipher in a nurse’s uniform.

Marc Lawrence, the film’s director, writer, and onscreen growling cryptkeeper, plays Zambrini with the understated menace of a man who lost a bet and agreed to star in his own snuff fan fiction. He’s not scary, he’s not funny, and he spends most of his screen time mumbling ominous nothings like he’s auditioning for the role of “man muttering at the DMV.”

Everyone else? Local theater rejects, oil workers dragged in from a Texaco, and a pig named “New Pig #13” who should’ve gotten top billing for doing the most convincing acting.

🧛 Possession, Rebranding, and Other Unholy Nonsense

What makes Pigs uniquely infuriating is its history of being sliced, diced, exorcised, and repackaged more times than a leftover meatloaf. Originally released in 1973 as The Pigs, the film later received a supernatural opening scene tacked on to ride the Exorcist wave, even though the rest of the movie never mentions possession again. It was like taping an episode of The Twilight Zone to the beginning of Green Acres.

That footage? Completely pointless. Like garnish on a rancid steak.

Then came the marketing blender: The Strange Love Exorcist, Daddy’s Girl, Roadside Torture Chamber, and the somehow even more absurd Blood Pen. Watching the film feels like you’re flipping through twelve VHS tapes in one hour, each with different fonts, titles, and narrative intentions, all shouting: “Please just watch me. Please. We’ll be anything you want. Please.”

🐷 A Bloody Trudge Through Rural Nihilism

The kills are mostly implied. The suspense is nonexistent. And the pacing? You’d have more tension watching a hog nap in the sun. Occasionally, there’s a bizarre spark—Lynn’s calls to her long-dead father, or the final revelation that there’s a 13th pig—but those moments aren’t payoff. They’re just the movie reminding you it has no idea what it wants to be.

The finale tries to be poetic, with pigs dragging Lynn into the muck like a low-budget Dante’s Inferno, but it’s too little, too late. Any message about trauma, madness, or small-town rot gets buried under the weight of muddy direction and the clumsiest editing this side of a failed driver’s ed instructional film.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 possessed pork chops
Pigs is a mess of a movie—part psycho-horror, part grindhouse gruel, part rural nightmare—but the worst part is how hard it tries to matter. In the end, it’s not horrifying, haunting, or even fun. It’s just hogwash.