"They planted the living and harvested the dead!" What did you expect, soybeans? Not from the blood farmers, immortalized in drive-ins and B-movie dives throughout America in Invasion of the Blood Farmers.

The film isn't any different from any of the hundreds with similar titles that came before it and hopefully will follow it. What's interesting about Invasion of the Blood Farmers is that it was coauthored by former CREEM freelancer Ed Kelleher ("Black Sabbath Don't Scare Nobody," Dec. 1971).

Kelleher carries on a dual identity. During the day he's a lanky, gentlemannered rock publicist. But once he's alone with a character named Ed Adlum, his long fingers become stumps, his facial features melt into hydrochloric mulches, and there is no crime too sadistic, no horror too gruesome for Kelleher and Adlum to consider, and eventually put to the screen.

The pair met while working for Cashbox, the music trade publication. They toiled grimly in the coin-machine section, writing articles about new flipper games, which they were never allowed to play. Neglected and mocked by their "fellow" staffers, who garnered all the respect and attention one gets by writing about music in "the trades," Kelleher and Adlum began to exist in a fantasy world populated by sinister thoughts and dreams of vengeance.

Soon their discussions about horror became an obsession. They found they shared similar backgrounds. Kelleher, as an ordinarily crazed New York kid growing up in the 1950s, absorbed his enormous knowlbdge of "B-trashy shock film$" by going to the movies six days a week. Adlum had been involved in cinescuzz, having co-produced one of the first acid-porn movies, Blonde On A Bum Trip.

Adlum and Kelleher spent a few months talking about the kind of movie they wanted to make. "It was right after Woodstock, so naturally we pawed over the idea of a werewolf at a rock festival," says Kelleher, "but it didn't seem to jell."

They finally sat down to write a movie when Kelleher came up with the almost irresistible title, Invasion of the Blood Farmers. Experts confirm his theory that "the title is crucially important to the success or failure of these movies. It's gotta have some humor, and some indication of horror, but you can't go overboard, or the true aficianado will simply stay away. Once you've got the right title, everything else comes easy."

The screenplay for Blood Farmers combines two elements. First, there is an atrocity every seven minutes. You can set your watch by the excesses, which include mutilations, maimings, beheadings, and frequently the draining of entire bodies-full of deep, rich, human blood, human blood.

The second element Kelleher and Adlum used in the screenplay was a stockpile of fifties-type characters, in keeping with the classic tradition of the golden days of sleaze. There are mindless fobs like Tex the Drifter (played by Kelleher), Dr. Roy Anderson (Norman Kelley), his daughter Jenny, and various members of an ancient Druid cult who've infiltrated the all-American town of Jefferson Valley in search of a rare blood type with which to resurrect their dying Queen Onhorrid in time for the ritual Feast of Menanon.

Writing the script took place over a few weekends in Adlum's basement, creative juices spurred by the abuse of a bizarre drug known as Budweiser. After the script was finished, it took nearly a year and a half to raise the necessary Capital to begin production.

For the cast, Kelleher used a number of friends who he'd worked with in the off-off Broadway theatre circuit where some of his plays had been performed. Auditions were held to find a few actors emaciated enough to portray the blood farmers. The film was shot during six weeks, in May and June, 1971, in an isolated area of Westchester County, New York. "We used a place called the Town Line Motel on Route 9 for some scenes," says Kelleher. "The guy who ran the place was so flattered that he's put up a plaque: Invasion of the Blood Farmers Filmed Here." "

World premiere was in Springfield, Mass. It played New York for a week, and since then has throttled around the drive-ins of the midwest and the south, where it still runs relatively strong. So far, Invasion of the Blood Farmers has grossed nearly ten times its initial budget of under $50,000.

With Blood Farmers a certified success, Kelleher and Adlum went to work on their next project. Written in January, 1972, the title again is a balanced stroke of genius: Shriek of the Mutilated.

"We set out to make a film about the Abominable Snowman," says Kelleher. "There was one done in 1957 starring Forrest Tucker that I've always liked. We thought we'd do an update, based around the legend of Bigfoot," the American version of the snowman thought to be alive and wandering through the Pacific Northwest.

Along the way, the theme changed somewhat. Shriek of the Mutilated ended up as the story of a professor doing research on the Abominable Snowman on an isolated island. Members of the party began to die "systematically and mysteriously." There's cannibalism, gore, "and some great scenes with an electric meatcutter." Major national distribution will begin'in early 1974.

An impassioned student as well as creator of classic drive-in schlock, Kelleher believes that Blood Farmers may be "the first film in history too bloody for TV." More than 16 quarts of Stein's Make-Up Blood were used in the 80 minute film. "Real blood doesn't photograph well. Stein's is much redder and thicker than real blood."

Is there anything socially redeeming, a useful message Kelleher is trying to get across?

"No. None at all. The only socially redeeming thing is that it might keep someone off the streets for an hour and a half. What they do later is their own business."

The most dubiously rewarding event of Kelleher's career in horror films occurred when he went to see Blood Farmers during its brief run at the legendary Selwyn Theatre on New York's 42nd Street. "It's the real barometer of success in this business. The Carnegie Hall of sleaze palaces. If I could make it in the Selwyn, then I've really done something substantial. It's like watching TV in a lunatic asylum."

A woman sitting behind Kelleher at the Selwyn had already seen the movie, and was giving her friend a grizzly sludgeby-sludge account, eagerly anticipating every atrocity. In one particularly revolting scene, a dog is bludgeoned to death.

"This is disgusting," the woman said to her friend. "1 don't know who makes films like this, but they oughta kill him!"

Kelleher is less than satisfied about the state of the "art" today. "It's become a slick field, with distinguished actors and big studios. The minute a cheap horror film becomes polished, it loses its vitality." His favorite pros in the business are Sam Katzman, who did a number of great shlockers in the 1940s, including Zombies of Maura Tau, and Roger Corman's American International films of the late fifties and early sixties. He loved Night of the Living Dead because "You're not just watching a film. You're conscious that it's not Hollywood, that the film is a product of living in Pittsburgh."

Right now Kelleher is working on a number of screenplay and production ideas. What he'd really like to do is a rock "n" roll horror movie, because "there's never been a great one. Those beach monster things just didn't make it. Rock V roll is horrible," he says. "The best rock "n" roll anyway."

If he's ever going to do it, he's in the right business. He recently left a job writing press releases for Columbia Records in order to take a better paying, less hectic publicity gig with an old friend. Ed Kelleher, creator of Invasion of the Blood Farmers and Shriek of the Mutilated, now makes his living as publicist for Melanie.

Wayne Robins

CATCH MY SOUL (Cinerama)

What a weird movie! The credits alone are tantalizing, though hardly promising. Get this: a rock musical adaptation of Othello written by the former creator and producer of tv's "Shindig" (name of Jack Good); with music by Delaney Bramlett (who's listed as producer and arranger for the extensive score), Tony Joe White, Richie Havens and others; starring Havens as The Moor, Tony Joe as his imagined rival Michael Cassio, Susan Tyrrell, the terrific drunk from Fat City, as Iago's wife Emilia, Delaney and Bonnie in musical cameos and others not quite so unlikely; directed by a television actor/ director ("Secret Agent," "The Prisoner") named Patrick McGoohan who's making his "feature film directorial debut" here. With such a mish mash of talent, the results are wildly uneven — at once so bad and so surprisingly good I hardly know how to approach it.

It begins terribly, with a kind of running narration in song by Iago, overplayed, but quite brilliantly, by Lance Le Gault, always seething with vicious passion. Havens" Othello is a people's preacher, a black Christ figure to Iago's larger-than-life Satan, and his boyishly pretty Desdemona (Season Hubley) was one of the most devoted members of his hippie flock. The first third of the film, where most of the exchanges are musical and the dialogue is sparse, is sometimes chaotic, often confusing. After the appropriately "counterculture" wedding of Othello and Desdemona, a wild celebration party and the temptation and eventual drunken disgrace of Othello's closest disciple, Michael Cassio, this opening section of the film ends with the burning of Othello's church (during which Havens runs around singing his "Run Shaker Life"). We were groaning a lot through all this: Richie Havens, hippies drinking wine, Iago saying he would "have a black mass on Othello's black ass" — feh! But you had to admit the music was good and getting better and Bonnie Bramlett as one of Cassio's temptresses was just about worth the price of admission.

And from the burning of the church on, the film did become absorbing in spite of all the earlier built-up resistance. The characters had established themselves and everyone but the central five disappeared as the film focused in on its plot: the stealing of Desdemona's handkerchief, the arousing of Othello's eventual murder. The dialogue remained at a minimum but it worked, somehow managing to be Shakespearian in style but free enough to fit the people. A number of scenes, especially the murder itself and Iago's gloating triumph afterward, were stunningly set and played. Tyrrell, with her great whiskey voice, was wonderful and Le Gault the perfect maniac devil. Even Havens is totally credible and often moving, especially with his last few songs, like "Put Out The Light" just before the murder. Altogether, the music is among the best I've heard in a rock operatic context — strong and attractive and excellently produced — a hundred times better than the drivel in Jesus Christ Superstar and much more effectively dramatic as well. I can't believe I liked it in the end, but Shakespeare does it again, with a little help from his friends.

Vince Aletti