A young child is orphaned and so he is raised by his aunt. When she kills a workman who is working at her house, the police try to work out if her pleas of self-defence are real or not. She also seems hellbent on keeping her nephew with her, at all costs.

Wow. There’s a lot going on in this film. The first five minutes which show the parent’s death is something else. They are driving but speed into a lorry which is carrying timber, with one plank crashing through their windscreen and decapitating the father. The car then veers off the road and over a cliff which means that the mother who is in the passenger seat is killed. What a dramatic start to a movie.

The film then resumes years in the future with orphaned Billy now a teenager. An interesting aspect of the film that was quite daring for the time was that it features a cop character who becomes absolutely convinced that several of the male characters are, in fact, closet homosexuals and that this is a motivating factor for the murder and everything surrounding it. In fact, he’s so adament about this that I kept thinking that possibly he’s deflecting from himself. ‘Johnny, are you queer?!’

Also, the relationship between Billy and his aunt, Cheryl is creepy, suffocating and has hints of incest about it. There’s a fine performance by Susan Tyrell who steals the show as Cheryl although her performance does sometimes veer into camp and almost as if she’s trying too hard to be unhinged.

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is another oddity thrown up by the Video Nasties list and I’m glad I got to see it because of it’s inclusion. It’s pretty exhausing to watch though. I think one viewing was enough.

Fun fact- Ted Nicolai who worked on the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a sound designer worked on this as the editor. A young Bill Paxton stars also.

2.5 out of 5 stars