Daddy's Deadly Darling

Daddy’s Deadly Darling
AKA Pigs
1972 – United States
Director – Marc Lawrence
Paragon Video Productions, 1985, VHS

A dad who molests his daughter throughout her minute-long life montage gets his when she brutally murders him. The daughter, Lynn, is committed to an asylum but steals a nurses outfit and a car and busts out into a rural location and a rock song featuring a jews harp.

Out in the sticks, an old bald farmer named Zambrini (writer/director Marc Lawrence) apologizes to a dead body for having to feed it to his pigs, continuing the snappy dialogue, Zambrini reveals the origin story of his flesh hungry swine.
Lynn (Toni Lawrence, the directors daughter) shows up at the creepy dark farm and takes a job in Zambrinis café where, according to the terrified old ladies in the next shot, he feeds the pigs to the general public. Unfortunately for the old women, the Sheriff refuses to arrest Zambrini for stealing bodies from the graveyard because “dead bodies have no civil rights.”


Awakening sweaty from a dream in which Zambrini had slashed her apart with a straight-razor, Lynn goes for a midnight snoop around the farm and is caught and threatened by the Z man. The next day, while serving some ham to a local, Ben, he tells her about the other pretty girls who disappeared and got fed to Zambrinis pigs. Afterwards, she has another creepy talk with Z man, but stays on board for the free phone priveliges so she can make crazy raving phone calls to her dead daddy.

Later, Ben forces her to go on a date, and tries to rape her but is stopped short by the Sheriff who drives Lynn home but then also gets a little creepy. The solution to that problem is to invite Ben over for a romp between the sheets and a straight-razor emasculation. Finally!, sandwiched between those loony phonecalls and plot development scenes there’s some moderately creepy parts.

Zambrini finds Lynn rocking in the corner sobbing apologies to “daddy”. What a pair these two make, Zambrini mumbling away incoherently and Lynn outwardly in total control. But really, she’s stark raving mad and between conversations with “daddy” possibly hallucinating screaming telepathic anthropomorphic pigs.

By the time she snaps again and kills someone in another mostly bloodless stab scene, there’s been so much crazy crazy babbling under the influence of rednecky Sheriff procedural that, despite the wandering cleavage, to his and my detriment, Zambrini and I had both forgotten who the killer was. This low budget-rural slasher precursor to Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a lot of the genuinely creepy ideas that would be put to more effective use by its successors.

A cool old(?) poster for the title Pigs:

The 2002 Troma DVD release: