Fritz Haarman killed at least 24 people between the years of 1919 and 1924. He generally went after young males of the homeless and selling-my-ass-for-money variety, luring them back to his place and ripping their throats out with his teeth while ramming his tumescent schnitzel into their raw, gaping krullers, spilling the jelly filling everywhere and making a huge, disgusting mess. Oddly enough, the more-than-icky-enough truth is not what made Haarman’s case famous. You’d think being a back-door vampire would be more than enough to get you on the crazy bastard map, but thing that everyone remembers about Haarman is in fact an unsubstantiated urban legend – that he disposed of the bodies by grinding them up and selling them as sausage meat.

I have a little theory as to why this became more famous – fairy tale-ization. Although it’s still pretty icky (but then, the Brothers Grimm were pretty fucked up too), you can use the sausage angle as a cautionary tale for your kids. “If you don’t eat your peas, I’ll sell you to the butcher and he’ll make you into sausage” is much less traumatizing than, “If you don’t eat your peas, Fritz Haarman will come and fuck you in the ass while he’s chewing your throat open to drink your blood before he blows his load in your cooling corpse”. I mean, I know that’s what I tell my kids, but not all parenting techniques involve the threat of anal rape and barbaric vampirism. Each to their own.

Haarman was referred to as a vampire and werewolf, among other, more mundane, things, and did a sort of German Jack the Ripper job on the police, who had been using him as an informant for some time and still somehow failed to find out he was a hideous serial killer. And again, although the facts of his killings are enough to make most exploitation filmmakers blush and shit their pants full of dollar signs at the same time, that damn sausage thing is what inspired many stories in many countries for the near-century since Haarman was given the guillotine for (maybe) letting them eat sausage. Oh, and the whole throat-chewing sodomite thing, too.

Tonight’s movie finds the Haarman character played by Victor “King Tut” Buono. If only he’d thought to grind up Batman and sell him to Arkham Asylum as sausage meat… The flick opens with Otto Lehman, best butcher in Vienna, being released from a lunatic asylum, where he’d been committed by his shrew of a wife for whacking an annoying old lady with liverwurst.

He tries to go back to being the best butcher in Vienna, but his wife won’t stop nagging him and he discovers that she and her sniveling brother have jacked up his prices and sold inferior meat in his absence. The final straw comes when his wife catches him looking at the silhouette of his naked neighbor. She lambastes him and he kills her. Panicking, he decides to do what he does best…make tasty sausage! Realizing that a)he’s not as mentally stable as the doctors said he was, and b)that killing people and grinding them up for sausage meat is an efficient way to cut costs in the face of inflation

A nosy inspector and Mike Lawrence, a tabloid journalist, suspect Lehman, but after dragging the chief of police in to investigate several times and turning up nothing, the two set about to bring down Lehman on their own. When he gets greedy and kidnaps the Berta, the neighbor lady, who is also seeing Mike, she starts throwing rings and buttons and any old thing she can get her hands on into his sausage grinder, until the items turn up in restaurants and lead the police to his door.

Made in Italy right before the boom of Eurosleaze gore movies, had this flick been made a decade later it would have been nothing but a splatterfest. Not that I don’t love me some Italian splatter, but instead of buckets of gore, we’re treated to something unusual in the world of exploitation flicks – a clever little black comedy that just happens to contain lots of loving shots of a sweaty Victor Buono cutting up meat.

My favorite bit of comedy comes when Lehman is trying to balance a freshly-killed prostitute against his butcher block and reach for his knives, but she won’t stay put and keeps falling over. It’s not exactly on the level of Buster Keaton, but it’s fun to watch a large sweaty man juggling a dead whore while whimsical music doodles in the background.

It’s not heavy on the gore, and there isn’t a ton of action, but the story is interesting, Buono is a lot of fun to watch, and the movie’s quality winds up being a pleasant surprise when all you were expecting was 80 minutes of mildly entertaining crap.

Provided you have a healthy love of meat and large, sweaty men doing large, sweaty things, this one’s for you.