Daddy's Deadly Darling (1973) Synopsis

-This synopsis is regarding the original cut of the film ('The 13th Pig'), not any of the various re-edits of it**The film opens as we see a man feeding a corpse to a pen full of 12 squealing pigs. This man is Zambrini (Marc Lawrence). He talks to the corpse as he prepares to toss it into the pig pen, explaining that the pigs were roaming free one night and they happened upon a drunk sleeping in a field. After eating the sleeping drunk, the pigs gained a taste for human flesh and now, nothing else will satisfy them.A Volkswagen Beetle driven by a young woman down a series of increasingly isolated back roads. This woman is Lynn Hart (Toni Lawrence), and the song that plays over the opening credits advises her to "keep on driving", because "somebody's waiting for you somewhere down the road". After driving past a series of oil wells somewhere in rural California, she stops at a dead-end road, where she finds a small roadside diner. There is a sign in the diner's window that says "Waitress wanted". As she steps out of her car, she is startled by the squealing of the pigs, but she continues inside, where she meets Zambrini. This is his diner, and without much dialogue passing between them, he hires Lynn as a waitress and helps her get settled into a spare room in the back of the diner where she will stay. She finds a strait razor in the medicine cabinet in her room while she is preparing for bed. She has a nightmare that Zambrini enters her room and slashes her with the razor over and over again, but she wakes up and realizes it was just a nightmare. She goes outside, starts looking around the property and hears the pigs squealing again, but before she can approach the pig pen, Zambrini grabs her and warns her never to go looking around back there.Zambrini's closest neighbors are a pair of elderly sisters, Miss Macy (Catherine Ross) and Annette (Iris Korn). They are in the habit of calling the local sheriff, Dan Cole (Jesse Vint), and complaining to him about Zambrini's pigs. They can hear the pigs squealing from where they live, but they also claim that the pigs run free at night and come right up to their house, and that Zambrini murders people and feeds their dead bodies to his pigs, after which another pig will appear in the pig pen.While Lynn is serving customers at the diner, one of them, named Ben (Paul Hickey), begins hitting on her, although she rebuffs his advances. He tells her Zambrini's back story, about how he was a circus performer who fell from a high wire during a performance and was pronounced dead, only to be taken to the morgue, where they discovered he was not dead at all. Cole arrives and talks to Zambrini about the complaint he got from the Macys, warning him to make sure his pigs are all in their pen and that they stay there. He also meets Lynn, frightening her for a moment by telling her she is driving a "missing car". It turns out he is only referring to her registration, which is outdated. She promises to update it. Afterwards, Lynn makes a seemingly desperate phone call to her father, telling him that she had to leave, but that she will return to be with him as soon as she can. We only hear Lynn's side of this conversation.Later, Zambrini pays an uninvited visit to the Macys, entering their home unannounced and terrifying them by wearing bizarre makeup that he used during his days as a circus performer.Ben returns to the diner and asks Lynn out again, this time telling her that he discovered an out-of-place nurse's uniform discarded in a field nearby, seemingly implicating Lynn, the stranger who has just arrived in town. Although Lynn tries to deny any connection to the uniform, she agrees to go out on a date with Ben. Unfortunately, Ben drives her to an isolated location and tries to force himself on her, seemingly willing to rape her if she does not comply with him. Fortunately, she is rescued by Cole, who arrives on the scene and gives her a ride back to the diner.Lynn then mysteriously invites Ben back to her room at the diner, apologizing for not accepting his advances. She puts on a show for him by wearing sexy lingerie, and then she gets into bed with him. However, she produces the strait razor and violently slashes Ben over and over again with it, killing him. Zambrini discovers the murder scene, with Lynn staring off into space and absentmindedly singing to herself next to Ben's dead body. Calming Lynn down, he cleans her up and takes her to his own room, where he puts her to bed and she falls asleep. Afterwards, he removes Ben's body, cuts it into pieces and feeds the pieces to the pigs.Lynn wakes up the next day with seemingly no memory of the incident, but she walks down the road to a pay phone, where she places another one-sided phone call to her father. When she cannot reach him, she runs back to the diner, "chased" by her half-remembering the dying screams of Ben and the threatening squealing of the pigs.Ben is missed at work, and Cole begins investigating his whereabouts, leading him to the diner. He talks to the Macys, who claim to have seen him arrive at Zambrini's diner, never to have left, while the pigs "went crazy". Cole questions Zambrini again and tries to look at the pig pen, attracted to it by the howling of Ben's dog, which has apparently located Ben's corpse by its sense of smell. A human hand is lying just outside the pig pen, but Zambrini manages to hide it by standing on it and Cole leaves none the wiser. Cole returns to the Macys, where a doctor (Walter Barnes) is doing a checkup on one of the sisters. Cole and the doctor have a conversation about Miss Macy's belief that Zambrini turns people into pigs by feeding their dead bodies to his pigs, and the doctor tells him that the ancient Egyptians actually believed this was possible, and that a human turning into a pig was a step toward becoming divine. Lynn herself proves impossible for Cole to question, staring off into space again and absentmindedly playing with her hair.Cole is not the only one looking for Ben, however. Zambrini discovers a group of young men prowling around his property, presumably Ben's co-workers at one of the oil wells. They find nothing, but beat up Zambrini and tell him to leave town.Things start to unravel for Lynn when a man named Jess Winter (Jim Antonio) arrives in town and starts asking for Lynn. He is eventually referred to the diner, where he approaches her in a non-threatening way and tells her they have some "mutual friends" who care about her. Our suspicions about Lynn are confirmed when he implies that Lynn has escaped from an insane asylum. He tells Lynn that she is welcome to come back, and Lynn is happy at first, asking about a doctor that she seemed attached to in a fatherly way. Zambrini overhears them talking, and when Lynn goes to pack her things in order to return with him, Winter talks privately to Zambrini, telling him that Lynn has escaped from an insane asylum and he is a private investigator hired by the asylum's staff to find her and bring her back to continue her treatment. When Zambrini asks Winter about Lynn's father, he tells him Lynn has no father - her father, in fact, is dead.Having become somewhat attached to Lynn, Zambrini does not want her to leave, and asks her to stay. Lynn agrees, luring Winter into turning his back on her and then stabbing him to death over and over again with a large kitchen knife. The body is dragged by Lynn over to the pig pen and tossed into it, where the pigs immediately eat it.Lynn's world continues to close in on her when the asylum calls Cole, telling him that Winter is missing and Lynn is an escaped mental patient with homicidal tendencies. Cole calls Zambrini at the diner and tries to warn him about Lynn, telling him to act as if nothing is wrong and wait for them to come and take Lynn into custody. Zambrini, however, immediately tells Lynn that the police are coming for her and they need to make it look as if she has left. When Lynn mentions her father, Zambrini repeats what Winter had told him: her father is dead. Lynn reacts violently to this statement and stabs Zambrini in the back with the large kitchen knife, killing him.Knowing that the police are coming for her, she makes one final phone call to her "father", and this time a repeating recorded message on the other end is heard on the phone, telling her over and over again "We're sorry, but you have reached a number that is disconnected or is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again." In her crazed mind, Lynn thinks she is talking to her dead father, weeping and telling him over and over again that she loves him. While she is weeping and talking, the human flesh-eating pigs, seemingly unseen by her, somehow escape from the pig pen and suddenly enter the diner and advance on her.Cole arrives at the diner and, presumably, finds the bloody aftermath of the pigs having eaten the bodies of both Lynn and Zambrini. He later tells Ben's co-workers that Lynn murdered her own father after enduring several years of sexual abuse from him, ultimately ending with him raping her, after which she went insane and killed him by stabbing him to death over and over again with a knife. All of the pigs are loaded into the back of a truck and taken away, seemingly to be slaughtered for meat, but Cole is startled to find that instead of the 12 pigs he had counted on his previous visits to the diner, there are now 13 pigs. Also found in the pig pen is the Egyptian ankh necklace that Lynn has worn around her neck throughout the entire film.

-This synopsis is regarding the original cut of the film ('The 13th Pig'), not any of the various re-edits of it**The film opens as we see a man feeding a corpse to a pen full of 12 squealing pigs. This man is Zambrini (Marc Lawrence). He talks to the corpse as he prepares to toss it into the pig pen, explaining that the pigs were roaming free one night and they happened upon a drunk sleeping in a field. After eating the sleeping drunk, the pigs gained a taste for human flesh and now, nothing else will satisfy them.A Volkswagen Beetle driven by a young woman down a series of increasingly isolated back roads. This woman is Lynn Hart (Toni Lawrence), and the song that plays over the opening credits advises her to "keep on driving", because "somebody's waiting for you somewhere down the road". After driving past a series of oil wells somewhere in rural California, she stops at a dead-end road, where she finds a small roadside diner. There is a sign in the diner's window that says "Waitress wanted". As she steps out of her car, she is startled by the squealing of the pigs, but she continues inside, where she meets Zambrini. This is his diner, and without much dialogue passing between them, he hires Lynn as a waitress and helps her get settled into a spare room in the back of the diner where she will stay. She finds a strait razor in the medicine cabinet in her room while she is preparing for bed. She has a nightmare that Zambrini enters her room and slashes her with the razor over and over again, but she wakes up and realizes it was just a nightmare. She goes outside, starts looking around the property and hears the pigs squealing again, but before she can approach the pig pen, Zambrini grabs her and warns her never to go looking around back there.Zambrini's closest neighbors are a pair of elderly sisters, Miss Macy (Catherine Ross) and Annette (Iris Korn). They are in the habit of calling the local sheriff, Dan Cole (Jesse Vint), and complaining to him about Zambrini's pigs. They can hear the pigs squealing from where they live, but they also claim that the pigs run free at night and come right up to their house, and that Zambrini murders people and feeds their dead bodies to his pigs, after which another pig will appear in the pig pen.While Lynn is serving customers at the diner, one of them, named Ben (Paul Hickey), begins hitting on her, although she rebuffs his advances. He tells her Zambrini's back story, about how he was a circus performer who fell from a high wire during a performance and was pronounced dead, only to be taken to the morgue, where they discovered he was not dead at all. Cole arrives and talks to Zambrini about the complaint he got from the Macys, warning him to make sure his pigs are all in their pen and that they stay there. He also meets Lynn, frightening her for a moment by telling her she is driving a "missing car". It turns out he is only referring to her registration, which is outdated. She promises to update it. Afterwards, Lynn makes a seemingly desperate phone call to her father, telling him that she had to leave, but that she will return to be with him as soon as she can. We only hear Lynn's side of this conversation.Later, Zambrini pays an uninvited visit to the Macys, entering their home unannounced and terrifying them by wearing bizarre makeup that he used during his days as a circus performer.Ben returns to the diner and asks Lynn out again, this time telling her that he discovered an out-of-place nurse's uniform discarded in a field nearby, seemingly implicating Lynn, the stranger who has just arrived in town. Although Lynn tries to deny any connection to the uniform, she agrees to go out on a date with Ben. Unfortunately, Ben drives her to an isolated location and tries to force himself on her, seemingly willing to rape her if she does not comply with him. Fortunately, she is rescued by Cole, who arrives on the scene and gives her a ride back to the diner.Lynn then mysteriously invites Ben back to her room at the diner, apologizing for not accepting his advances. She puts on a show for him by wearing sexy lingerie, and then she gets into bed with him. However, she produces the strait razor and violently slashes Ben over and over again with it, killing him. Zambrini discovers the murder scene, with Lynn staring off into space and absentmindedly singing to herself next to Ben's dead body. Calming Lynn down, he cleans her up and takes her to his own room, where he puts her to bed and she falls asleep. Afterwards, he removes Ben's body, cuts it into pieces and feeds the pieces to the pigs.Lynn wakes up the next day with seemingly no memory of the incident, but she walks down the road to a pay phone, where she places another one-sided phone call to her father. When she cannot reach him, she runs back to the diner, "chased" by her half-remembering the dying screams of Ben and the threatening squealing of the pigs.Ben is missed at work, and Cole begins investigating his whereabouts, leading him to the diner. He talks to the Macys, who claim to have seen him arrive at Zambrini's diner, never to have left, while the pigs "went crazy". Cole questions Zambrini again and tries to look at the pig pen, attracted to it by the howling of Ben's dog, which has apparently located Ben's corpse by its sense of smell. A human hand is lying just outside the pig pen, but Zambrini manages to hide it by standing on it and Cole leaves none the wiser. Cole returns to the Macys, where a doctor (Walter Barnes) is doing a checkup on one of the sisters. Cole and the doctor have a conversation about Miss Macy's belief that Zambrini turns people into pigs by feeding their dead bodies to his pigs, and the doctor tells him that the ancient Egyptians actually believed this was possible, and that a human turning into a pig was a step toward becoming divine. Lynn herself proves impossible for Cole to question, staring off into space again and absentmindedly playing with her hair.Cole is not the only one looking for Ben, however. Zambrini discovers a group of young men prowling around his property, presumably Ben's co-workers at one of the oil wells. They find nothing, but beat up Zambrini and tell him to leave town.Things start to unravel for Lynn when a man named Jess Winter (Jim Antonio) arrives in town and starts asking for Lynn. He is eventually referred to the diner, where he approaches her in a non-threatening way and tells her they have some "mutual friends" who care about her. Our suspicions about Lynn are confirmed when he implies that Lynn has escaped from an insane asylum. He tells Lynn that she is welcome to come back, and Lynn is happy at first, asking about a doctor that she seemed attached to in a fatherly way. Zambrini overhears them talking, and when Lynn goes to pack her things in order to return with him, Winter talks privately to Zambrini, telling him that Lynn has escaped from an insane asylum and he is a private investigator hired by the asylum's staff to find her and bring her back to continue her treatment. When Zambrini asks Winter about Lynn's father, he tells him Lynn has no father - her father, in fact, is dead.Having become somewhat attached to Lynn, Zambrini does not want her to leave, and asks her to stay. Lynn agrees, luring Winter into turning his back on her and then stabbing him to death over and over again with a large kitchen knife. The body is dragged by Lynn over to the pig pen and tossed into it, where the pigs immediately eat it.Lynn's world continues to close in on her when the asylum calls Cole, telling him that Winter is missing and Lynn is an escaped mental patient with homicidal tendencies. Cole calls Zambrini at the diner and tries to warn him about Lynn, telling him to act as if nothing is wrong and wait for them to come and take Lynn into custody. Zambrini, however, immediately tells Lynn that the police are coming for her and they need to make it look as if she has left. When Lynn mentions her father, Zambrini repeats what Winter had told him: her father is dead. Lynn reacts violently to this statement and stabs Zambrini in the back with the large kitchen knife, killing him.Knowing that the police are coming for her, she makes one final phone call to her "father", and this time a repeating recorded message on the other end is heard on the phone, telling her over and over again "We're sorry, but you have reached a number that is disconnected or is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again." In her crazed mind, Lynn thinks she is talking to her dead father, weeping and telling him over and over again that she loves him. While she is weeping and talking, the human flesh-eating pigs, seemingly unseen by her, somehow escape from the pig pen and suddenly enter the diner and advance on her.Cole arrives at the diner and, presumably, finds the bloody aftermath of the pigs having eaten the bodies of both Lynn and Zambrini. He later tells Ben's co-workers that Lynn murdered her own father after enduring several years of sexual abuse from him, ultimately ending with him raping her, after which she went insane and killed him by stabbing him to death over and over again with a knife. All of the pigs are loaded into the back of a truck and taken away, seemingly to be slaughtered for meat, but Cole is startled to find that instead of the 12 pigs he had counted on his previous visits to the diner, there are now 13 pigs. Also found in the pig pen is the Egyptian ankh necklace that Lynn has worn around her neck throughout the entire film.

Published Time: 2021-01-15 09:10:16