by John Harrison
While her filmography during that decade may not have been extensive, Lowry appeared in a handful of genuinely enduring genre classics, as well as getting the rare opportunity to work with some of the most important directors in their respective fields, including George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader, and Radley Metzger. It wouldn’t be a lie to state that her presence, and performances, in many of these films form a big part of why they remain so fondly remembered.
Spending most of her early childhood in Illinois, where she was born on October 15, 1947, Lynn Lowry also spent time in California and Georgia, following her father whenever he found himself transferred by his employer. Using acting as an outlet for her intense shyness, she studied theatre at the University of Georgia, after she was granted a scholarship in 1966, and later worked for a time as a Bunny at the Atlanta Playboy Club before moving to New York, working as a bartender to support herself and her young son while she auditioned for acting jobs.
While Lowry’s first feature film role came in the comedy The Battle of Love’s Return (1971), written and directed by future Troma head honcho Lloyd Kaufman, her first feature to garner a release was I Drink Your Blood (1970), which she had filmed after completing work on the Kaufman film. It certainly turned out to be memorable screen debut.
A low-budget independent horror from writer/director David Durston, I Drink Your Blood cast Lowry [above] as the mute Carrie, one of a small bunch of hippy Satanists, who drift into a small town and terrorise the few residents, before an obnoxious kid serves them a bunch of meat pies which he has injected with rabies, as payback for the hippies raping his sister and forcing his grandfather to consume LSD. Naturally, once the full grip of the rabies kicks in, the hippies embark on a bloody killing spree, spreading the infection to a group of construction workers at a nearby dam.
Filmed in the small, Upstate New York town of Sharon Springs, and one of the first films in the US to have been slapped with an X rating based on violence rather than sex or nudity, I Drink Your Blood is a remarkable piece of work, outrageously gory (in its original cut) and filled with wildly entertaining silliness, yet containing enough of a grim, downbeat ambience to keep your stomach slightly churning throughout. It’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) meets the Manson massacre, and Lynne Lowry certainly looks the part of an innocent, confused hippy led down the wrong path by the enigmatic Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury). Despite her character being mute, Lowry still manages to bring an impressive degree of emotion, creating a childlike vulnerability, which ultimately makes it more effective and disturbing when she turns violent, using an electric carving knife to slice off the hand of a poor woman offering to feed her.
Lowry’s next role came in the softcore sex thriller Sugar Cookies (1973, aka Love Me My Way), another film from Lloyd Kaufman, though he only co-produced and co-wrote this one, with directing (and co-writing) duties going to Theodore Gershuny. Also partially produced by a young Oliver Stone, Sugar Cookies is certainly one of the more thematically interesting and accomplished adult sex features of the day, when porn was starting to really come out of the shadows and infiltrate the mainstream following the release of Deep Throat (1972).
Impressively, Lowry plays two different characters in Sugar Cookies, which tells the story of a young model [Lowry – pictured, main image] who is murdered by a film producer while on assignment, the killer setting it up to look like suicide. While the model’s lesbian lover (Mary Woronov) agrees to provide an alibi for the killer, she secretly plots her revenge by recruiting a naïve lookalike (Lowry again) and luring her into a very deadly, sexual game. Dark and sombre, and visually arresting, Sugar Cookies is a sexual, kaleidoscopic blend of arousing porn and abstract arthouse (cult Warhol star Woronov was at the time married to director Gershuny, which can help explain the film’s eclectic style).
The same year as Sugar Cookies, Lowry got the first of her opportunities to work with a true genre heavyweight, when she was cast as Kathy in George A. Romero’s The Crazies (1973, aka Code Name: Trixie). At the time, Romero was finding it tough trying to replicate, or even come close to replicating, the breakout success of his seminal Night of the Living Dead, and sadly The Crazies quickly came and went during its original theatrical run. Fortunately, like a lot of the filmmaker’s other works, it began to receive positive re-appraisals over the subsequent years, particularly once Romero found favour with his landmark zombie epic Dawn of the Dead (1978).
Set (and filmed) in the small town of Evans City in Western Pennsylvania, The Crazies examines the terrifying prospect of biological warfare, as residents become affected by a bioweapon that has made its way into the local water supply, thanks to a military plane carrying the weapon, which crashes on the outskirts of town. As the highly contagious virus, given the code-name “Trixie” by the military, rapidly spreads through the town, turning those infected into violent, homicidal maniacs, the army moves in to quarantine the population and enforce martial law.
In The Crazies, Lowry is cast as Kathy Fulton, one of a group of uninfected locals who attempt to flee the town, fearing they may be either killed by the military or the infected crazies, or bombed into oblivion if the outbreak cannot be controlled. In one of the film’s more powerful scenes, Kathy’s father Artie (Richard Liberty), now infected with the virus, attempts to rape his daughter, believing her in his delirium to be his late wife. After the rape is stopped by another member of the group, Artie hangs himself, while Kathy is tragically killed by the military while wandering around in a daze. As in I Drink Your Blood, Lowry’s character in The Crazies conveys a genuine sense of vulnerability and helpless innocence, which makes her demise all the more tragic.
Lowry returned to erotica for her next film role, as Betsy, in Radley Metzger’s Score (1974), which was released in both soft and hardcore versions. Like a lot of Metzger’s work, Score was a noticeable step-up from the standard porn feature of the time, in terms of production values, performances, and thematic depth, while still succeeding as a piece of genuine erotica. Based on an off-Broadway play and set in the fictional European city of Leisure, Lowry is cast in Score as Betsy [above], a naïve young newlywed caught up in a game of seduction with a couple of experienced swingers, whose kicks include making bets on who can seduce whom first. Filmed against a backdrop of exotic Croatian locales, Lowry delivers what may be her finest performance in Score, displaying a remarkable transformation in her character over its course. She also exudes a natural but very powerful sexual energy, and it’s likely that her performance was helped by the atmosphere and goings-on on set (according to interviews with Lowry, co-star Claire Wilbur was livid after finding out she was getting paid less than her, and real amyl nitrate was popped during filming).
The following year, Lowry travelled to Nun’s Island in Montreal, Quebec, to work on David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975, aka The Parasite Murders, aka They Came from Within). Shivers was Cronenberg’s third feature film, but the first to really garner significant distribution and attention, especially outside of his home country of Canada. As in I Drink Your Blood and The Crazies, Lowry once again finds herself dealing with a highly infectious outbreak, though this one is much more parasitic and sexual in nature, something which would be a recurring theme in Cronenberg’s work. Set in a high-tech, high-rise apartment building, Shivers [below] is a very frightening, and very modern, horror tale, as the infected residents become consumed by sexual desire, and the uncontrollable urge to pass the infection on, which begins to happen at an alarming rate. An allegory of both modern medicine and sexually transmitted disease, along with sexual impulse itself, Lowry once again uses her physicality and sexual energy to great effect in her role as Forsythe, nurse to the building’s onsite doctor, who is having a passionate affair with her boss. As one of the central characters in the movie, Lowry gets to feature in a number of Shivers’ most memorable scenes, including an effective shock moment which recalls Night of the Living Dead, and gets to deliver perhaps the most important monologue in the whole film:
“I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I’m having trouble you see, because he’s old… and dying… and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully.”
Sadly for her fans, Lynne Lowry’s genre film appearances became less frequent following the release of Shivers, though Fighting Mad (1976) was an enjoyable diversion into low-budget action territory, and gave the actress the chance to work with producer Roger Corman, director Jonathan Demme, and actor Peter Fonda. Influenced by recent, rural-set drive-in action hits like Billy Jack (1971), Walking Tall (1973), and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974, also starring Fonda), Fighting Mad casts Fonda as an Arkansas farmer who takes up arms (specifically, bow and arrow) against a group of greedy and corrupt land developers, who are attempting to drive him and his neighbours off their own properties so they can be strip mined. In a role that sees her requiring quite a bit of physicality, along with a degree of introspection and emotion, Lowry plays the partner of Fonda’s character, trying hard to make a genuine connection with him.
It would be another six years before Lynne Lowry would return to the big screen, cast as Ruthie in Paul Schrader’s audacious, and oft-maligned, Cat People (1982), a radical and highly eroticised remake of the 1942 RKO classic. Lowry’s appearance in the film was limited to just an early, solitary scene, but it’s certainly a very memorable and effective one, her prostitute character mauled to pieces by a black leopard in a seedy New Orleans motel room. A moody and unnerving sequence, which helps set the tone of the film while delivering an effective shock, poor Ruthie’s demise was spectacular enough to later warrant inclusion on the excellent horror documentary/compilation movie, Terror in the Aisles (1984).
While Lowry kept herself continually busy with theatre work, and singing with her own jazz trio, in the late-2000s she made a welcome return to horror and fantasy cinema, appearing in a number of independent productions like Splatter Disco (2007), Beyond the Dunwich Horror (2008) and George: A Zombie Intervention (2009), many of them put together by filmmakers who grew up watching Lowry in her seventies classics, either at the time of their original release or on home video in the eighties. She also made a brief cameo appearance, playing an infected woman riding her motorbike, in Breck Eisner’s surprisingly effective remake of The Crazies (2010), which helps give it a nice link back to the original.
Having spent many years unaware of the growing appreciation of her film work, Lynne Lowry now embraces her cult stardom, becoming a frequent and popular guest at fan conventions, while continuing to act regularly, bringing the same level of daring and commitment to her art that she always has, while also remaining a striking and exotic onscreen presence.
