If they’d been able to actually finish it, I think it’d be NotLD-level classic. I mentioned it in this thread:
Shudder is currently streaming a great print of this movie.
Re Million Dollar Legs:
It is available on the Internet Archive.
Very well regarded and publicized in the USA, IIRC. Farnsworth was great, and apparently Norm McDonald’s inspiration for dealing with his cancer.
Oh, this was on “The Last Drive-In” last season. Quite good, I thought. The question of whether any of it really happened was raised.
I don’t think I’d regard it as “torture porn” but perhaps my definition is idiosyncratic. (I think of “torture porn” as a movie where you’re meant to enjoy the pain inflicted on others and to side with the one inflicting it.)
In a cast full of near-30-year-olds playing high schoolers, Clint Howard is the only actual teenager and he looks about 35. (They gave him a wig a few years later for Evilspeak and he looks a lot more plausible as a young student.)
Before all the images were broken, I specifically referred to TDB in the "They Don’t Make 'Em Like They Used To" thread as a kind of low-but-not-micro-budget filmmaking you don’t see any more. I am perhaps inexplicably fond of it.
Er, yeah, it was nominated for six Oscars and won two.
But time can make a “cult film” out of anything, eh? Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress Oscar for 7th Heaven (1927), but aren’t all silents now relegated to cult status?