BLOOD FEAST

*** Today begins a week long look at the horror films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the late, great(?) gore auteur that brought graphic bloodletting to the drive-ins in the 1960s. I had planned on writing a fresh review of BLOOD FEAST, but after reading an old review of mine, I decided to be a lazy prick. Truth be told, my feelings on the film haven't changed at all and I could use the day off. So here you go, a reprint of an early Films That Witness Madness review from 2010, grammatical errors and all. Enjoy(?). *** 

No use in mincing words: BLOOD FEAST is awful. Not awful in the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE kind of way either. Just plain awful. But while it may be unoriginal and unforgivably dull to watch today, in its time, BLOOD FEAST was anything but. In fact, no one had ever seen anything like it before. BLOOD FEAST was, for all intents and purposes, the first true gore flick, a pioneering work that brought unbridled bloodletting and sadism into the drive-in theaters. 

While PSYCHO had already done the whole "madman slicing up pretty girls in the shower" three years earlier, BLOOD FEAST added to that scenario all the gruesome details Hitchcock wisely left unseen. Thanks in no small part to its lurid ad campaign (dreamed up by the film's writer/director Herschell Gordon Lewis and its producer Dave Friedman, both longtime exploitation players) and gallons of spilled blood, BLOOD FEAST found itself a sizeable audience of thrill-seekers and heavy-petters. The rest, as they say, is history. 

BLOOD FEAST, for the fifteen or sixteen of you who don't know, centers around an Egyptian caterer named Ramses who has been carving up women in preparation for an Egyptian "blood feast" in honor of the goddess Ishtar. The homicide detectives - there's only two of them - investigating the crimes have no clues and no leads, but one of them is dating a young girl whose mother has booked Ramses as the caterer for a party she is throwing for her daughter. Ramses, having gathered all the appropriate bits and pieces for his ritual, plans on using the daughter as the final sacrifice, the one that will bring the bloodthirsty goddess back to life.

Were it not for its historical importance, BLOOD FEAST would be all but indefensible. Shot in nine days for under $70,000, BLOOD FEAST looks cheap and feels cheap. There are no name actors on the film (only Playboy Playmate Connie Mason could be considered for that particular honor) and the talent behind the scenes was clearly second-rate at best. The sets are all garish and amateurish, everything is awash in primary colors and dime store props and several individual scenes are clearly pieced together from shots taken in various locations. Of course, complaining about such things is unnecessary and a bit trifling. Anyone expecting professionalism and high-production values in a film called BLOOD FEAST should have their head checked.

This film exists for one reason and one reason only: gore. So how does BLOOD FEAST stack up? Again, those expecting quality effects should think twice before viewing, but there is something genuinely unsettling and queasy on display here. Far from slickly done, the crude effects work in BLOOD FEAST manages to disgust a good bit more than the slicker horror films of the 1980s. Nothing in BLOOD FEAST even remotely approaches realism, but the gore in the film is much stronger than I remembered it being precisely because it is NOT slick and well-executed. The scene where Ramses attacks a woman, forcing his hand into her mouth and pulling out her tongue, a long mangled hunk of something meaty, is still quite disgusting. More sophisticated audiences may laugh off all the shoddy violence on display in BLOOD FEAST but the audiences back in 1963 must have shit their pants.

As much as I would like to join the cult of BLOOD FEAST and proclaim this movie as a mini b-movie masterpiece, I cannot. I simply don't think it's any good. It's poorly paced and terribly inept at just about everything it tries to do - minus the one or two gore effects that genuinely work. The two follow-up films in his "Blood Trilogy", COLOR ME BLOOD RED and TWO-THOUSAND MANIACS, are better made and more entertaining. Either one of those two films would make for better viewing than BLOOD FEAST.

Strangely enough, though Lewis was put through the shredder by American critics through-out his career, the usually more stubborn French critics took him much more seriously. The critics of the Cahiers du Cinema pegged him as "a subject for further research". They really didn't need to look any further than BLOOD FEAST. It is a perfect summation of much of Lewis’ work as a filmmaker: cheap, laughable, borderline misogynistic and obsessed with the red stuff.

BLOOD DINER

You'll know within the first 10 minutes if Jackie Kong's BLOOD DINER is the film for you. It lays all its cards on the table right away. The film is often referred to as a horror-comedy but it isn't, or at least not in that order. BLOOD DINER is really a comedy-horror with the emphasis squarely placed on sight gags and deliberate attempts at camp. Its splattery effects are designed to give you the giggles rather than the dry heaves. 

Within its opening 10 minutes, we see everything the film has to offer. Over the top gore, outlandish performances (all of which are dubbed in over-exaggerated fashion), and an absolute, almost obsessive, desire to be loud, crass and altogether offensive. You either get the joke or you don't. You either find it funny or you don't. You need to make up your mind within those first 10 minutes because the film, once it's set in motion, doesn't deviate from its course.

Unfortunately, while I got the joke, I certainly didn't find it funny. BLOOD DINER was supposedly a remake of (or quasi-sequel to) Herschell Gordon Lewis' BLOOD FEAST at one point in its life before Kong and Co. decided to make it a completely new property. To be honest, the film still is a remake of BLOOD FEAST in a lot of ways. Both films concern ancient blood sacrifices to a dormant goddess, blood sacrifices that require a whole lot of murder and the occasional stitching together of disembodied limbs. While BLOOD FEAST gave us a single cultist, BLOOD DINER gives us two, brothers Michael and George. The brothers are guided along in their task by the disembodied brain of their uncle, Anwar. Oh, and the brothers operate a diner, a nod to the murderer of Lewis' film, a man who ran a catering service.

I spent most of my time with BLOOD DINER fiddling with the volume on my television. There were moments when the film became downright overbearing, with so many voices and environmental noises, none of which were properly normalized in the sound mix, pouring out of my speakers that I could feel my eardrums begin to throb. The few jokes I did find amusing quickly became just another annoyance as BLOOD DINER is a total slave to repetition. It was funny the first time the agitated police chief smacked around his own man, far less so the fourth time it happened. There is most certainly a contingent of horror fans that will laugh their asses off every time a talkative, disembodied brain (complete with eyeballs) bemoans its lack of a dick. For me, it was only half funny the first time. The next 17,000 times the joke was made… Well, you get the idea.

Thankfully, there are some good-to-great moments buried beneath the lousy Troma-styled comedy. A topless aerobics workout gives way to a machine gun massacre. A woman is slathered in batter before having her head shoved into a deep fryer. When the killer finally releases his grip, the woman begins running through the restaurant, her head now encapsulated inside a giant ball of deep fried deliciousness, before finally being decapitated by a broom. There's a fantastically morbid scene later in the film in which George repeatedly strikes a pedestrian with his van, and the entire finale is a bizarre and bonkers bloodbath featuring cannibalism, laser beams and an exploding head or two.

But overall, I just did not enjoy my time with BLOOD DINER, largely because I didn't find the humor at all entertaining or effective. It just kind of annoyed me all the way through. Had they dialed it down a little at the start maybe I could have been eased into it all a bit better. Maybe I could have learned to appreciate the humor. But BLOOD DINER flies out of the gate at top speed and never slows down. The humor starts broad and stays broad. The film starts loud and stays loud. If you're a Troma guy or gal, BLOOD DINER is your flavor of ice cream, but if you're like me, expect little more than a headache and a serious case of the yawns.