THE GORE GORE GIRLS

By 1972, the formula had truly gone stale. THE GORE GORE GIRLS (or BLOOD ORGY, depending on the print of the film) was Herschell Gordon Lewis’ swan song, his last foray into splatter until 2002’s belated BLOOD FEAST sequel. All the trademark Lewis elements are here. The black humor, the self-aware gags, the tomato paste gore, the hammy actors playing cornball roles… Inch for bloody inch, this is a Lewis film. And it is boring.

And it wasn’t just me who was bored by THE GORE GORE GIRLS, Lewis was too. You can see it all over the film, in every frame, in every ill-timed edit. Lewis was running out of patience and energy. This long winded tale of a black gloved psycho mutilating strippers feels more like a eulogy than a serious effort. Times had changed and so had the exploitation movie. The kind of cheap gore flicks that once filled drive-ins were now antiquated laughing stocks and Lewis, the man who turned splatter into gold, was all but a dinosaur.

THE GORE GORE GIRLS is filled with scenes of bored strippers shaking their tits while looking directly into the camera. The gore is still plastic bodies filled with hamburger and mannequin limbs with one end dipped in stage blood. The big cameo in the film is given to Henny Youngman, a man whose humor had aged as well as his body. 1972 had given us films like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, TOWER OF EVIL, DEATHDREAM, RAW MEAT, THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW, DEMONS OF THE MIND, THE ASPHYX… The exploitation film had left Lewis behind years ago. His style of film simply could not compete with the more socially conscious (and therefore all the more immediate) horror films of the time.

THE GORE GORE GIRLS begins with a stripper having her face rammed repeatedly into a mirror. In order to solve the mystery of who has been leaving dead dancers all over the city, Nancy Weston, a reporter for the Globe newspaper, hires Abraham Gentry, a world famous private investigator. As our two leads do the bare minimum required to solve the case, the killer continues to mutilate women in various uncomfortable ways. Throats are slashed, eyes are ripped out, heads are mashed into a pulp. One woman has her nipples sliced off, the left one producing a stream of milk, the other a stream of chocolate milk. Her roommate has her head shoved into a bowl of hot cooling oil. In another scene, the killer smacks a woman on her bare ass with a meat tenderizer over and over, eventually killing her.

On top of the nasty, sexualized murders, Lewis has virtually every female character humiliate themselves for the pleasure of men. He has his female characters abuse each other. He turns them into money hungry opportunists and verbal abuse sponges. Knowing his depiction of women wasn’t going to go down well with the current women’s liberation movement, Lewis decided to double down. Never one to bow to political correctness, THE GORE GORE GIRLS features a bevy of feminist protesters, all of whom are clearly costumed to look more like men than women. After Nancy goes undercover with the feminists, she has a brief scene with Abraham in which she spouts feminist talking points like a brainwashed radical. Clearly, Lewis was trying to go out with an offensive bang.

Unfortunately, THE GORE GORE GIRLS fades like a fart in the wind. Much of the problem lies with the lead character, our Private Investigator, Abraham Gentry. Given his meticulously styled hair and his walking cane, I think we were supposed to find this character suave and charming. Every woman he comes across certainly falls for him. But truth be told, the guy is just a dick. A massive, obnoxious, borderline intolerable dick. I hated this character. I hated everything about him. I especially hated how the character would sometimes stop and turn to the camera to deliver some horrible pun. Stop it, goddammit. Just stop.

But virtually every character in the film is written to be an intolerable oaf. Nancy is shrill and demanding, and her constant attempts to seduce Abraham just made me hate her more. The various strippers we meet throughout the film are empty headed bimbos who exist only to fill the nudity quotient. The police lieutenant is a screaming jackass. The major red herring of the film was the only character in the film that I liked, an angry ex-Marine who used to bash in the skulls of corpses in Vietnam. Now all he does is sit at the end of a strip club bar smashing cabbages. I liked that guy, largely because he barely spoke throughout the entire film.

The murder mystery angle gets dropped two thirds of the way into the running time just so Lewis can film a short parade of strippers dancing topless. It was at this point that I zoned out and never really came back. I was done, done with this film and done with this week of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies. Truth be told, I enjoy the works of Lewis quite a bit. Like the director himself, I was just ready for a nice, long break.

THE WIZARD OF GORE

Attempting to think logically about Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1970 pseudo-rubber reality gore flick THE WIZARD OF BLOOD would be to miss the point. I mean, this is a movie that begins with a stage magician ranting about solipsism for three solid minutes. Every second of the film is a put-on. Every major development is not to be trusted. THE WIZARD OF GORE is a film concerned with the illusion of reality and the plasticity of perception.

OK, so I’m making it sound a bit more heady than it actually is, but Lewis’ film really is a mind fuck, one that will probably fly largely over your head the first time you see it. It’s all about a stage magician named Montag the Magnificent. Montag is a bit of a firebrand, peppering his performances with loud speeches about certainty and the sham nature of media entertainment. His show starts a bit underwhelming, just the regular old tricks any amateur magician could pull off, but then things get interesting. Montag asks for a volunteer, a woman to meet him on stage for the old “sawing a woman in half” trick. A woman staggers up the aisle, clearly in some sort of fugue state. Montag has her lay down on a table before pulling out not just any old saw but a goddamn chainsaw. And then, with glee in his eyes, Montag really does saw the woman in half.

Or does he?

This is where THE WIZARD OF GORE complicates things. The sawing of the woman in half is just the first of many murders that will be carried out by Montag in the film, but are they really happening? The first time I saw the film I thought the tape in my VCR was warped or just fucked up. The editing of these scenes breaks continuity. In a later murder set piece, we see Montag place a metal spike to the temple of a young woman before nailing it into her skull. But then the film cuts and the woman is perfectly fine, completely untouched. A cut later and Montag is pulling out her brain. Another cut and the spike is clean through her skull. Another cut and the woman is fine. Another cut, another inconsistency, another cut, another break in the temporal flow of the scene.

After the so-called “magic trick” is done, the volunteer returns to her seat, completely unharmed. But we never see a woman regenerate her damaged tissue. We never see the piles of guts and rivers of blood reverse their flow, seeping and squeezing back into the body. As the film goes on, we learn that Montag is a very skilled hypnotist. Is that what is going on here? Is the sight of bodily dismemberment as much a ruse for the in-film audience as it is for us?

In a development that further complicates matters, all of the female volunteers are later found dead, their bodies mutilated in the same way they were mutilated on stage. One woman even falls over dead in a crowded restaurant, her stomach suddenly spilling out all over the carpet. How exactly is this possible? Why are we treated to red tinted, dreamlike sequences of Montag stealing the corpses of these women from the morgue? Our lead protagonist, a talk show host named Sherry, gets a spot of blood on her hand when she accidentally bumps into the stretcher one of these ex-volunteers is now lying on. That spot of blood will continually appear and disappear as the film goes along.

So what the hell does this all mean? I don’t know. The fact that the film ends with a kind of triple twist ending is possibly a good indication that THE WIZARD OF GORE isn’t meant to be some tightly structured, intricate bit of reality bending horror. The film is probably just meant to screw with your brain a bit while saying a few words about how the media can play games with your senses. No question is ever answered. No solution is ever given. It’s just weird. Deal with it.

This layer of surrealism sits on top of a well staged, but not well acted, bit of splatter cinema. It’s one of Lewis’ most memorable films, filled with graphic images, gaudy costuming, and clever bits of composition. Though his performance is equal parts wooden and hyperbolic with nothing in between, Ray Sager creates one hell of a memorable weirdo in Montag the Magnificent. Sporting a great Harry Reems mustache, Sager’s wild eyed performance has turned the murdering magician into a cult icon among splatter movie fans (the film would also go on to inspire scenes in productions as diverse as American Horror Story and THE FUNHOUSE). Unfortunately, he’s the only real bright spot among the cast (and believe me, that’s saying something) and as a result, THE WIZARD OF GORE is not as memorable as it could have been. Had Connie Mason and William Kerwin played the leads instead of Judy Cler and Wayne Ratay, I would probably rank this a spot or two higher on my personal Best of H.G. Lewis list.

Minor quibbles aside, I do think THE WIZARD OF GORE is a good time. It most certainly does not make for an easy first watch. It might take a spin or two for the film to effectively worm its way inside your brain. Once it does, well… it’s a nasty and confusing good time, not to be missed.

THE GRUESOME TWOSOME

THE GRUESOME TWOSOME is as close as you’re ever going to get to a Herschell Gordon Lewis giallo. The disappearance of several college girls sparks the obsessive curiosity of a pretty blond named Kathy. Her investigation leads her to a wig shop run by a kindly old woman named Mrs. Pringle, a widow living with her stuffed cat Napoleon and her mentally challenged son Rodney. What Kathy doesn’t know is that Mrs. Pringle is the culprit, a psychopath luring young college girls to her home with the promise of a cheap room to rent. Once the trap is sprung, Rodney murders the co-eds and messily scalps them. Their long locks of hair are then turned into Mrs. Pringle’s fancy wigs.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I did just sum up the entire plot of this film in five sentences. Lewis’ 1967 return to full-on splatter isn’t exactly teeming with narrative. In fact, it begins with a bizarre puppet scene of two mannequin heads, each adorned with paper mache eyes and mouths, discussing the events of the film. The only reason this scene exists is to help pad the run time out to feature length. It isn’t the only bit of padding either. There’s a damn near five minute long scene of college girls dancing on beds in negligees crammed in there too. As we know who the killer is right from the get go, there wasn’t much need for a seven and a half minute long scene of a curious Kathy following her school’s suspicious Swedish janitor to his home. Red herrings don’t work if you know the killer’s identity. But the film really needed to be 70 minutes so….

With Kathy filling the required amateur detective role, the second most important bit of the giallo formula would be the murder set pieces. How does THE GRUESOME TWOSOME stack up, you ask? Well, the film might be suspense free, but it is not without its fair share of nauseating violence. Released a scant 19 days after Lewis’ anemic vampire thriller A TASTE OF BLOOD, THE GRUESOME TWOSOME dives straight back down the rabbit hole of excess with a handful of grotesque murders. Each scalping results in a nasty sludge of tomato paste running down a victim’s face. Rodney uses an electric carving knife to slowly decapitate a woman. A down-on-her-luck lass looking to sell her locks for a few bucks is graphically disemboweled. It’s sick, gooey stuff.

The nasty gore sits alongside a generous helping of Lewis’ typical black humor. There’s a really weird scene of Kathy and her boyfriend Dave at the drive-in. All she wants to do is talk about the unsolved murders. All he wants to do is make out. Their scenes are intercut with the movie playing on the drive-in screen, a pretentious arthouse film all about a man eating potato chips and squishing fruit while his off-screen lover tells him how much she adores him. The aforementioned slumber party scene features our nightgown wearing babes eating from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken as they shuffle suggestively to the jazz music blaring on the soundtrack.

None of it makes much sense, even the relatively straight forward stuff, but then again, it’s not really supposed to. It’s a nonsense brew made of mystery thriller tropes, proto-slasher psychobabble and soft nudie-cutie moments. It delivers the splatter and a few chuckles, and that’s about it. It’s as flimsy a plot as you’re likely to find, carried out in typical Herschell Gordon Lewis fashion. It’s easy going sleaze. Take it or leave it.

A TASTE OF BLOOD

“John, I can see that flower pot in the mirror, but I can’t see you!”

 “Oh. Bah! It’s a bad piece of glass.”

That little exchange of dialogue between two friends, one of whom just so happens to be a vampire, sums up the tone of A TASTE OF BLOOD rather well. At damn near two hours, this 1967 love letter to campy Hammer horror is Herschell Gordon Lewis’ magnum opus, a sprawling (read: contains more than five locations) tale of vengeance from beyond the grave.

A Florida businessman named John Stone receives a box in the mail, a strange package from overseas containing two bottles of aged brandy and a letter notifying him that he has inherited an estate in London. As the inheritance has a bit of a waiting period attached to it, John continues with his day to day, slowly draining the two bottles of brandy. Unbeknownst to John, the brandy has been laced with blood. Not just any blood, oh no, but the blood of Dracula, John’s ancient ancestor.

John’s changes in behavior (for example, he only sleeps during the day and the sight of crosses make him wince) worry his adoring wife, Helene. She turns to John’s friend, the good doctor Hank, for help. As Hank is still madly in love with Helene, he agrees to speak with John. But before Hank can get to the bottom of all this, John skips out, traveling to England. Why, you ask? Well, that’s where the distant relatives of Dracula’s mortal enemies live, of course, and John, now full-on vampire, has a bone to pick with them.

If A TASTE OF BLOOD sounds like a great deal of fun, it’s because it mostly is, emphasis on mostly. The biggest problem is the pacing of the film. It is, to put it nicely, awfully leisurely. Lewis considered A TASTE OF BLOOD to be his best film and you can tell that the director was in love with every single moment of it. There’s so much fat to be trimmed off here, so many moments that go on well past their purpose. Had all the excess been trimmed off, A TASTE OF BLOOD would have clocked in at a tight 75 minutes. As it stands, there just isn’t enough worthwhile material here to justify a running time of 117 minutes.

For example, early on in the film it is established that John is a workaholic and perhaps even an alcoholic. He keeps a bottle of whiskey on the table, a bottle which slowly empties with each dissolve or fade in. We see John beginning to crave the vampire brandy he keeps in the cupboard. As all this is going on, his mood is changing. He ignores and verbally abuses his loving wife, becoming more and more withdrawn with every drink.

These early scenes led me to believe that what Lewis was constructing with A TASTE OF BLOOD was an elaborate allegory all about alcoholism. After all, what better way to do that than by crafting a vampire story? But no, those early scenes are not there to serve any kind of subtextual purpose. They’re simply there for melodrama. John’s slide from human to inhuman takes roughly 45 minutes. Without those early, largely redundant drinking scenes, we would have arrived at John’s vampiric destination 10 or 15 minutes earlier. That would have made quite the difference.

Because the film is very light on action. There are only a few murders and one half-hearted chase scene throughout the entire film. Most of the movie is talking, about relationship issues, about the history of Dracula, about revenge and reconciliation, about superstition in the modern age. Along the way, it hits all the narrative stops you would expect from a vampire film. We go to England. We meet a Van Helsing. We discover that Helene is being preyed upon by her vampire paramour. So on and so on. All that’s missing is Dracula’s underlings. There are no brides of Dracula here and no Renfields either.

Indeed, one of the most interesting elements about A TASTE OF BLOOD is that it marries the Hammer Dracula film with Lewis’ own gory slashers. John isn’t draining these people of their blood to turn them into his undead slaves. No, he’s tracking down the relatives of folks like Quincey Morris and driving stakes through their hearts. In this film, Dracula isn’t concerned with timeless love and quasi-sexualized bloodletting. He’s all about petty revenge.

The real fun of A TASTE OF BLOOD is watching how all these familiar elements play out in unfamiliar ways. It’s a bit deconstructionist and a bit self-deprecating. It’s certainly more than a little self-aware. But on the surface level, it’s just a well constructed vampire movie, albeit one with major pacing issues in the first half. The fact that the film is every inch a Herschell Gordon Lewis production only adds to the fun. There is a burlesque scene crammed in for no good reason. Our hero is played by Lewis regular William Kerwin, with all his usual workmanlike charms up front and center. Characters all talk like they’re trapped inside a B-movie and the blood, when it flows, is bright and vivid, like a beautiful Crayola fountain.

COLOR ME BLOOD RED

The final film in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ so-called Blood Trilogy, COLOR ME BLOOD RED tells the familiar tale of a down-on-his-luck artist whose fortunes are suddenly reversed when he begins melding artistic creation with cold blooded murder. Far less engaging than Roger Corman’s 1959 take on the tale, A BUCKET OF BLOOD, COLOR ME BLOOD RED struggles to maintain a pulse throughout its 79 minute run time. Following the lively and entertaining TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, Lewis’ third foray into splatter feels positively uninspired.

Lewis was always able to turn the act of murder into an entertaining bit of low(est) brow art, but here in a film about that very thing, he stumbles completely. Adam Sorg, the downtrodden painter who discovers that human blood provides his art with just the right oomph to attract critical praise and commercial interest, could be seen as a stand-in Lewis, an ex-advertising man turned nudie-cutie director whose film career was going nowhere fast. Lewis came upon the idea of adding graphic, ludicrous gore to his films and just like that, he found himself a profitable commercial niche. 

But a niche can sometimes be a noose and you can definitely sense that Lewis was afraid of being trapped in the gore film forever. In that way, COLOR ME BLOOD RED can be seen as a kind of testimonial film, a movie all about an artist whose bloody work creates a kind of commercial and artistic whirlpool from which he cannot escape.

However, for as interesting as the film might be on a kind of autobiographical level, it just does not work well as a piece of entertainment. You can feel Lewis exercising a considerable amount of restraint throughout the film, especially in the area of on-screen violence. In terms of raw body count, COLOR ME BLOOD RED is by far the most anemic film in the entire Blood Trilogy. There is at least one great killing in the film, a riotous scene in which Sorg terrorizes two love birds riding water bikes in the ocean, but for the most part the killings are all strikingly tame. The only real bit of gore we get is a brief scene of Sorg wringing some blood out of an exposed wad of guts. The rest is rather unmemorable.

The characters are just plain awful. Sorg is every inch the annoying artiste, a bug eyed, whining brat of a man prone to screaming fits and grating histrionics. Oddly enough, when we first meet him, he’s quite likable, albeit a touch too sarcastic. His early scenes with his live-in lover Gigi are some of the best scenes the film has to offer. The two have an “if we ever get married…” in-joke that runs throughout all their scenes together, a kind of rib-poking light insult that gives the couple a genuine spark and chemistry. But then Gigi has to go and accidentally cut her finger on a broken frame, bleeding onto an empty canvas. The sight of the red blood awakens Sorg's creative energies and Gigi.. well, she ultimately ends up with a knife to the face as a result.

Her blood ends up smeared all over a rather terrible painting and that painting attracts the attention of Mrs. Carter, a well-off art appreciator with a lovely teenage daughter named April. April has a boring new boyfriend named Rolf and two beatnik friends, Jack and Sydney, who think it’s farrrr out to dress in identical costumes, right down to wearing the same wig. April and the gang will form the other half of the film’s focus, culminating in Sorg taking an unhealthy interest in April.

Unfortunately, April and her friends are every bit as annoying as our lead psychopath, especially the beatnik couple. They’re the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. So what we have here is a gore film that is light on gore filled with characters light on character. Though the jazz score is catchy and the film does contain some of the most striking compositions in all of Lewis’ oeuvre, the film really is an abysmal watch. The subtext of the film is the only thing worthy of consideration here, but even then the film makes it’s entire point shortly after Gigi’s murder. So had the film just been a 35 or so minute short, it would have been pretty damn good. But no, the film then spends 40 minutes lazily repeating itself until the underlying point of the film is drowned beneath all the lousy pacing and grating performances. It's a terrible miscalculation of a film and had it been, as it was planned to be, Lewis' farewell to the horror genre, it would have been a very bad way to go out.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!

Just one year after inventing the modern gore film with his low budget shocker BLOOD FEAST, Herschell Gordon Lewis returned to the drive-ins with yet another genre innovation. Bolstered by an increase in budget, shooting time and confidence, Lewis created TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, a dark horror comedy riff on Alan Jay Lerner’s Brigadoon. Six Yankees find themselves in a Southern hell, manipulated and murdered by the jubilant inhabitants of Pleasant Valley, a small redneck community celebrating their town centennial.

With it’s opening theme music enthusiastically proclaiming “oh, the South is gonna rise again!”, TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! births the Southern horror film. If you’ve ever seen a movie about a bunch of Northerners taking the wrong back road into dangerous hick country and enjoyed it, you can thank Lewis. Everything from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE to HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES has some of this film’s DNA floating around in it. If you’re in the market for an interesting and effective look at the cultural conflicts that live along the Mason-Dixon line, you would be better off sticking with Hooper’s classic or films like SOUTHERN COMFORT, but as a kind of culturally aware cartoon, Lewis’ film is every bit as enjoyable as the countless films it inspired.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! is often referred to as one of the sickest films ever made and that’s a reputation the film actually kind of deserves. While the film isn’t as graphically violent as BLOOD FEAST, it is far more sadistic. The fact that it’s cast of killers are all sweet, jovial and pumped full of so-called “Southern charm” makes the violence they mete out that much more disturbing. A redneck Lothario forcibly cuts a woman’s thumb off and a live dismemberment by ax is carried out by giggling hicks. A gaggle of killers have the time of their lives watching a man being drawn and quartered. None of this is going to look at all convincing to you, by the way. The effects work largely consists of mannequin arms, raw hamburger and poster paint. It’s the gleeful sadism of it all that provides the punch.

If disembodied limbs are not candy enough for your eyes, there’s a bevy of beauties in the cast, including Connie Mason, Linda Cochran, Yvonne Gilbert and Shelby Livingston. Lewis had yet to mix his nudie-cutie proclivities with his newfound interest in gore so if you’re expecting nudity or sex, well… you’ll have to make due with Ms. Mason washing dirt off her legs in a river. But the female cast isn’t just scenery. No one in the cast of this film delivers a great performance per se, but they sure as hell deliver energetic performances. TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! was filmed in a small Florida town and everyone on camera, every single person, is clearly having the time of their life. This movie is not short on energy.

If you’re at all familiar with Brigadoon, I’m afraid I already spoiled the movie for you. For those who have no idea what Brigadoon is, the ending of TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! might come as quite the surprise. It’s a great ending for sure, a real Twilight Zone-style corker that manages to erase every plot hole you noticed throughout the film’s 83 minute running time. It also gives the film a bit of real world relevance. I can’t think of a better time for this film to be rediscovered than right now. It feels like a film uniquely suited to the current political climate of the United States.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! was an important step forward in both Hicksploitation and Southern fried horror. I’ve heard that Lewis considered it to be his best film. I think I would agree with that. It’s a fun, funny, gross and nasty little exploitation movie with a few firing neurons and more than a little spilled blood. The perfect way to spend a lazy Autumn evening.

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.