The film I’m reviewing today is the granddaddy of low budget trash. There had been low budget movies before, of course, and many were pretty trashy. However, none of them had been quite as shameless in their crass exploitation of sex and violence as this one. I can only imagine what the crew cut and beehive hair crowd of 1963 must have thought watching this for the first time.
Quick Recap! When COVID shut down everything in early 2020, I started an online bad movie night get-together with some friends that we eventually dubbed “Bad Movie Monday”. The premise was simple: We’d torture each other every Monday with the worst trash we could find, tell a few jokes, cheer each other up, and in the process maybe discover some weird obscure cinema that we might never have seen any other way. This series of reviews will feature highlights of those night so you can all share in the fun and maybe get some ideas for your own movie night.
Besides the fact that it is the first splatter film, what makes Blood Feast stand out is that director Herschell Gordon Lewis seemed so professional and efficient despite him having almost literally nothing to work with. To put this in perspective, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space had more than twice the budget as Blood Feast. So the fact that it didn’t end up being a thirty-five minute movie padded with ten minutes of stock footage and twenty minutes of girls in bikinis hopping up and down on the beach is kind of astounding.
That said. You can definitely tell, just by the camera setups and the dry way actors deliver their lines, that Lewis didn’t want to waste any time with second takes. If he gave any direction at all it was something like “Speak in a loud clear voice and don’t fuck it up.”
I think that this makes Blood Feast a great introduction to bad movies for a beginner. It’s a lot of fun. You can watch it with friends and talk over it without missing anything important because the dialogue is so obvious that you could watch the entire movie without sound or subtitles and know exactly what each character is saying just by their body language. It’s short, which is always a quality you should look for in almost any movie whether it’s good or bad. It’s also edited and paced fairly well for what it is. It’s not perfect, the whole thing starts to lag around the third act. However, I’ve seen a whole lot worse coming out of this era. At least it’s not obscure-for-good-reason nonsense that was entirely built around cool poster art and a catchy title. There is an actual movie here. Yeah, it’s rough around the edges but it’s a fun little flick.
Okay, so what’s Blood Feast about? Let’s look at the back of the 1980s era VHS!
This Herschell Gordon Lewis classic concerns an average family, who in its pursuit of “keeping up with the Jones” has the extreme misfortune of hiring an exotic, insane Egyptian (Ramses) to cater the twenty-first birthday party of their daughter (played by former playmate Connie Mason).
Through murders, mutilations, and mind-twisted slayings, Ramses gathers the grisly ingredients for his culinary masterpiece. In his distorted mind these gruesome deeds have something to do with the reincarnation of Ishtar, an Egyptian goddess. Believe me, this guy is incredibly weird! In a graphically detailed dream sequence, the high priest (Jerome Eden) performs his pulsating heart-ectomy on a young girl in a ritual sacrifice.
A police detective, who is the fiancé of our birthday girl, learns of Ramses’ bizarre deeds, and goes in search of the madman. The final components for Ramses’ Bloodfeast must come from the birthday girl herself, and that ingredient is left to the viewers’ imagination. The blood-churning gore effects in Bloodfeast are some of the most catastrophic acts of horror on film, so outrageous and so mercenary that most consider this film, in a strange way, to be quite funny!
Since its premiere in 1963 this film has established an incredible cult following and today still plays theatrically across the country.
This is fairly accurate synopsis. Probably a bit too descriptive, but who cares? This isn’t one of those movies that’s ruined by “spoilers” I mean, if you can’t figure out most of the story just from the title and poster then you’re not trying very hard.
Alright! Now onto my favorite part of the review where I list ten thoughts I had during the movie.
#1 – At one hour and seven minutes you wouldn’t think this could contain much filler, yet there it is in all its glory anyway! Want to see how people walked from their car to their house in 1963? You’re in luck! How do rotary phones work? You’ll be able to MAKE calls using a rotary phone by the end the movie. Every excruciating detail will be shown! But don’t think of it as filler, think of it as a documentary about life in the early sixties. It’s much more fun that way.
#2 – Blood, Blood everywhere, and not a drop of it looks realistic.
#3 – Ishtar is an EGYPTIAN Goddess??? Uh. I think this film may not be accurate in its portrayal of Egypt, or its portrayal Miami Beach for that matter.
#4 – I think that Fuad, the bad guy, is supposed to be a very old man and maybe have some sort of deformity? Anyway, they sprayed some white in the actor’s hair and he pretends to limp. That’s all they had the budget for.
#5 – I don’t think this movie actually had a musical composer. I think H.G. Lewis just found old discarded tape reels of random electronic organ noises in the garbage behind a recording studio and used that instead.
#6 – The “Egyptian” props in this movie were also probably found in the garbage. They were then almost certainly returned there very soon after production wrapped up. The trash can giveth and the trash can taketh away.
#7 – People often complain about how cheap and ridiculous this film is. However, after having endured some of the most atrocious trash imaginable on previous Bad Movie Mondays I think this is freakin’ Hitchcock compared to some of the turds I’ve seen.
#8 – The early sixties decor and fashion looks kind amazing, and it’s so nice to see a film that has such a vivid color palette. It’s not dark and washed out like modern horror movies.
#9 – Fuad’s eyebrows are so terrible and stupid that they’re almost genius. I would say the actor does 73% of this acting using them.
#10 – Fuad is the world’s worst hide and seek player of all time.
