{"id":38488,"date":"2023-01-09T14:02:29","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T19:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=38488"},"modified":"2023-01-09T14:09:33","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T19:09:33","slug":"bad-movie-monday-blood-feast-1963","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/09\/bad-movie-monday-blood-feast-1963\/","title":{"rendered":"BAD MOVIE MONDAY: BLOOD FEAST (1963)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The film I\u2019m 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.
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\nQuick 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 \u201cBad Movie Monday\u201d. The premise was simple: We\u2019d 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019s Plan 9 from Outer Space had more than twice<\/em> the budget as Blood Feast. So the fact that it didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cSpeak in a loud clear voice and don\u2019t fuck it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that this makes Blood Feast a great introduction to bad movies for a beginner. It\u2019s 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\u2019s short, which is always a quality you should look for in almost any movie whether it\u2019s good or bad. It\u2019s also edited and paced fairly well for what it is. It\u2019s not perfect, the whole thing starts to lag around the third act. However, I\u2019ve seen a whole lot worse coming out of this era. At least it\u2019s not obscure-for-good-reason nonsense that was entirely built around cool poster art and a catchy title. There is<\/em> an actual movie here. Yeah, it\u2019s rough around the edges but it\u2019s a fun little flick.<\/p>\n

Okay, so what\u2019s Blood Feast about? Let\u2019s look at the back of the 1980s era VHS!<\/p>\n

This Herschell Gordon Lewis classic concerns an average family, who in its pursuit of \u201ckeeping up with the Jones\u201d 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).<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A police detective, who is the fianc\u00e9 of our birthday girl, learns of Ramses\u2019 bizarre deeds, and goes in search of the madman. The final components for Ramses\u2019 Bloodfeast<\/em> must come from the birthday girl herself, and that ingredient is left to the viewers\u2019 imagination. The blood-churning gore effects in Bloodfeast<\/em> 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!
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Since its premiere in 1963 this film has established an incredible cult following and today still plays theatrically across the country.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is fairly accurate synopsis. Probably a bit too descriptive, but who cares? This isn\u2019t one of those movies that\u2019s ruined by \u201cspoilers\u201d I mean, if you can\u2019t figure out most of the story just from the title and poster then you\u2019re not trying very hard.<\/p>\n

Alright! Now onto my favorite part of the review where I list ten thoughts I had during the movie.<\/p>\n

#1 \u2013 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\u2019re in luck! How do rotary phones work? You\u2019ll be able to MAKE calls using a rotary phone by the end the movie. Every excruciating detail will be shown! But don\u2019t think of it as filler, think of it as a documentary about life in the early sixties. It\u2019s much more fun that way.<\/p>\n

#2 \u2013 Blood, Blood everywhere, and not a drop of it looks realistic.<\/p>\n

#3 \u2013 Ishtar is an EGYPTIAN<\/em> Goddess??? Uh. I think this film may not be accurate in its portrayal of Egypt, or its portrayal Miami Beach for that matter.<\/p>\n

#4 \u2013 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\u2019s hair and he pretends to limp. That\u2019s all they had the budget for.<\/p>\n

#5 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

#6 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

#7 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

#8 \u2013 The early sixties decor and fashion looks kind amazing, and it\u2019s so nice to see a film that has such a vivid color palette. It\u2019s not dark and washed out like modern horror movies.<\/p>\n

#9 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

#10 \u2013 Fuad is the world’s worst hide and seek player of all time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The film I\u2019m 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3070],"tags":[465,3076],"class_list":["post-38488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badmoviemonday","tag-hg-lewis","tag-splatter-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38488"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38500,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38488\/revisions\/38500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}