Blood Feast [DVD] [1963]

It was obviously made on a shoestring budget: the camerawork, "special effects" and "musical" soundtrack are all extremely poor, and as if that wasn't bad enough, the plot and dialogue are (to put it mildly) also very weak and the "acting" is absolutely hopeless.

The film stars Playboy playmate Connie Mason as a student called Suzette who has a fascination for ancient Egypt. It begins with a radio news item about murders of young women in Suzette's small American town, and we soon discover the weird looking culprit - a deranged Egyptian cultist who also owns an "exotic" catering company and goes by the unlikely name of Fuad Ramses. Suzette's mother decides to hire Fuad to serve up an Egyptian meal for her daughter's upcoming 21st birthday and that's when the fun begins....

Fuad has been preparing an ancient Egyptian "blood feast", whose main aim is to resurrect the goddess Ishtar and whose main ingredients are various body parts of young women (hence the killings). In preparation for Suzette's birthday surprise he not only intensifies his murderfest (and clearly enjoys his work!) but also aims to make Suzette his final victim. The resulting gore looks fairly mild by today's standards and is about as unrealistic as it's possible to get, but it comes thick and fast while the tomato ketchup keeps flowing very freely indeed. Fuad's plans are eventually foiled, but not before one completely over the top scene in which a victim has her tongue ripped out, and the fact that the tongue is so huge that it's obviously not human in origin only enhances one of "Blood feast's" many moments of accidental greatness.

Encouraged by the success of "Blood feast", Lewis soon followed it up with the equally tasteless "2000 Maniacs" and "Colour me blood red" (the three films became known as the "blood trilogy") and if you like "Blood feast" you'll enjoy them all. You should check out the "The gore gore girls" too.

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On the face of it, Blood Feast would seem to have some good things going for it: a catered feast secretly prepared with human blood and body parts, the influence of an ancient Egyptian religious rite, a number of dead bodies, and even a Playboy playmate in the form of Connie Mason (Miss June 1963). Despite all this, though, the movie drops an H bomb from the very first moment. Plot-wise, you have a series of gruesome murders striking fear all over town, with the killer bagging nubile young women at a rate of 3-4 a week. From each victim he takes a different body part (each time it looks like intestines to me, yet it can be an eyeball, an arm, a heart, whatever). The killer needs these "ingredients" so that he can bring the blood-thirsty goddess Ishtar back to life. The police are clueless, and I do mean clueless; they smoke cigarettes and sit at their desks as hard as they possibly can - heck, the chief even bangs his hand on the desk every now and again - but they just can't come up with a single clue (largely because they can't recognize a clue if it falls on top of them like a ton of bricks). Meanwhile, a wealthy woman is planning for her daughter's birthday celebration and, as a special surprise, she hires Fuad Ramses to cater the party. Ramses promises her an authentic Egyptian feast, and this idea goes over like gangbusters because daughter Suzette just so happens to be attending weekly lectures on ancient Egyptian cults. Suzette also happens to be the girl of one of the town's only two detectives, so you see how all of this starts fitting together.

While the gore is pretty unspectacular from our modern viewpoint, Lewis succeeds quite well at times. We don't actually get to see the actual killings, of course, but there are plenty of shots of our killer pulling out parts of human bodies in his blood-soaked hands, mixing up a batch of young woman blood soup, hacking off limbs and such, and of course cooking such delicacies. Lewis makes a point of admiring his gruesome handiwork, oftentimes panning the camera slowly across the whole body of a mutilated, blood-spattered, thoroughly dead victim. There is one scene in particular that impressed me, involving the appearance of a girl who has a sunken cavity in her chest where her heart used to be. By and large, though, the gore is quite campy to us modern-day horror fans, but one should try to appreciate it in its proper context.

I can't conclude without addressing the performances of the actors and actresses involved with this movie. This may well be the worst assembly of hopeless actors I've ever seen. I don't know where Lewis found these people. You can't just take people off the street and have them perform this badly; it takes years of devoted practice to become this bad a performer. Lewis must have had some of these kids in a bad actor's training camp from the time they could talk in order to coax such wooden, ridiculously bad performances out of them. Then there is the terrible music, which continually takes one of three forms: endless repetition of two drum beats, the playing of a kazoo-like instrument, and terrible pipe organ music of the type that worked well alongside silent movies but does not work at all in this film.

Basically, Blood Feast is a horribly campy, low-budget, sub-B horror movie that now serves as hilarious entertainment which can not be taken the least bit seriously. Were it not for its importance as the first true blood and gore film, this would be just another forgettable trek through the dark forest of bad horror movies. Its historic importance to the genre, however, makes it a film every gorehound must watch and pay homage to in some way.

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