Blood Feast (1963)

Just when you thought you had discovered and watched the worst of the worst, along comes a movie showing you how wrong you were. Having spent a lifetime as a purveyor of z-grade cinema, I have recently found that there is a treasure of utterly vile, festering shite to be discovered within the realms of Pushto cinema here in the heartland. But even having watched some of the dregs from that beautiful genre of world cinema, it came as a true shock to the system when I finally managed to view something as appalling as Hershell Gordon Lewis’s legendary Blood Feast.

Firstly, I am disgusted at myself for never actually having watched a film by H.G. Lewis, but as they say, better late than never. The film is stunningly abysmal from beginning to end, with acting that must be seen to be believed and a plotline that perfectly illustrates H.G. Lewis’s brand of alternative/deranged genius. The film was released in 1963 and scored considerable success on the underground and drive-in circuit where it built a loyal following due to its sheer awfulness and audacity to be so boldly atrocious in every way. Lewis claims that the film came about when a friend and he decided to use the surplus theatrical blood they had left after an earlier job. Lewis decided to write a movie built around the fact that they had two bottles of theatrical blood in their possession, so that’s how the idea of Blood Feast began!

The film doesn’t waste any time getting down to business, and we have a blonde beauty hacked to pieces in her bathtub in the first minute. First, the beauty’s eye receives a gouging with a spike, and the audience is treated to a full view of the jiggling bits of flesh that the grey-haired killer prizes out from the socket – tasteful indeed. Then the murderer proceeds to hack off her limbs one by one and take off with them to an undisclosed hideout. Moments later, a second woman is followed back to her apartment and attacked by the maniac, who slashes open her skull and removes the contents for his ghastly blood rites. A Beauty on the beach is similarly sliced to shreds, and in the absolute screamer of a scene, a Scandinavian blonde is ravaged, and her tongue is ripped out from her mouth, leaving a gaping wound with blood and much oozing from it in the most grotesque manner. The police department is fumbling around for clues, but each day that the monstrous killer is not apprehended, a new gruesome murder is discovered. One of the attacked women lives just long enough to tell the police what strange words the killer was mouthing as he attacked her – some foreign Mumbo Jumbo.

The audience is shown that the deranged killer is the Egyptian Fuad Ramses who is overtly a caterer but actually a man attempting to resurrect his ancient Egyptian lover by cooking her this horrendous broth of body parts culled from each of his murdered victims. The ghastly club-footed Ramses is plotting to trick wealthy socialite Mrs Freemont by ravaging her daughter at a proposed Ancient Egyptian feast which is nothing but a front for his murderous endeavours. However, by now, the police are hot on the trail of Fuad Ramses, and the race is on to stop him from completing his devious scheme and butchering a further innocent along the way.

H.G. Lewis made a considerable amount of money churning out ultra cheap exploitation fare during the 60s and has a massive following of die-hard fans. Arguably his biggest fan has been (naturally) John Waters, who finds his films far superior to anything Orson Welles has ever attempted. The joy in Lewis’s work is that he takes it as a challenge to get people to come into a cinema to watch his rubbish. For him, it is the very challenge of getting the fish (audience) to bite the bait and pay for a ticket for the movie. If he has succeeded in that end, then he really couldn’t care less what the movie was like. That’s unfair; once Lewis got his audience into the cinema, he intended to give them something they would not have expected and were unlikely to forget. Lewis found that the sex market had already been covered, so he chose to go for pure unadulterated blood and guts gore to achieve his ends.

Blood Feast was his first foray into pure gore, and due to its notoriety and fame, Lewis earned the title as the “Godfather of Gore” and indeed the man who almost “invented” screen gore. He claimed to be very proud when he noticed teenagers at drive-ins opening their car doors to puke, having watched his gut-wrenching gore on screen! Blood Feast entirely lives up to its lofty reputation as a simply astoundingly appalling piece of cinema. The gore is so spectacularly and joyous in evidence that is still manages to shock even today. Even in 2001, there were various hackings and slashings in the film that the British Censor has found too disgusting for public viewing, and several cuts made in the British DVD release of the film. What more can one say – Hats off to H.G. Lewis for being the pioneer of gore films and also for continuing to carry the torch that such schlockmeisters as the great William Castle lit with his unique brand of showmanship and his unique tactics to try to snag his viewers by such incredible gimmicks like providing the audience with barf bags upon entering the cinema…a tactic that John Waters later employed for his wondrous epics.

If you have a taste for the bizarre, the gruesome and the stunningly inept, you will not be disappointed by this epic piece of celluloid.