Blood Feast (1963)

Just when you think you have finally uncovered the absolute bottom of the cinematic barrel, along comes a film that somehow digs even deeper. Having spent a lifetime enthusiastically wallowing in Z-grade cinema, I had already discovered an astonishing treasure trove of festering awfulness within the realms of Pashto cinema here in the heartland. Yet even after surviving some of the most delirious dregs that world cinema has to offer, it still came as a genuine shock to finally experience Blood Feast for the very first time.

First and foremost, I am frankly ashamed of myself for somehow reaching this stage in life without previously watching a film by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Still, as they say, better late than never.

And what an experience it is.

Blood Feast is staggeringly, almost majestically awful from beginning to end. The acting is so catastrophically wooden that it genuinely needs to be seen to be believed, while the plot perfectly encapsulates Lewis’s uniquely deranged brand of exploitation genius.

Released in 1963, the film became a substantial underground and drive-in success, attracting audiences through sheer audacity alone. Legend has it that Lewis and a friend found themselves with leftover theatrical blood from another production and decided to build an entire movie around the fact that they had two bottles of fake blood sitting around unused.

Thus was born Blood Feast.

The film wastes absolutely no time getting down to business. Within the opening minutes, a blonde woman is hacked to pieces in her bathtub. First her eye is gouged with a spike, allowing the audience a glorious close-up view of wobbly flesh being prized from the socket in magnificently questionable taste.

The grey-haired killer then proceeds to hack off her limbs one by one before carrying them away to some undisclosed hideout.

Moments later, another unfortunate woman is stalked back to her apartment and attacked, her skull opened up so that the contents can be harvested for some ghastly blood ritual. Elsewhere, bikini-clad beach beauties are sliced apart, while one particularly unfortunate Scandinavian blonde suffers one of the film’s most infamous scenes as her tongue is ripped from her mouth in a geyser of blood and oozing entrails.

It is all so spectacularly excessive that one can scarcely believe what one is watching.

Meanwhile, the police bumble around helplessly searching for clues while bodies continue piling up at an alarming rate. One victim survives long enough to mutter strange foreign phrases the killer repeated during the attack — mysterious mumbo-jumbo that eventually leads investigators toward the culprit.

The audience, however, already knows the truth.

The deranged murderer is Fuad Ramses, an Egyptian caterer secretly attempting to resurrect an ancient Egyptian goddess by preparing a gruesome stew of human body parts harvested from his victims.

The club-footed Ramses plans to use an elaborate Egyptian feast hosted by wealthy socialite Mrs. Fremont as the centrepiece for his final blood sacrifice. As the police finally begin closing in, the race is on to stop Ramses before yet another unfortunate victim is butchered.

To call the film crude would be an understatement bordering on comedy. Yet therein lies its strange power.

Herschell Gordon Lewis made a considerable career out of churning out ultra-cheap exploitation fare throughout the 1960s and eventually built a fiercely loyal cult following. Perhaps his most famous admirer has been John Waters, who once jokingly suggested Lewis’s films were superior to anything ever attempted by Orson Welles.

The peculiar brilliance of Lewis lies in his complete understanding that his films were essentially carnival attractions. For him, the real challenge was not artistic achievement but simply getting audiences to buy tickets.

Once he had lured them into the cinema, he intended to give them something they would never forget.

Lewis realised early on that sexploitation had already become crowded territory, so instead he pursued pure, unadulterated gore.

And with Blood Feast, he effectively invented the gore movie.

The film’s notoriety eventually earned Lewis the title “Godfather of Gore,” and astonishingly enough, many of its grotesque sequences still retain the power to shock today. Even decades later, British censors continued trimming material from home video releases because certain scenes were still considered excessively unpleasant.

Quite an achievement for a film this magnificently primitive.

Lewis himself reportedly took enormous pride in watching horrified drive-in audiences physically vomit after witnessing his handiwork onscreen.

And honestly, one suspects he would be delighted to know the film still provokes reactions all these years later.

There is something oddly admirable about the sheer shamelessness of it all.

Like William Castle before him, Lewis understood that horror cinema was as much about outrageous showmanship as filmmaking itself. Castle handed out insurance policies and electrified cinema seats; Lewis handed audiences buckets of gore and dared them not to faint.

Later, even John Waters would follow the same glorious tradition of gimmick-fuelled exploitation excess.

Viewed today, Blood Feast remains an astonishingly inept piece of cinema — but also a strangely historic one. It may be terrible by almost every conventional standard imaginable, yet it possesses an undeniable charm through sheer nerve, audacity, and unfiltered bad taste.

If you possess any affection whatsoever for the bizarre, the grotesque, the gruesome, or the spectacularly incompetent, then this legendary slab of exploitation trash will absolutely not disappoint.

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