Blood Feast (1963) Recap/Review

Nothing so appalling? At least the poster got one thing right.



I was originally going to recap/review Splatter University but I shut that 1 off 30 minutes in when I realized it wasn't going to get anymore interesting after the crotch stab 2 minutes in. No instead I'll be talking about the late great Herschell Gordon Lewis's infamous splatterfest, Blood Feast. Blood Feast holds the distinction of being the first "gore" movie. You see, the nudist camp movies Lewis was making at the time weren't making money anymore so he and his producer got together and made a list of topics they could exploit since the major studios wouldn't touch them. Eventually Herschell decided on "gore" and movie history was made.


True story: I first heard about this movie from my grandma. Not even joking.


Recap: The movie opens with a lady in a bathroom tuning into plot point radio and learning that the latest in a series of murders has occurred. Since this is a slasher movie, she does the only logical thing 1 can do after hearing about a serial killer on the loose: take a bath. After she disrobes (off-screen, of course. Graphic bodily dismemberment is a-ok but nudity? That's just sinful) and gets in the tub she's gets her attacked by the movie's killer, Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold).

After gouging out her eye he cuts her leg off and stuffs it into a bag. This bit is shot & edited really weirdly, he just turns his back to the camera and makes awkward stabbing motions in the air before the leg jump cuts into his hands.  In his heyday Lewis often couldn't afford to shoot that many takes, so jump cuts were common in his filmography and Blood Feast was no exception.


 I had no idea eyeballs were so meaty.



We cut to the only 2 homicide detectives in all of Miami bemoaning the fact that 7 women have been murdered in the past 2 weeks, each of them with body parts or organs removed and the 2 of them haven't found a single clue. Which is probably because they are the dumbest cops in cinema history. Blood Feast is 1 of the most hilarious examples of what Roger Ebert called an "idiot plot" because this flick would be over in 5 minutes if our lead character Pete (William Kerwin) had any brains inside his noggin. Not only does he constantly ignore obvious clues but there's only 1 scene in this movie where he actually does some detective work instead of doing things like sitting on his ass whining or taking time out of solving a murder case just to go on a date (I'm getting ahead of myself here). Ironically he's played by the best actor in the movie.

"My chances of never having a decent career after this movie are THIS BIG!" (Pete's the 1 on the left BTW)


We next see a woman visit a catering store and ask for "something unusual and different" to serve for dinner at her daughter Suzanne's birthday party. The store's run by Fuad and he recommends a "Egyptian feast" that "hasn't been prepared for over 5000 years". Seeing nothing strange about a bug eyed weirdo staring daggers at her and rambling about ancient Egyptian catering in his best Bela Lugosi impression, she agrees. When she leaves Fuad veeeeery slooooowly limps to a secret room in his store. Oh yeah, Fuad's supposed to be an old man. I was wondering why he had all that flour in his hair.

Fuad's secret room contains a bloody altar and a spray painted mannequin statue of the "Egyptian Goddess Ishtar". You see Fuad is killing all these women and harvesting their organs to prepare the titular "Blood Feast", a ritualistic dish that will somehow bring Ishtar to life.  I love how this movie doesn't waste any time with things like "mystery" or "letting the audience figure things out with the characters" but instead tells us everything about the killer upfront before our hero even knows who he is. It's hilarious seeing how long it takes for people to figure out that the obviously evil guy is evil.

Later that same night Fuad attacks a couple making out on a beach, chops off the top of the woman's head and removes her brain with incredible ease (that sure is 1 sharp knife!). The scene is the worst edited in the whole movie-there's so many rapid fire jump cuts that I don't honestly don't know how this girl was murdered.

 Of note: the producer's pet snake got loose during the filming of this scene and Herschell left it in the movie. Good call.


The fuzz arrives at the scene but despite seeing a slow moving elderly man with flour in his hair cut out gooey chunks of his girlfriend's brain, the boyfriend can't describe the killer beyond saying he had grey hair and "glowing" eyes(?) because "It happened so fast!". The editing's so bad the characters can't figure out what's goin' on!
Pete does find out from beach girl's parents that she went to the same book club as bath tub girl but this movie's only 67 minutes long and the teens making out at the drive in are liable to get bored so we cut to Fuad cutting out some lady's tongue in the only good scene in the movie.

Anyway now that we're 20 minutes into the movie let's meet our secondary protagonist!

 This is Suzette. She's played by Connie Mason, who was Playboy's Miss June 1963. Her acting's about what you'd expect from a Playboy playmate.

We meet Suzette, who's talking to her mother. The amount of plot coincidences in these next few scenes is absurd. Suzette not only happens to be interested in Egyptian culture but just so happens to be going to a lecture about Egyptian cults that very night with her boyfriend who just so happens to be Pete. But not only are they going to a lecture about Egyptian cults, the lecture turns out to be about the cult of Ishtar! Small world, ain't it?

 If more lectures contained fantasy re-enactments of gruesome dismemberment I might have actually paid attention to them in school.


After the lecture Pete and Suzette sit in their car and talk to pad out the movie. Ed Wood would be proud of this scene because ala Plan 9 the background constantly shifts from day to night. This is the only scene this even happens in so I don't know what the hell is going on here. The only plot relevant thing that happens here is that Pete tunes into plot point radio and learns that a girl Ramses attacked survived and is at the hospital (3 attacks in 1 night? He's on a roll!). I'd ask why the station didn't inform their lead detective this themselves but seeing the level of intelligence Pete's displayed this whole movie I don't think I would tell him either.

Pete doesn't get much out of the girl other than the word "E-tar" repeated over and over again. Even though he was literally just at a lecture about the blood feasts of Ishtar, he's completely flabbergasted by this so and goes back to the station to whine some more about how much he sucks at his job. In the meantime Ramses gets an order for his book Ancient Weird Religious Rites (this was a book bathtub girl was reading earlier) and sets out to kill her. Yes folks, Ramses has been killing anybody who's ordered his book and the cops still couldn't figure out any kind of connection between the killings.

But wait, it gets better. In yet another startling coincidence, Suzette's friend Trudy was the 1 who ordered the book. Ramses knocks her unconscious on Suzette's porch in broad daylight and carries her back to his place with nobody seeing him doing this. I guess it's not just the cops who are stupid in this movie...then again, it does take place in Miami.

A week later Pete calls up Suzette from the station to tell her they haven't found Trudy yet (no surprises there). Since Suzette's 1 personality trait is "perky" she immediately changes the subject from her friend being kidnapped by a maniac to talk about her party. After telling Pete that Fuad is serving an Egyptian feast for dinner in honor of the goddess Ishtar he's initially oblivious as usual. Then it finally occurs to him "E-TAR SOUNDS KIND OF LIKE ISHTAR!" and starts putting the pieces together. After getting the rest of the force to search the catering store they almost instantly stumble across the secret room and find Trudy's mutilated corpse. In a rare instance of foresight the cops remember Fuad's at Suzette's and race over there.

 "Hey! I ordered my human flesh well done, not medium rare!"


At Suzette's party, Fuad convinces her to lie down on the kitchen table with her eyes closed and say the proper words to offer herself up to Ishtar. Pete and Suzette really do deserve each other, they're both dumb as bricks. Before Ramses can knife her though, Suzette's mother walks in and screams, causing him to stop and limp for his life. What the hell was he expecting when he decided to try and butcher somebody in the kitchen of a crowded house? Oh well, this recap's been going on long enough so let's wrap this up.

Pete and the other cops chase Ramses into a junkyard, he tries to escape in the back of a dump track and gets crashed. Yep, Pete doesn't even stop the villain himself but he does make an overly long speech describing every detail of the detective work used to get there even though that was 10 minutes ago. The end.

 You know it's a special kind of movie when a garbage truck accomplishes more than the main characters.



Review: This is a wonderfully bizarre mess of a movie that couldn't have been made by anybody besides H.G. Lewis. It's got all his trademarks: campy acting, ridiculous dialogue, repetitive music, strange editing & cinematography and a thin plot only there to string all the exploitation elements along. The acting from everybody except Kerwin is terrible all around but what do you expect when most of the people made to say and do this ridiculous stuff weren't even real actors anyway? Mal Arnold's manic performance takes the cake though and makes every scene he's in unintentionally hilarious.

Lets face it though: nobody ever watched Blood Feast for the acting or the story. They watched it for the gore. Even though it's all mannequin parts, stage blood, meat, etc. to me it still works all these years later. Maybe it's how old this film is. Maybe it's because Lewis mixed in real animal organs with the fake stuff. Maybe I'm so pissed off by crappy CGI gore that the DIY nature of the blood 'n guts here looks better by comparison. Whatever the case, the gore's obviously the main attraction here and it's done well.

There's some slow parts of this movie so it's not an all out laugh riot like, say, Troll 2 but it's got enough unintentionally hilarious moments and gross out gore effects to make it a good choice for any bad movie night. Plus it's historically significant too!

Rating: 3/4. Recommended!