In previously entries, I may have touched on the idea of there being a canon of trash cinema. Trash doesn't necessarily conform to such structure but there are films that fans of amusingly or charmingly bad cinema hold sacred, and have touched on hundreds of times. Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake always shows up, and I'm sure much of the totius corporis of Jess Franco and Al Adamson instantly qualify. Blood Feast is one of the cornerstones of this canon--for it is a revolution, a shattering of old shackles bound to the ankles of horror films. This was when gore started to become big, once and for all. Director Herschell Gordon "H.G." Lewis finds himself today in the dubious honor of sharing the title "Godfather of Gore" with Lucio Fulci, and most of the movies Lewis went on to make became similar trash masterpieces. To review Blood Feast is redundant, but this site is about sharing a certain type of love for movies, no matter how many times before it's been said. And because Blood Feast means so much to the world of trash, it's a great first-time movie for neophytes for the genre.
Someone is running around killing people and stealing their body parts! Eyes, brains, kneecaps, and tongues are all ripped clean from a mad, unknown maniac! I shouldn't say "unknown," of course--the movie makes it no secret that the murderer is the cryptic Fuad Ramses, a caterer who also worships the goddess Ishtar. Ishtar demands blood! Blood that flows from the conclusion of the "Egyptian Feast," a meal of flesh that is catered to the most obnoxiously bad white person actors ever. There are a couple of cops who are chasing them but that doesn't really matter. What matters is flashbacks to ancient Egyptian flashbacks and, as always, the violence. Mostly the violence. It all concludes in the inside of a garbage truck, with a final wash of Technicolor gore.
Blood Feast is a classic by same merit that makes a "good" movie a classic--it is endlessly entertaining. It is a trash classic, however, because it does not make you think. Rather, it's sort of a middle finger to the movie of the genius. Like any trash film, it's probably not something you want to overindulge in if you value yourself as an intellectual or if you want to be comprehensible in film discussions. (As a self-confessed idiot I've enjoyed my life of self-sabotage.) But it's still an eye-opening experience to see something that has this much pure audience pull in it. The word "pure" is meant to serve a certain purpose here, because '60s gore-trash represents a kinder, gentler sort of graphic violence than the nihilistic punk stuff that would rise from the '70s. H.G. Lewis usually made sure to have fun with his movies. They're bright and colorful, even beyond the blood, so there's always a sunny aesthetic to them. And, there is always goofiness in them. The soundtrack is loaded with slapstick, and everyone, especially Fuad Ramses, overacts to high Heaven. Compare this to a movie released just eight years later, Kent Bateman's Headless Eyes. That is a grungy, unforgiving movie that features similar violence (namely, eye-plucking) that ends up coming across as visceral rather than bouncy. Headless Eyes is still a great movie, but it's great for other reasons. It forms its own canon with gritty flicks like Messiah of Evil and Meatcleaver Massacre, whereas Blood Feast errs closer to the side of Adam West's Batman.
I do have to give more attention to the acting, because the fun Lewis evidently had passed through to his cast. Some people, like the guys playing the cops, treat it like a job--they have a hardboiled performance. But the lady who commissions Ramses for the Egyptian Feast at the beginning not only gets amazing lines ("Yes...yes...we must do it."), but she misses cues and trips over her lines pretty consistently. The king, of course, is Ramses himself. He gets no shortage of mugging, eye-closeups, or space for his body performances. Plus, he is apparently supposed to be elderly, by his actor, Mal Arnold, was a whole thirty years old at the time of production. So they just rub a bunch of flour on his hair and eyebrows. It's fine. What? Money was tight! They couldn't afford to reshoot that flubbed dialogue, or get actual makeup for their actors aside from they brought from home. What matters is the gore. It is through the gore that the revolution is transmitted.
Blood Feast was a notable contributor to the unraveling of traditional cinema. It is the sand that was fused to make the dark mirror of those movies that thrive on character development, coherent storytelling, and expertly-crafted effects. Here, we get the same joy we'd find in a Hitchcock film, except we barely meet the characters, the storyline is slipshod at best (you'll note how little time I spent on it), and the appearance of the film betrays a lack of funding. Any famous first of this type is worthy of examination, and I'm pleased to say that Blood Feast lives up to its legend.
To put it another way, here's a quote from one of the theater managers, who dropped it after Lewis asked how the movie had done: "These yahoos are laughin' and scratchin' and slashin' the seats and shootin' bullet holes in the screen. Then up comes that tongue scene. All you see is a bunch of white eyeballs!"
Of course, the story of Blood Feast doesn't end on the silver screen. In fact, it's just the beginning. H.G. Lewis wrote a novelization of it too!!
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