While Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat was Herschell Gordon Lewis' third-to-last film, it is nonetheless a fitting finale to his career. I wish I had been the age I am now in 2002 so I could properly bask in the hype that surely arose when a sequel to Blood Feast was announced, and yet I think it's just as fun to look at this movie fourteen years later. How long-ago and embarrassing the early 2000s seem. Yes, they're largely embarrassing because that was when I was a kid, but a lot of people say that the 20th Century had a particular hold on trash that our present time has yet to duplicate. If you cruise the "21st Century" tag here on the A-List, you'll find movies that range from Noah to Five Across the Eyes. We've managed to do strange just fine--just not nearly as frequently, it seems.
But what about the mega-terror of the embarrassment that is the self-aware super-late sequel? There's nothing but cringing in movies like Hobgoblins 2--if the first movie was bad, in ways that both killed it (as in Hobgoblins) or let it thrive (such as Blood Feast), self-awareness is never, ever, ever, ever the answer. Shitty self-awareness is why people hate postmodernism. And yet, it's an inevitable product of postmodernism itself--we really are moving into so-called "transmodernism" as postmodernism itself becomes a joke. We are reacting to and building upon an art movement that has become popular. As you might expect by the fact that I'm even talking about postmodernism or transmodernism in the first place, I enjoy good postmodern works. And going into this movie, I tried to put faith in Lewis as an intelligent and ambitious but occasionally clumsy and wrong-headed director--someone who would make good use of the lateness of his sequel. I like to think that my faith was well-placed.
After an extremely bizarre Beast of Yucca Flats-style opening, involving two roadkill-eating hillbillies murdering each other for no discernible reason, we cut to a young man moving into his new catering shop. He is Fuad Ramses III, grandson of the killer from the first Blood Feast. He seems to be an ordinary fellow at first, even if he's warned by the local police detective that the locals probably won't trust him for what his grandfather did--inside the very halls of Fuad's new digs, even! However, Fuad III discovers his predecessor's old statue to Ishtar, though it clearly isn't the same spraypainted mall mannequin from the first movie. The statue seems to possess him, and he begins to transform into a copy of his grandfather, adopting his speech patterns and tendency to arrange "Egyptian feasts." This seems to be an act of fate, as an injury incurred by one of his victims gives him Fuad I's Torgo-esque limp! From there history repeats itself, as Fuad tracks down the guests of the wedding party he is to cater to, removing their body parts and turning them into food as a sacrifice to his goddess. That's it, really, until it reaches a relatively straightforward--albeit pretty hilarious--climax.
Blood Feast 2 has the primary fault of being overly repetitive. Like A Taste of Blood, BF2AUCE is a long film and not merely by H.G.'s standards. Most of this time is spent with builds up to and executions of either gory murder sequences (often featuring by-now familiar Goofy H.G. Lewis Songs) or scenes of women acting dumb and taking their clothes off. Fine. Blood Feast had that too, albeit to a more minimized extent--Blood Feast 2 has more nudity and is generally gorier. And certainly anyone who is a diehard Blood Feast fan is going to want to see more of the same. It's played with creatively at points. Lewis lampshades his own hammy dialogue, and has managed to get enough of the main cast to replicate the strange combination of wooden clunkiness and community-theatre scenery-chewing that his original cast insisted on, in a way that is clearly tongue-in-cheek. (It was probably tongue-in-cheek back then, too.) And yet self-awareness is not always salvation. Blood Feast was barely over an hour. To essentially do what that first film did for an extra hundred minutes stretches my ability to use pastiche as a defense...which I should say is saying something. Yet, it is good to see the master behind the wheel here--for indeed, there were Blood Feast knockoffs here and there, which generally lacked Lewis' panache (Bloodsucking Pharaohs from Pittsburgh, anybody?). Lewis does a good job of preserving the spirit he had in '63, though he does so perhaps a bit too strictly. (Weirdly, the best metaphor I came up with while watching it was that it was like a porn. Everything was meant to set up the actors to Go At It, whether that was stripping or killing, in the place of fucking. I've heard of that sort of accusation being leveled at gore films before, that they structurally resemble sexual material and that that adds to their supposed depravity. I don't really think I'm in a position to judge one way or the other, but after seeing many gore films in my life, including a depressing number of [bad] torture porn films, none struck me so much as being like porn than Blood Feast 2.)
All U Can Eat is much more directly a comedy than Blood Feast, which made me dread watching it a little bit. As a rule, I hate, hate, hate horror comedies, and I was worried that Lewis was going to go all Poultrygeist on me. I like to think that the good stuff in this movie makes up for the bad. This movie is pretty sexist--I expected it. "Women are dumb and bitchy but they look good nekkid and scream well" is the general maxim here, and it is usually played for laughs or general sleaze-rooted humor. Plus, it gets old fast when we keep seeing that Detectives Myers and Loomis (HAW HAW HAW GEDIT) are, respectively, prone to vomiting around corpses and being obsessed with food. Because Loomis is FAT, and fat people are simply OBSESSED with food. As the Traflamadorians say, so it goes. I enjoy these movies, love them even, and will return to them repeatedly, and yet I hate the idea that I'm supposed to turn off my brain while watching them when it comes to sexism and stupid jokes. There is no happy medium for me, and this is why nobody watches horror comedies with me. That having been said, I will still laugh at offensive jokes. John Waters has a cameo in this movie, and it's great. Maybe it's just that I love seeing John Waters in things, especially when his character is just Waters-as-himself in costume. I also laughed when Fuad started arguing about Detective Myers' use of the phrase "turn up missing"--after all, someone can't "turn up" if they're missing, right? It is, as one should expect from a 21st Century horror comedy, far from perfect. And there's that paradox again. You really can't expect something even close to perfect, can you...?
So it goes, so it goes. I really, really liked this movie, even if I won't judge anyone who cuts out twenty minutes or so from their personal viewing. I'm glad I'm not disappointed. 2016 wasn't a great year, let's just say. I don't know what comes up after here. I'm glad, however, that H.G. Lewis was a man who existed. He and others like him deserve to be remembered, because even if their movies were trash, they're another way out of the horrors of our horrible world. And they remind us it's not horrible at all. We have...entertainment. We have people striving to make people laugh or scream or just be happy, and we have the times when those people marvelously succeed. I hope I've joined Mr. Lewis and others in helping to keep your spirits up a little. Because in all likelihood, you deserve it.
We'll see you in 2017! Thank you so much, all of you, for stopping by. None of this would be possible without you. You are the true A-Listers. Or just generally awesome. Have a happy New Year. OR ELSE.
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