Review #513: 'Blood Feast' (1963)

Back in the early 1960's, when drive-in theaters were still all the rage and the place to go for some haunted house and alien invasion B-movie thrills, producers were completely oblivious to a colossal gap in the market. That is until 1963, when producer David F. Friedman and director Herschell Gordon Lewis came up with a 'script' called Egyptian Blood Feast, a film that would be designed to not only show gratuitous violence, but to have the explicit gore as its main selling point. So Friedman hyped up publicity by handing out 'vomit bags' at screenings, and going as far as taking out an injunction on its own film so kick up a fuss. The film was pants, but the legacy is history, and so was born gore cinema, a sub-genre that horny teenagers still flock to in order to get their cheap thrills.

The film follows the exploits of Muad Ramses (Mal Arnold), an exotic caterer and author of 'Ancient Weird Religious Rights'. Socialite Dorothy Freemont (Lyn Bolton) enters his store and asks Ramses to create a party to remember for her daughter Suzette (Connie Mason), to which Ramses obliges, hoping to create an Egyptian feast that will re-awaken his god Ishtar. The town is beset by gruesome murders, with bodies being butchered and dismembered, puzzling Detective Pete Thornton (William Kerwin), who is co-incidentally studying Egyptian history with, co-incidentally (there's a pattern emerging!) Suzette. Will the detectives be able to unravel the mystery? Will Ramses create his feast, causing the re-birth of Ishtar? Will anyone point out how ridiculous Ramses' fake eyebrows are?

It is easy to make fun of this film - this is H.G. Lewis after all. Yet while every conceivable factor of Blood Feast's production is of the lowest standard, you can't argue with the film's importance. Ramses is an instantly forgettable madman, but he is the original machete-wielding maniac, paving the way for countless slasher imitators, from Michael Myers to Jason Voorhees. Lewis himself said it best - "I've often referred to Blood Feast as a Walt Whitman poem. It's no good, but it was the first of its type." Shockingly, this is arguably Lewis' most gruesome, with the gore factors dropping noticeably with follow-ups Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965) (now dubbed The Gore Trilogy). At only 67 minutes, this still tries the patience, and has more plot holes than I care to mention (maybe to stop the killings, someone should have told Ramses that Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess!), but its historical significance has cemented it's place in horror history.


Directed by: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Starring: William Kerwin, Mal Arnold, Connie Mason
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie