Blood Feast

1963
Dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis

A bushy-eyebrowed caterer messily murders various women in order to resurrect an ancient Egyptian goddess. Several inept detectives attempt to track him down and put a stop to his nefarious deeds. 

Produced by exploitation guru David F. Friedman, and economically directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, Blood Feast abounds with an impish glee and carefree abandon. With not a shred of decency or taste in sight, inconveniences such as plot and story are flung aside in favour of shoddily staged scenes of carnage and makeshift mayhem. Hurrah! This title holds the dubious honour of being the first ever ‘gore movie’ or ‘splatter film’ – films centred around gory special effects and scenes of depravity and sadism. Back in the early Sixties all this was new and subversive and naturally horror audiences thirstily lapped it up as they clambered to catch a glimpse of what would become a milestone in schlock cinema.

Anyone who has seen Blood Feast will know that it is a film designed around a number of grisly special effects-heavy scenes in which various characters are hacked, slashed, decapitated, de-tongued and generally slathered in their own gore – all in the name of entertainment! These moments are sprinkled sporadically throughout a vague and plodding story with an emphasis on gross out gore effects and close-ups of hapless victims being outlandishly murdered by a creepy caterer wielding a copy of ‘Ancient Weird Religious Rites’. 


Prowess and subtlety are not words in Lewis’ vocabulary, and we wouldn’t want them to be. The film’s very raison d’être is to provide audiences with an abundance of over the top and gory imagery and showcase the splattery effects. Everything plays second fiddle to this. The acting is gobsmackingly awful and yet immensely amusing. This exchange is just one example of the sort of staggeringly bad dialogue and woeful delivery one can expect whilst wallowing in this sordid viewing experience. As dated as the special effects are, a couple of them still manage to seize attention – particularly those featured in the shot of the dead women on the beach, her head a bloody mess, and the scene in which a character has her tongue slowly ripped out of her throat whilst flailing around a grotty motel room is also disturbing.

This sublimely trashy film firmly falls into the ‘so bad it’s entertaining’ category. Completely tensionless, it more than compensates with its sheer camp value. Blood Feast is cheap, nasty and a bloody fun time. I watched it through the bottom of a wine glass at a recent screening in Belfast’s Safehouse Gallery as part of a new film night dubbed Texploitation. Organised by local comedians and fans of exploitation movies, Texploitation is set to take place at least once a month for the foreseeable future. For more info, simply follow the linkage…  

Popular posts from this blog

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (2010)

Image
Dir. Andy de Emmony After placing his senile wife in a care home, retired astronomer James Parkin (John Hurt) heads for the coast to revisit their ‘old haunts’, including the now out-of-season hotel they honeymooned in. By day he is stalked along the windswept beaches by a spectral figure dressed in white, and by night he is terrorised by strange sounds and someone, or something, attempting to enter his room… In the 2000s BBC4 attempted to reignite the old Ghost Story at Christmas tradition by adapting MR James’s A View from a Hill (2005) and Number 13 (2006). This series was seemingly short lived though, as their next outing wasn’t until 2010, and an unusual reinterpretation of James’s classic chiller Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad . While de Emmony’s direction captures the atmosphere and tone of James very well, this film differs significantly from other adaptations, including Jonathan Miller’s supremely unsettling 1968 take . Neil Cross’s screenplay only incorpo
Read more

Caveat (2020)

Image
Isaac, a brooding drifter suffering from memory loss, agrees to look after Olga, the niece of his acquaintance Moe. A troubled woman prone to bouts of catatonia, Olga lives in an old, ramshackle house on an isolated island in the middle of a dark lake. Isaac agrees to wear a chained harness that prevents him from going into certain rooms. He gradually comes to learn of the unsettling history of the house and the unquiet dead it harbours within its walls... Written and directed by Damian McCarthy,  Caveat  is steeped in the Gothic tradition. With distinct echoes of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, it is ripe with a lingering atmosphere of morbidity and decay. McCarthy's screenplay toys with themes such as psychological rot, dark family secrets, and the aftermath of unspeakable violence and cruelty. The story unfolds within the creepy confines of the lonely, mouldy house, with myriad forbidden rooms, hidden passageways and concealed bloody secrets. The house itself is cut off from civili
Read more

Otherworldly Encounters on Halloween

Image
Oíche Shamhna shona duit. To celebrate All Hallow’s Eve, my dear friend Marie – a writer and folklorist based in Missouri - has put together a podcast exploring first-hand paranormal experiences that took place on Halloween. The stories and accounts are shared from r/Paranormal , The Fairy Census , and the Dúchas Schools Collection (part of the National Folklore Collection UCD Digitization Project).  Between the stories, one of which is read by yours truly, Marie explores some of the history and folklore surrounding the traditions of Halloween, or Samhein, as it was known in Ireland where it originates from. An important festival in the ancient Celtic calendar to mark the end of summer, Samhein (Irish for November), is the night when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead becomes thinnest, allowing souls of the deceased to pass through into our world and roam freely. The night we call Halloween in English, is Oíche Shamhna: literally Samhain (November) Eve. To listen t
Read more