Video Nasty #8: Blood Feast

Synopsis: Local caterer and occult obsessive Faud Ramesis has been asked to cook for Mrs Fremont's dinner party. He's planning an egyptian feast, something which hasn't been attempted for thousands of years. Unfortunately Tescos is all out of female body parts, so he takes it upon himself to hunt the local free range birds.

In 2010 i'm attempting to watch and review all of the films on the DPP Video Nasty list. Click here for an explanation.

Blood Feast (1963) is the original splatter movie, making its director, Herschell Gorden Lewis, the godfather of gore. Lewis' previous films were mild skin flicks, and as such Blood Feast has the aesthetic and quality of a low budget soft-core porn movie; everything is shot on a single camera and the three wall sets are gloriously poor, spoilt by the sound stage making all dialog echo unnaturally for such a small room. The low-rent quality of filmmaking actually compliments the script, which is more camp than a carry on film made by John Waters. The dialog is dumber than a Michael Bay first draft and the actors would be relegated to 'second sheep' in a primary school nativity play. But that really doesn't matter, because Blood Feast isn't a serious film, it's a bloody, silly, splatter flick made to make the drive-in audience simultaneously scream and howl with laughter.


The gore is so ridiculously it's sublime. Legs are dismembered and skin-flick beauties are decapitated, all with the camera lingering on the gore for far longer than required, like a kid poking a dead body with a stick. My favourite sequence shows Ramesis ripping out a victim's tongue. After he's yanked it out we see an excessive amount of blood pouring from the victim's mouth, the flow clear helped by the actress' still attached tongue, clearly in cheek. It's obvious that the film's miniscule budget has gone into the special effects, and the film's better for it. It's in no way realistic, but then what fun gore film is?

Faud Ramesis is the star of the piece, hammed up wonderfully by Mal Arnold. As if his huge hypno-caterpillar eyebrows rendered purple by the technicolor wasn't odd enough, he has a Keyser Söze style limp, making escape from the scene painfully slow. Ramesis wants to bring his beloved Egpytian god Ishtar back from the dead, which requires a blood feast of women's body parts. When a customer asks him to arrange a dinner party, he can't belive his luck. 'It's a sign to begin' he effuses to his Ishtar effigy, ignoring the fact that as he is a caterer this is hardly an infrequent event.


The two inept detectives are on the puzzling case of the murders, spending most of their time on an echoey soundstage discussing how horrifying it all is. Serendipitously, Detective Thornton has been attending weekly egyptian history lecturers with his girlfriend Suzette 'All these murders take the joy out of everything' Fremont, which still doesn't help him solve the murder until the last few minutes of the film. The paucity of investigation could be excused if the book 'Ancient Weird Religious Rites' written by Ramesis hadn't been found at the scene of the first murder.

Much like the greatest film ever made, Evil Dead 2 (obviously), Blood Feast doesn't take itself seriously and manages to use gore in a fun slapstick way. There's little surprise that this is cult film, and it's definitely something I'll be watching again in the future (not a huge undertaking, considering the 65 minute runtime). It's a shame that much of the work in the genre this film defined only takes inspiration from the gore, leaving the fun behind.