“The worst horror movie I have ever seen.”
STEPHEN KING
Who made it? – Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis| Written by Allison Louise Downe | Director Of Photography Herschell Gordon Lewis | Special Effects
Who’s in it? – Mal Arnold| William Kerwin | Connie Mason | Lyn Bolton | Scott H. Hall
If you weren’t watching this, you might have been watching… Cleopatra / The Birds / The Great Escape
Production info, wiki page and whatnot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Feast
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056875/
What’s it all about?
Well who’s this cutie? We open in a small apartment. From the snappy décor, stylings, furnishing and amounts of velour, wood and wall-to wall Formica we are knee deep in the 1960s. The whole place looks like Truman Capote got let loose with a Habitat catalogue. And here she comes, a bottle-blonde bomb-shell, all piled-high beehive and Monroe curvy wiggles. She is getting ready for her bath in a manner that only happens when men are typing the screenplay. But – rather than sultry saxophone soundtrack and a feeling of saucy soapy sexiness more befitting the atmos – thundering timpani beats out an impending dummm-dummmmm dummm-dummmm like we were rowing a longship or summoning a Pharoah.
Our bathing beauty flicks the nob of a nearby tranny (what we would now call, turning on the radio). And, as per many a TV detective show, out spools an announcement: “A murder! A mutilated body! Police Request! Women, lock your doors! Stay Inside!” And so on. Our model seems unirked by this and proceeds to busy herself with towels and talc. Off comes the slinky polyester frock to reveal – swit swoo! – a Playtex pointy set of lingerie. Where is Leslie Philips with an E-type jag and a well-timed “ding dong!” when you need him? Climbing into the bath, the timpani still thundering away – we close up on her reading material. Left to one side on the bath to avoid splashing is her choice of book. Not for her, the current 1963 bestsellers: The Bell Jar, The Planet Of The Apes or indeed Dr Suess’s Hop On Pop. No no, our heroine is thumb deep in a leather-bound edition of “Ancient Weird Religious Rites.”
But before she has time to sit back, allow some bubbles to teasingly allow a glimpse of saucy nipple and justify the X Certificate… A shadow falls across the Radox, timpani Frenzy, and dan-dan-dahhhh! It’s a killer! It’s a murderer! It’s what happens if Michael Richards and Charlie Chaplin has a baby! Dark suit, wild eyes and the most preposterous sprayed grey pomp and eyebrows since Parker drove Lady Penelope.
She screams! His knife comes down! Cut to his Marx Brothers style eye-rolling as we see her flesh, her blood, all pink and squelchy on the end of his blade. A Rolf Harris Stylophone takes over the two-note plodding soundtrack and we see the poor woman’s remains. She lies, dead, with one eye removed.
But Chaplin Richards doesn’t stop there. From behind we grimace at the elbow action, back and forth, back and forth as he saws away at something. We can only hope it’s the shower unit. But no, turning he hold aloft her lower leg. First an eye, now a leg, like it were some grotesque game of Operation. But given the woman’s nose doesn’t light up and there’s no buzzer, into the bag the items go and he’s away, leaving us to stare at the stumpy close up of a poor female who will never again soap up a boob or enjoy clunky radio exposition
As my proctologist likes to say, what an opening. Cut to credits! Timpani is back, joined by the brass section as the legend is revealed. We in are in the company of the modest Box office Spectaculars Inc. A Friedman-Lewis’s production. Over the image of the Sphinx – with a nose more missing than if she’d been a member of the Groucho club during the nineties – it’s…Blood feast! Blood spurts and squirts on the screen and we get our cast and production list. And blimey, we’re only four minutes in.
So if that’s our victim and that’s our baddie? Hell, lets meet the heroes. It’s the door to the Homicide Bureau Chief of detectives. In a fixed midshot, we meet our two cops. Detective Pete and his boss, Chief Detective Frank. Shirt sleeves, fags, oiled hair, grey suits and tie clips, they are discussing a murder case.
No breaks, no clues, no fingerprints. They got nuthin’ and they’re pretty damned well pissed off about it, goddamit. Pouring coffee, hands on hips, chewing cigarettes and sweating in the Miami heat, they can do little it appears, but discuss brutal killings, vent frustration, read their lines off cue cards stuck to the pot plants and request Pete ensure emergency broadcasts repeat every half hour. Their plan appears to be to pace, the room, swear, and hope the killer does it again btu this time with more carelessness. Sherlock and Watson, these chaps ain’t. But they’re on the sides of the angels and our best bet and apprehending Richards Chaplin so we will have to hope and wait.
Now we’re going shopping. Jump to a catering company sign. Yes, it’s the delicious world of “Fuad Ramses exotic catering,” all painted in a mock Egyptian style. And who is this behind the counter of dry goods and tinned meats? Holy Hieroglyphics, its Richard Chaplin. Or as we now realise…Fuad Ramses. The hair is greyer and bigger, the eyebrows thicker and wilder, the complexion tanned and lacquered. The eye rolling more akin to a bowling alley. Tingaling on the bell and its Fuad’s only customer.
Or at least, the only one we see, only one we are concerned with and possible the only woman in California requiring Faud’s particular set of skills. Well it’s Dorothy Freemont. Fiddle-de-dee, aint she a well to do dame, with her fancy frock and big old spotty hat. She needs Faud for a special occasion. Her daughter Suzette’s 18th birthday. Faud has come recommended, although Lord knows who by or why, given what we’re about to discover are his preparation methods. Something usual, Freemont wants. Totally different.
At which point Faud gives his creepy pitch. From his delivery it would appear he has spent less time reading Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends & Influence People, and more time curled up in his pyramid with “The Vincent Price Guide To Freaking Customer The Fuck Out“. With creaky, croaky am-dram tones he suggests to Freemont that yes. He can cater for – dan dan daaah, huge pause…unusual affairs! What about an Egyptian Feast? An authentic dinner! The ACTUAL feast of an ancient Pharoah, not served on earth for 5000 years?” Well Mrs Freemont is delighted with this suggestion for, it appears two reasons. Firstly, she reveals her teenage daughter Suzette happens to be studying Egyptian culture. Who’d have thunk? But also because Faud appears to glare and stare at the woman putting her into some kind of Hypnotic zoomy trance for a moment. Is this to secure the sale? TO put her in his power? TO ensure a non-fundable 15 % deposit? It’s not clear. But what is clear is that the plot is set. Freemont hauls herself and her preposterous millinery out of the shop and Faud if free to rub his hands together like he was playing Fagin in a pantomime and then limp theatrically across the store to a backroom lit like a New Orleans photography lab.
Ah-hah. Now this is a food preparation area. The plot thickens, as does, it appears the stew. In a backroom draped with red curtains and flaming torches, Fuad prays to his Egyptian Goddess.
A large gold painted plastic statue, heavy with the mascara and draped with blue polyester, Faud stirs a steaming pot of human casserole and chants, “I am your slave oh lady of the dark moon.” Yep, he’s bonkers. But it seems he has a plan to bring this statue gid to life and it involves, we can assume, a recipe which is two parts oregano, one part garlic and eight parts Tampa Bay blonde girl.
Our characters in place, we pick up the pace. Another Miami blonde, all low heels and Alice bands, clicks her way across a parking lot to pick up the daily paper. Handily holding it out at 45 degrees so she can’t read it, but we can, we zoom in to see the splash headline: LEGS CUT OFF!
nd then a quick montage cut about the town to see other distress commuters reading the same news. It would seem a pathological killer is on the loose and the police can’t find a clue. But let’s see if that’s right…
“A pathological killer on the loose and we can’t find one clue!” yells Chief Detective Frank. Yep, we’re back at the Homicide Bureau. Under harsh studio lights, the cops and chewing and pacing once again, in fresh shirt sleeves, new tie clips and under another scoop of Brylcreem. Have they just found out about the dead girl in the bath from reading the newspaper? It wouldn’t surprise me. But what they do know is that our one-eyed hopalong bathtub beauty belonged to a book group. Is that a clue? Well it’s something. The cops decide to split up and actually do some policework besides drinking coffee and reading tabloids. One’s off to the morgue. The other is going to hang about and see if someone else gets murdered.
Well surprise surprise, someone is about to get murdered. No bath this time. Faud is stalking the classic horror victim – the canoodling kissing couple. They lie in what is either the soft glow of the Miami moon or the piecing glare of a klieg spotlight on the Tampa beach. She’s all capri pants and “It’s getting late, shouldn’t we be getting back…” while of course he’s all quiffy charm and “heyy baby, I’m here…Now…prove you love me,” which is frankly unnecessary. But his aggressive heavy-handedness is short lived as a timpani drum appears and Faud is there.
He gets a clonk on the head, Looney Toons style, but she is not so fortunate. Organ chords, Phantom of the Opera style, he plunges down upon her, fussing at her neck, all in shadow, blocking our view. Eventually he pulls back and we see…urgh. A close-up on his hands full of dripping innards. He begins to tidy away his kill with a gruesome shot of the poor girl, top of head mutilated, blood and gore splashed over the sand. A beach snake sniffs at the gooey remains.
Cut to the cops on the beach. The greasy boyfriend in a comical Wile E Coyote head bandage is sobbing. The brisk detectives Fred and Pete are all sharp suits, pads, pens and questions. “What do you make of these murders, Frank?” “He took the brains.” They agree whoever the killer his, he’s got a sick, sick mind. Indeed. And now a spare one. And then its snappy procedures as one heads to the parents, the other accompanying the body to the morgue.
But at last a break! Back at the Homicide office, Pete and Frank are knocking back more cold coffee and dragging back more hot cigarettes as the dead girl’s mother has a breakdown, sobbing away. A stoic husband comforts her and does his best to answer Pete and Fred’s clunky questions. No, she was not a gadabout. She went steady. Any clubs or organisations? She had lots of friends. Many folk she knew through her book club. Book club?! This appears to have the sleepy synapses of the cops snapping. A book club! The girl in the bath had a book! This, it appears, passes for a clue. Which it is I suppose, if you only have a 67-minute run-time.
Now we’re back in Faud’s kitchen to see how the casserole is coming, like it were a Saturday morning cooking show. It’s a miracle he doesn’t have a couple of guests at the table supping white wine and saying “so is that just ordinary supermarket brain?” and chucking about soggy bottoms. But no, under the red lamp, with a big iron school dinner pot, Faud stirs the dry ice and entrails, chanting in is creaky Peter Lorre voice about the ancient formula needed for your rebirth.” The statue stands to one side, decidedly unimpressed with the performance.
Another murder? Hell why not. Times ticking on a Faud has a party to cater for in 2 weeks. Now, whether the party meal and the rebirth of an Egyptian god are somehow linked is not clear. Is the party merely another way of sourcing teenage ingredients? In bulk, as it were? Or does the ritual require acolytes to chant and watch and stand around holding twiglets? So far it’s not clear. But what we do know is Faud hasn’t finished shopping. So we’re back in the Miami sunshine as Fuad spies on yet another couple of randy lovebirds.
Wheeling into their apartment complex in a Pulp Fiction style block, a man drunk at 2 in the afternoon, natty captains cap on his head, bombshell beauty on his arm wobbles out of his convertible and takes his lady to her door. He’s not gone ten seconds before Faud cues his local timpani and Stylophone combo and knocking on her door, bursting past and hauling her to the bedroom. As if crossing off an imaginary shopping list (eye, check. Leg? Check. Brain? check) he is now in the market for a nice bit of tongue. A grotesquely pervy gropey fingering then commences as he shoves his digits into the poor girl’s mouth and pretty much gets her face to third base.
After far, far too long she falls backwards and Faud hold sup his trophy. About 10 inches of fleshy pink teenager tongue. On the bed, the girl lolls and gurgles and dribbles and makes a horrible mess for whoever has to clean the sheets. I mean that’s never coming out.
Meanwhile, detective Pete and his girlfriend are at their weekly Egyptian history lecture.
Yep, you read that right. And in-case this is not enough of a clunky piece of coincidence, Detective Pete’s girlfriend is …Suzette, her of the up-coming birthday party. We need to get that out of the way and we need to get past it. As I say, we’ve less than 80 minutes to get this whole tale told so director Lewis is going to have to simplify his plot strands. But anyway, the cop and the soon to be victim are listening to an elaborate tale of Moses, Israelites and the cult of Ishtar.
Let me take a fast aside here and say that back in 1963 when Gordon Lewis wrote and directed this piece of exploitation nonsense, you could say the word Ishtar without everyone who’d ever subscribed to Variety immediately thinking of the famously flopping 1987, Elaine May directed buddy comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman of the same name.
Pre 87, Ishtar was better known as the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon constructed in 569BC. But those innocent days, thanks to May’s reported $40m loss at the box office, are lost in the sands of time.
Ah well. Where were we? Yes, Ishtar. According to this dreary lecture which has Pete and Suzette in its thrall, head tilted like dogs listening to Stockhausen records. This Goddess was worshipped by the Syrian people over 5000 yrs ago. But unusually for the time, but helpfully for screenwriters, it was an evil worship type of love that thrived on violence and virgin sacrifice.
Helpfully, Lewis doesn’t miss an opportunity to gross out his drive-in audience once again so we are in “pop video flashback territory” for a few minutes to illustrate the lecturer’s point.
As talk grows of slaughter and catching blood in bowls, we watch whispy dry ice and asps squirm over a woman’s half naked body. A knife is plunged into her sternum, deep to the hilt. Blade dripping, a man dressed as an oven ready chicken plucks out the heart and given a good old pummelly squeeze like it were an executive stress-toy. We fade back to the lecture. We are reassured the cult died out by the 2nd of the 15th dynasty but still it is rumoured there are followers of Ishtar today…
See you next week… Round of applause. The crowd mingle, leaving Pete and Suzette to ruminate on the glaring smorgasbord of murder clues which they’re absurdly not picking up on. Pete calls Frank at the station to catch up on any missed events? But nothing. The only clue they’ve got is that the surviving beach boyfriend spoke of seeing the killer’s glowing eyes and grey hair. Not much to go on. Especially if you appear, like these two, to be the worst policemen in the world.
So gallant Pete offers Suzette a fatherly lift home, which is entirely appropriate given their age difference. In fact a great-grandfatherly lift home would be more like it. Pete, randy old goat that he is, decides that the night is too nice and she’s too near the age of consent not to take advantage so they stop off at Happy Day’s “Inspiration Point” or its Tampa equivalent for a little car-based canoodling. “Are we safe?” Suzette asks. And in the most reassuring non-rapey manner, Pete states: You might be safer with the killer than you are with me…” Ffs Pete. A little small talk about how nice they both are, a little side exposition about how they’re both enjoying their Egyptian culture classes. She tells him to stop talking, as if she were Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway, and they’re about to do some harmless tops and fingers (whatever they called that in 1963. Ball the beaver or Make Out with the Melons or whatever.)
But of course they interrupted by the car radio. An old fashioned calling all cars bulletin. Another victim, aged 23. She’s in critical condition (and frankly dear reader, I know how she feels). Well that’s ruined their snog, there’s ineffectual police work to do!
At the hospital, it’s a sorry sight. The victim is bandaged up like The Invisible Man, just a nose slit and enough space for a mouth to explain what happened while someone behind the bed plays a church organ.
Well, she explains, she is Janet Blake. She was attacked by a man with wild eyes! He came from behind a bush… A horrible old man. Kept chanting it was for Eetar! Eetar!” Exhausted by so much plot explaining, Janet collapses. The organist goes into double time. Medics shake their heads. I’m afraid it’s all over.
Eetar? This rings bells with Detective Pete, and the entire audience who by now are screaming at the screen. “It almost sounds familiar…” he muses. For Pete’s sake Fred. Or indeed, for Fred’s sake, Pete. All they can think of is to bring in, quote, “any man over 40 with any kid of record.” Which given the population of Tampa in 1963 was about 700,000 people, is going to take more than just one roomy van. But ah well.
It’s been a few minutes since we checked in with Faud as we assume he stirs half of Janet’s face into his Pyramid flavoured Pot Noodle. So let’s catch him back at the store, opening a letter that’s placing an order for his bestselling book… Ancient Weird Religious Rites. Wait a second! You mean… Faud is the author? Is this how he’s picking his victims? Does this make any sense? Is it important that the people he hacks to pieces have read his book? Does this make the stew taste better? Well it’s not clear.
But what IS clear is that someone called Trudy Sanders has written to him for a copy post haste. A quick phone call (actually a tediously long call as, until the push button phone gains ubiquity in about two-year’s time, we have to sit through the whole rotary dial palaver), he finds where Trudy is staying. Let’s hope its somewhere a bit sexy, think the men in the audience who, having had the promise of the bathing blondes at the beginning, have gone limp waiting for something to happen.
Well Lewis doesn’t disappoint and he knows his audience, as Trudy is sat about a swimming pool with other nubile 60s cuties, all lipstick and bikinis, fluffy mules and beach balls, all to the accompaniment of a jolly piano.
But no sooner have we had a few shots of cleavage, midriff and lower bum cheek, than Trudy has dried off and is leaving the party. Cue the timpani of course – dumm dumm, dumm dummmmm – and Faud is leaping from the bushes and carrying her away.
Well this is getting silly now. The cops are dragged in to investigate Trudy’s disappearance. They presumably question the 10,000 men over 40 to see where they were in the last 24 hrs, but fail to question Faud or indeed ask him what all that dry ice bubbling in his stock room might be about.
Back in the shrine, we find Trudy’s predictable whereabouts. But for once, Faud hasn’t gone straight for the bread-knife and stock cubes. For he needs fresh blood. And either Ishtar or Herschell Gordon Lewis has decided blood, like fresh cream, is best served whipped. So among the statues and blue fabric, Faud whips and lashes at a chained-up Trudy, dark red blood striping and wiping across her bare back as she screams. And screams. And screams. Faud eventually tires of this trope and catches the running rivulets of red in a silver cup to presumably, act as a nice spicy dipping sauce.
Ita? Ishtar! Ita?! ISHTAR!!! Like it was a clue on the 1980s game-show 321, a hundred tonne penny drops and – back at the station – Pete suddenly remembers where he’s heard the word. A slow rotary dial and he’s got the lecturer on the line. Ishtar, the blood feast of Egyptian goddess? Fuad Rameses? Author of…Ancient Weird Religious Rites?!” That’s all the crack detective Pete needed. “Alert all cars! Go to caterers! Get Frank Mason over here fast! I think we got our killer!”
We have just 20 minutes more for the cops to wrap this up.
More thunderous church organ as Faud slides dismembered body parts into what appears to be a cold pizza oven. A long pause and then before you can say, “you sure can rehydrate a pizza” (Copyright Bugle/R Zemeckis 1989 All Rights Reserved), out slides a sizzling piece of leg. Faud’s feast is nearly prepared.
Outside, the cops are pulling up in the sunshine gleaming Plymouth Belvedere’s crawl across baking asphalt and cops pile out, guns at the ready. Man this looks cool. “Hope you got a strong stomach, Frank.” The detectives enter the rear to the sound of bongo and a disturbing organ, discovering the deserted shrine of Ishtar. And talking of disturbing organs, the table has been left somewhat mid-prep. A slow pan down a blood caked woman’s body. Flesh, grue, gore and entrails. Oh, and what looks like a bowl of lightly tossed salad on the side. For the ladies, one assumes. Who ordered this!? The Freemonts! Let’s go!
We are at Suzette’s party, which for a young teenager is remarkable staid. Smart and formal, it appears more to resemble some pastel gloved hostesses who have been hired to serve food to a room full of Kennedys.
From the kitchen, Faud enters, clapping for attention. You would have thought his spectacular silver hair and gargantuan eyebrows would have been enough. To make the feast more authentic, he needs – predictably – cooperation from a young lady…”
In the kitchen, a desperate Faud convinces a more-than willing Suzette to climb onto the Formica, lie down and chant the prayer to Ishtar. With lots of panto style “Come, my dear…” there is much comic back and forth as she interrupts, sits up, teases and forgets her lines.
Much to Faud’s – and the audience’s – growing frustration. Finally Suzette settles back and closes her eyes, beginning the chant. Cue Faud grabbing up a frankly massive machete. Here we go…
But no. In comes bumbling mum to check on the coleslaw, catching the act. Screams! Faud makes a run for it, avoiding sadly the macabre frenzy of a bloody party massacre which we were all sort of hoping would be the cherry on the top of this silliness.
As Faud limps Into the squinty sunshine across low rise sprawly parking, the cops arrive at the house. “Suzette! Suzette!” They explain this is all evidence of murder! “Oh dear,” mum says oddly. “The guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight.”
The final chase. Across a stinking beachy city dump, all sandy flies and trash cans, Faud limps away, the cops in warm pursuit. Tossing his knife feebly, he knows the game is up. In an attempt to either hide or escape or take his own life, Faud clambers into the back of a garbage truck (or bin lorry, if you’re reading in the UK). Unaware, the teamster at the wheel cranks the lever and down comes the crusher.
While he may not survive, the percussion section does and we get the glorious booming timpani finally once more as the metal lowers. Only his hands and bloody smeared fingerprints are left. Opening the maw of the machine, blood and torn clothes are all that remain. The cops light cigarettes, shake heads and Pete delivers a lengthy pointless explanation of how he managed to crack the case, 66 minutes after the audience had.
“Notify HQ that the killer is no more. He died a fitting death, like the garbage he was.” The cops depart, the statue cries bloody tears and someone squeezes red poster paint all over the final credits.
We’re done. Sixty-seven minutes you won’t get back.
Is it any good?
So this, ladies and gentlemen, is apparently where it all began. Not the first movie with a murder, not the first movie with bloodshed, not the first movie with Egyptian sacrifice. Probably not even the first movie with all three of them. However, it you study your literature, read your web pages, check your books and ask Mark Kermode and Kim Newman nicely, they’ll probably tell you: there was once just movies. Then in 1963, all of a sudden, there were “splatter movies.” And cinema, shock and censorship were never quite the same again.
It’s worth I think, despite the rather slight and forgettable nature of Blood Feast’s short exercise in sensationalism and sleaze, taking a moment to put the movie in a little context as we begin our journey. This isn’t going to be the site for in-depth director biographies or extensive filmographies – I’ll leave that to movie students and databases (databi? Ed.). But given we’re starting off at what some might term the birth of an entire genre, the launch of a subculture and the opening salvo in a war with the censors, I don’t think a little artistic archaeology is out of place.
It’s 1962. 36-year-old director Herschell Gordon Lewis is looking for a change. Along with producer David F Friedman, they’re tiring a little of creating batches of “nudie cuties”- the cheap to cast, cheap to shoot, cheap to promote 16mm short films of cheeky bathing-beauty titillation and teases where the only thing more shoestring than the budget are the bikinis. Naughty, cheeky and just on the right side of the censors to be shown at drive-in screenings, it seemed by 1963 the market for “boobs and beachball” cheapies was now flooded with what we would now call “content” by anyone with a camera, a box of thongs, a willing sister and a blow-up mattress.
It was getting harder and harder to keep their end up (so to speak). What Lewis and Friedman needed was a new gimmick. Something surprising, something fresh, something to get the drive-in crowd excited – something so edgy it would be like nothing seen before in the mainstream. But most importantly, something to make them some money.
Now, remember this was 1963. Despite the term “swinging 60’s” and all its Austin Powers promiscuity, it’s pretty much understood that nothing really swung until The Pill was unpacked at Woodstock, which wouldn’t be for another 6 years. 1963 was a lot more like 1953 than we care to remember. Music was still crooners and bobby socks and 1963 picture houses weren’t showing anything riskier than the family friendly fayre of Son of Flubber, The Great Escape and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
So Lewis and Friedman kicked around as many teenager-teasing taboos as they could, workshopping shock upon sleaze upon scandal. Discarded ideas we can now only image included “Con-man Evangelist,” “Nazi Torture Camp,” and something harmless and woke and I’m sure terribly PC entitled “Goona-Goona,” (later to be developed into a provincial pantomime starring Jim Davidson and Charlie Drake). Finally the pair agreed that, boobs and bums aside, what the audiences hadn’t ever seen up close, personal, in-their-face and in bright technicolour was… gore. Offal dripping, gooey, slaughter-house, curdled, fleshy, trembling gore.
Were they right? Audiences had never seen? Surely we can’t expect to believe that Lewis was the first director to think of upending a bottle of ketchup on a shirt and claiming a gunshot wound?
Well that’s true of course. Hammer studios had been dripping bright fake blood from the fangs of Christopher Lee since he donned the cape and Garlic-Bread repellent for director Terence Fisher in Dracula in 1958. Tay Garnett’s 1943 WW2 drama Bataan can stake the claim as the first movie to effectively employ the now familiar ‘squib’ – the small pyrotechnic explosive taped to a stuntman’s chest to ‘pop and squirt’ dramatically simulating gunshot wounds.
Plus if we’re really trawling through the archives, DW Griffith’s Intolerance has its fair share of clarety-brutality. And that was in 1916. So let’s not pretend that Lewis was the first person to think of showing a little….shall we say…unpleasantness on screen to shock and horrify his audience. Hell, there had been plenty of shock, knives, corpses, horror and blood – albeit a more photogenic chocolate sauce – swirling down cinema’s most infamous plug-hole three years prior when Janet Leigh had climbed into the shower for Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960.
Lewis wasn’t naïve. Sure, a knife wound wouldn’t be enough to turn heads. But if he aimed instead to turn stomachs? But, really turn them? This would be shocking. This would be new. Lewis was enough of a Barnum-Barker to know that gruesome gore would create the word of mouth and “must see” factor that an audience growing bored of knickers and nipples would queue up to revel in and cheer. To watch and then re-watch. To recommend. To dare!
Lewis was also enough of an industry insider to know that, yes, certification and censors were very clear with limits on flesh, on sex, on language and morality. But there were at that time, no official guidelines on…“innards.”
Did Lewis and Friedman have grander aims? Was this a “stretching of boundaries” and a “pushing of envelopes?” An experiment in art? Was this a creative challenge of societal taboos? Were Lewis and Friedman saying something about America’s post war attitude to the slaughter at the Somme? Nope. Fuck that shit. Lewis was a money man. He wanted to create a strip of perforated celluloid that would give him the biggest return on his investment. He had $24,000 of nudie-cutie profits to plough into this project. And whatever would double this, triple this or quadruple this would be what he shot. In his own words, “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an artform and spends money based on that immature philosophy.”
So. Lewis invested in 8000 feet of Kodak film. This would run through a camera for, give or take, 2hrs. So if he allowed every scene just one take, (and a generous second take if the cast or sound man really fucked it), he’d be able to squeeze out a 70m feature. If he didn’t have what he needed in the second take? Well then he’d just have to move on. Lewis wrote the script himself, with what you might now call a masterful understanding of plotting and pacing. One can’t argue that Blood Feast hasn’t a wasted scene. Victim, murder, cops. Victim, murder, cops. Victim, murder, cops. Credits. Shooting took place over a planned seven days in and around Miami Beach’s Suez Motel, but Lewis’s relentless shoot-and-move, shoot-and-move, two take method ensured the whole shebang was in the can in just five days. Casting was a masterstroke of exploitation, savvy, nous and contacts as Lewis knew: if you’re going to get drive-in teens to sit through 73 minutes of fleshy slaughter, Playboy Playmates are definitely the flesh punters are going to want to see slaughtered. So, leaning on his Nudie Cutie cast list, Lewis corralled centrefolds Connie Mason, Christy Foushee, Astrid Olsen and a whole swimming-pool’s worth of busty beauties to keep the crowd leering and cheering.
Aside from just some shapely ladies to succumb to bloody hacking, Lewis needed one or two actual actors. The key role of Faud Ramses fell to performer Mal Arnold, in his first movie role. Now much criticism has fallen at the feet of 30-year-old Arnold who, let’s face it, was challenged in his first role with portraying a 50-year-old Egypt-obsessed murderous cannibalistic psychopathic Miami caterer. A stretch, let’s face it, for which even Meryl Streep would need time in her trailer to prep.
How much of this hammier-than-honey-roast-ham panto performance of cod-Vincent Price vis Peter Lorre eye-rolling nonsense was Arnold’s choices and how much was an enthusiastic Lewis’s direction of “More! More! Worse! Sillier!” seems to fall generously on the side of the director. The research I could find suggested that Lewis – coming as he did from a non-subtle T&A, soft-core, less is less background – pushed Arnold to google his eyes, stick out his chin, limp around the place and affect a cod Transylvanian accent (which producer Friedman once described as “the worst Bela Lugosi voice anyone ever heard”) means, perhaps, there was a better performance in Arnold he was simply not allowed to give. We’ll never know.
Marketing the movie was of course 99% of the project. As Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin proved with their 1998 piece of crap Godzilla, you don’t need the public to like the movie. You just need enough of them to spend $10 to want to see the movie. The poster promised “Nothing so shocking in the annals of horrors. ” And we have to agree it’s correct, for better or worse, on that count.
As the prints of Blood Feast moved from city to city, local papers printed angry and shocked letters of complaint. Written, of course, by Lewis and Friedman. The pair posed as furious priests in one town to stir up both the “do NOT see this!” and the inevitable “we HAVE to see this!” fever that you old enough to recall Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers will be only too familiar. And of course no Midwest movie drive in was complete without actors dressed as nurses handing out airline sick-bags to drive-in viewers, with “Blood Feast” printed on one side, and “you might need this” printed on the other.
Did it work? Were they right? Did Lewis and Friedman under or over estimate the public’s desire to be repulsed, sickened, shocked and disgusted by this tawdry trawl thought cheap scripts, hammy acting, gory offal and thundering timpani? Well, as we said, on a budget of $24,000, records show it pulled in $4,000,000. Yep. A profit of over 16,000%.
Note: Horror has always proven itself as reliable return on investment, mainly due to low production costs colliding with audience must-see anticipation. Famously, in 1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez took three actors and a camcorder into the woods, had them scream about Blair Witches for a week and turned their $50k investment into a worldwide $250m box office. Compare this to the traditional blockbusters that may pull in a headline grabbing $586m gross (Iron Man, 2008) but had to spend $140m to get the damned project into theatres).
Okay, okay. But what of the movie itself? Well over 60 years later it’s impossible to understand the reaction or impact the very first “spatter movie” had on audiences who had simply never seen anything like it. That is, they’d never seen anything like the 3 or 4 gory murders. The remaining 70 minutes of detective-padding they had to sit through was sadly – and I hate to be presentist about this – exhaustingly familiar and somewhat unwatchably clunky.
We will talk in a later essay you can find here on where money actually goes in low-budget film production. Suffice to say, once you’ve shelled out for sets, props, costumes, make-up, lighting, cameras, microphones, editing suites, negative development, lunches and wages for people to operate all these things for 5 days – plus of course your 2hrs of film stock – you’re not going to have much left to tempt Richard Burton, Lawrence Olivier or Katherine Hepburn out of their trailer. What you might have is enough to hire the hammiest of amateurs to gasp, gawp, put hands on hips (the men) and hands on faces (the women) and read their lines off cue cards. Which is, either charmingly or regrettably (depending on your tastes) what Lewis gives us.
The whole shooting-match has the air of Saturday afternoon television. The stagey acting, the fixed camera, the barked-out clunky exposition as men shout plot and facts at each other – will be familiar to anyone who grew up with the Batman TV show (ABC 1966-1968). “Let’s go’s!” and “Dammits!” and “My god’s!” pepper the perfunctory script as the story hauls itself around as few locations as it can afford.
Costs are saved with the obligatory signs outside buildings (Homicide Office / exotic catering) before we cut to a borrowed shop or a fake office. As Lewis had only enough film for no more than two takes, it seems he’s risked nothing by experimenting and largely locked the camera, static, in a mid-shot, over-lit the room in a glare of halogen and asked the cast to shout the lines slowly – all so as to ensure he had at least one usable take.
Production values shout “cut cost at any cost.” Which means one can almost glimpse the squeezy-bottle nozzle as red poster paint is squirted all over the credits. No matter what the plot, cast or continuity might tell us, every scene is shot in midafternoon glare and all the cars are convertibles to save on costly lighting. The evening beach scene has been shot in the middle of the night with the courting couple lying in a blinding glare of a klieg lamp like they’re escaping from Colditz. And every effort has been made to pad the 15 minutes of plot into the 67 of run time so telephone calls have the exhausting rotary dial plodding, cars take an hour to park and any script idea is crowbarred in. Including the baffling finale clunker “This feast is evidence of murder!” “Oh dear, the guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight.” I mean what it THAT? Camp? A gag? Light relief? It sticks out like the sort of sore thumb a Miami based cannibalistic caterer might chop off and eat.
The cast are enthusiastic amateurs – Mal Arnold aside – and it shows. The gals have little to do but flick their hair, stick out their busoms, totter in pencil-skirts or bikinis, drown their hair in Ellnet Fixing Spray and then scream on cue. The two cops – the most bumbling of the bumbling variety – slurp coffee, read manilla files and once in a while might click their fingers with a “goddamit chief!” in a way Leslie Neilsen and Alan North had huge fun with in the Police Squad parodies. Arnold really does add as much honey-roast ham as he can as he croaks out his lines, somewhere between Alec Guiness (“Things have been ready for a long time…a long time…”), Vincent Price and, oddly, George Takai.
The lecturer on Egyptian cults is a stern, po-faced gent from the Howard Cosell school of broadcasting. And if you’ve ever seen the wild-eyed junkie from The Big Bang Theory try and pull of despair and pain in Sheldon’s apartment, you’ll recognise the boyfriend-on-the-beach’s techniques.
The music – Gordon Lewis himself – has the simplicity of John Carpenter, but with none of the class or style. John Wood-Glue, if you like. When drums aren’t pounding out thundering two note heave-ho heave-ho, Rolf Harris appears to take over on a battery powered Stylaphone. And when he’s in court, its off to temple for some dragged out Hassidic cello. Schindler’s Lizst, if you’ll forgive that one.
Nasty?
It’s been said that, just as the severed ear of cop Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) in the hands of Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) pretty much made Quentin Tarantino’s career, so the tongue of actress Astrid Olson and its violent removal made the career of Gordon Lewis.
Lewis has huge fun piling the gore onto the gore in order to shock and delight his drive-in crowds. Eyes gouged, legs chopped, brain extracted, tongues wrenched, backs whipped and hearts removed – there is plenty to have the audience squirming. The effects are gruesome – the blood bright and runny, the offal gooey and drippy, the meat raw and squelchy. Yes, once in a while the budget shows. Our first victim’s eye removal is nothing more than half a pot of Umbrol “Household Cavalry” red paint pooling in her eye. Her removed leg is little more than an artic roll or a discarded Mr Blobby costume. The hacked off stump is more “chickeny” than one might expect. Lewis is generous with the red paint (Allegedly red dye and Kaopectate – an antacid and anti-diarrhoea medication made with kaolinite and pectate).
The murders are well lit, in your face, lascivious and – in the case of the motel tongue removal – not a little sexual. More silly than nasty, more camp than carnage perhaps, but certainly Blood Feast earns its place as the very first of its type for pure “check THIS out!” cheek and set a bar the next 5 decades would see directors reach for, skim and – much to the delight of horror fans – clear with feet to spare.
Of what does it remind me?
Well nothing in the canon so far, as we are starting as it were, at movie zero. It is from Blood Feast that the “splatter” genre really grew and movie after movie would take its stalk-n-slash premise, it ancient occult chanting and its helpless blondes and do wild and crazy things. As far as the aesthetic though, glorious gore aside, it has the lovely snappy, sharp suits and sunny sedans of that Saturday cop show era. Hats, skinny ties, cigarettes, palm trees, crunchy gravel, wiggly skirts, beehives and tie-clips, the whole thing is cooler than Mancini with a Martini.
Where can I find it?
Youtube will provide you with a copy after a simple search if you don’t want to commit. But there is also a 2017 release of a shiny Blu-Ray, which – along with a clean print of the whole 63 silly minutes, has features including interviews, outtakes, commentary and “Scum of the Earth” – Herschelll Gordon Lewis’ 1963 feature. Oh and for completists, don’t forget to check out the much more comic 2002 sequel, “Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat.”
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 
2 thoughts on “LETS GET THE BANNED BACK TOGETHER! EP. 1 BLOOD FEAST (1963)”