Blood Feast (1963)

Instant Favorite.

Expected more

Beautiful, moving film.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

In Miami, the Egyptian serial-killer Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) owns a catering store and kills women taking parts of each one of them. Fuad worships the goddess Ishtar and is preparing a blood feast to resurrect her. Detective Pete Thornton (Thomas Wood) is investigating the murder cases trying to find who the killer is. Meanwhile the mother of his girlfriend Suzette Fremont (Connie Mason) hires the Fuad Ramses Catering store to provide the food for her birthday party. Fuad intends to sacrifice Suzette as the ultimate offering to Ishtar. Will he succeed?"Blood Feast" is a lame amateurish trash with laughable performances and ridiculous situations. The importance of this film is that it is the first splatter movie with explicit gore. It is unthinkable imagining the reaction of the audiences with the explicit violence and gore in 1963, despite the funny performances. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): Not Available on DVD or Blu-Ray

Yes, there is plenty to complain about if you want to, and it has been done, too. Just for a little taste: terrible acting, a script full of holes (though I liked the premise) and that soundtrack that just went on and on and on and on. Those elements are familiar to many cult flicks, and by now I can say I have seen a few. But, having seen 'a few', I can also say I've learned what to look for better. Some of those elements even become charming at some (perverted? whatever) point... And, as for the music, at some times it wás great ánd appropriate. The beautifully stylized gore and use of color made for a great atmosphere at quite a few moments. So, I should try 'Two Thousand Maniacs!' (1964) again sometime, which I didn't appreciate as much as this one... I have seen 'a few' since, indeed.A big 7 out of 10 for this one.

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.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

There are movies in the history of cinema that started a trend....Blood Feast is an horror movie that broke the taboo's of on-screen gore.Don't expect a twist-filled horror movie and great acting, just expect cheesy acting and gore, just imagine the audience of the 60's on how they were "shocked" as hell for the gore, the on-screen gore was a revolution and still to this day directors actually have the balls to show on-screen gore (even in mainstream cinema).This is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, it started a trend and an element very close to horror movies (the gore).Herschell Gordon Lewis, you have your name burned in the history of cinema, if you are curious to see how the splatter and gore movies started, take a look at Blood Feast....if you don't like because it's "too old" or "too cheesy" then rent Saw (The story lines of Saw is cheesier than Blood Feast....really).