{"id":4533,"date":"2015-10-15T00:47:34","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T00:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/?p=4533"},"modified":"2015-10-15T00:47:34","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T00:47:34","slug":"blood-feast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/?p=4533","title":{"rendered":"BLOOD FEAST!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blood Feast<\/a><\/strong> ~ 1963, Herschell Gordon Lewis, USA<\/p>\n

\"Blood_feast_poster_01\"<\/p>\n

Clocking in at just over an hour, and with a reported\u00a0budget of only $24,500, Blood Feast<\/strong><\/em> is the achievement that would forever enshrine Herschell Gordon Lewis<\/strong> as a name revered amongst horror aficionados\u00a0the world over. While on first inspection, the lion’s share of this film sucks like friggin’ crazy, it actually can’t be overstated how ahead of it’s time Blood Feast<\/em> really was. Often cited as the first ever legitimate\u00a0gore film,\u00a0this movie\u00a0began\u00a0a period of Lewis’ professional life where\u00a0he\u00a0would pioneer\u00a0a new level of blood and guts based exploitation, and would eventually earn the\u00a0honorary title “The Godfather of Gore<\/strong>.”\u00a0Today, Blood Feast<\/em>\u00a0is over 50 years old, and is still far gnarlier and more explicit than most modern horror films. Time to step up your game, Hollywood.<\/p>\n

THE PLOT~<\/strong> Fuad Ramses, caterer, religious fanatic and serial teenage girl dismemberer, opens up a highly regarded catering business in what\u00a0appears to be a sexless episode of Mad Men<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0Knowing that America is the land of religious\u00a0freedom, he takes advantage of his newly acquired\u00a0civil liberties and beings to horribly mutilate the shit out of\u00a0young women- you know- for Ishtar<\/strong>. Can the police stop him before he\u00a0finishes doing whatever the hell it is he’s trying to achieve? Hell yeah, but first a bunch of girls get the shit murdered out of them, and we watch it all in off-puttingly drawn out sequences of\u00a0next-level\u00a0motion picture violence.<\/p>\n

How violent and bloody is Blood Feast<\/em>? Well, today, the vilest, more despicable low budget splat merchants still\u00a0use this as a benchmark, and I imagine John Waters probably thought it was the best thing ever when he was 16. So, it’s pretty bad.<\/p>\n

\"f1367_blood_feast\"<\/p>\n

Lewis often said that he considered himself a business man, not an artist,\u00a0so he viewed his motion picture work as an entirely commercial endevour. Kudos for honesty, but this attitude is reflected in every aspect of Blood Feast’s<\/em> production,\u00a0this is an\u00a0artless, by the numbers motion\u00a0picture that put very little energy into appeasing film theorists. Start to finish, Blood Feast<\/em> is plagued with\u00a0boring\u00a0compositions, “just enough to get it done” dialog, horrendous acting, and thick, red acrylic paint substituting for blood. All of this juxtaposed against the disturbingly retro quaintness of the early 1960’s makes\u00a0this film\u00a0feel like some form of\u00a0Satanic kitch, like a 1950’s themed burger joint operated by Jason Voorhees. The weird thing is that I wouldn’t want it any other way, if the acting were actually good, it\u00a0would probably be really, really disturbing.\u00a0Blood Feast<\/em> is definitely a\u00a0“bad” film if you hold it up to any artistic scrutiny, but it just feels so right. This is the humble birth of gore cinema, if it didn’t sort of suck, wouldn’t that just feel inappropriate somehow?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Additionally, time has been very kind to Blood Feast<\/em>.\u00a0The novelty of an early 1960’s gore\u00a0film existing at all is tremendous, but\u00a0its clumsy production, lousy\u00a0story,\u00a0and prehistoric tropes\u00a0make\u00a0the\u00a0film\u00a0markedly more fun today than it has ever been before, by all accounts, this is a movie that will continue to\u00a0gain entertaining value as it becomes more and more antiquated.\u00a0There’s just so much to laugh at! In the movie, one of our would-be mutilation victims is dating a policeman, who appears to be in his late 40’s- and that’s weird, because I think she’s in high school. Also, at the end of the picture, our bad guy dies in\u00a0exactly the same way that The Shredder<\/strong> does in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles<\/a><\/strong><\/em> movie, so I really want to believe that Eastman and Laird owned a battered\u00a0VHS copy of Blood Feast\u00a0<\/em>back in the 80’s. Really, I want that to be true.<\/p>\n

\"bloodfeast2big\"<\/p>\n

There’s really no argument to be had for Blood Feast’s<\/em> artistic merit. It wasn’t better than other gore films, it was just “first,” but that’s still important. At the end of the day, people don’t like Lewis’\u00a0output for its\u00a0artistic merit anyway, and Blood Feast<\/em> is a fun movie that deserves the worship it receives.<\/p>\n

\"FeastFeat\"B-<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blood Feast ~ 1963, Herschell Gordon Lewis, USA Clocking in at just over an hour, and with a reported\u00a0budget of only $24,500, Blood Feast is the achievement that would forever enshrine Herschell Gordon Lewis as a name revered amongst horror aficionados\u00a0the world over. While on first inspection, the lion’s share of this film sucks like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[393],"tags":[753,146,214,1468,1470,1469,673,1471,1092,447,216],"class_list":["post-4533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-753","tag-b","tag-gore","tag-herschell-gordon-lewis","tag-john-waters","tag-something-weird","tag-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles","tag-the-shredder","tag-usa","tag-video-nasties","tag-video-nasty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4533"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4552,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions\/4552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}