Review: Blood Feast (1963)

Directed by: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Starring: Mal Arnold, William Kerwin, Connie Mason
Written by: Allison Louise Downe
Music by: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Arrow), DVD (Something Weird)
IMDb

Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) is the oddball proprietor of a Egyptian catering shop that probably serves human flesh since Fuad has a thing for murdering women, mutilating them, and baking their body parts in service of a “blood feast” to the goddess Ishtar. Blood Feast is Herschell Gordon Lewis’ first “splatter” film — in fact, the first splatter film ever — and one of the earliest movies in his career. That naiveté definitely shows in a brew that incorporates manifestly terrible acting, inventive and groundbreaking but entirely unconvincing gore, a flimsy story with no thrust at all, a whole lot of really banal sequences for a movie that only runs 67 minutes, and maybe just a little casual racism (it’s tough to tell with the Egyptian stuff, but I’m inclined to think HGL meant no harm). But Blood Feast’s historical significance, ingenuity, and peculiarity magnify its appeal, which is substantial. Notwithstanding that movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) would not exist without Blood Feast, there is plenty to dig your rotting teeth into here: Arnold’s completely bizarre performance, augmented by the dubious makeup he’s slathered in to appear aged (also a prominent feature of The Wizard of Gore), the sheer scale of gross-out (it’s easy to forget this movie was made in the early ‘60s when it was absolutely inconceivable to show open wounds spilling internal organs), and the manic energy of a filmmakers doing something completely new even if they have no idea how to do it. It’s common in movies that straddle the nebulous border between brilliance and ineptitude that you often can’t discern between purposeful intent to stray from plausibility or the inability to achieve it, and it’s no different here. Even the frequent and mundane scenes of detectives blathering about the murders have a quirkiness that begs forgiveness for their drag on the pacing. Although Blood Feast definitely works better as a time capsule than a film, it’s a film well worth watching, provided your tastes allow for it.

Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10