Blood Feast

Studio: Arrow Video

Oct 26, 2017 Web Exclusive By Dustin Krcatovich

In the hall of bad taste, few names are uttered with the same hushed reverence as Herschell Gordon Lewis, the verbose, dearly departed Floridian creep behind a cavalcade of campy, low-rent skin flicks and splatter films; with Blood Feast, the most notorious of his early creations, Lewis is even said to have invented the latter subgenre. Replete with ketchup-colored blood, dodgy cuts, and acting so hammy that even acknowledging the film’s existence is tantamount to renouncing one’s kosher diet, Blood Feast remains the hyper-saturated, no-budget stuff of fever dreams.

If you’re late for dinner, the gist is this: Fuad Ramses (the hypnotic, criminally underutilized Mal Arnold) is a caterer/murderer who is always hunting attractive young women in order to use their body parts to revive the Egyptian goddess Ishtar. In his caterer role, he hypnotizes loving mother Dorothy Fremont (Lyn Bolton) and convinces her to get her daughter Suzette (Connie Mason) an “Egyptian feast” for her birthday, so that he might use Suzette in a sacrifice. Normally, I’d put a spoiler alert at the beginning of this paragraph, since I pretty much just told you the whole plot, but this is all information you gather in Blood Feast‘s first 10 minutes, with the rest of the film serving as build-up to exactly the climax you’d expect. Like uncle Terry says, though, it’s the journey, not the destination, and this is doubly so for Blood Feast, which makes up for its complete lack of suspense with everything from a tongue yanked out of a mouth by hand to goofy swimming pool romps in (relatively) skimpy bikinis. It doesn’t function like any normal story, but it’s a wild ride, and a mercifully short one.

This edition also appends Lewis’s 1963 “roughie” feature Scum of the Earth, an ironic anti-porn morality/exploitation tale shot in grainy black and white not to save money, but to make it look more like a “stag film” (does this make Lewis the granddaddy of self-aware “trash art”, beating John Waters to the punch by around half a decade?). It’s a rough watch in a time far more conscious about, and rightfully appalled by, violence against women: though its moral is that said violence is bad, and that the exploitation of women is also bad, that morality is muddied by the fact that it’s being put forward in a skin flick, and particularly one that is a cornerstone of an exploitation subgenre whose main draw is simulations of that violence. That said, it’s an engaging watch, even food for thought, if you can stomach it. The ending feels weirdly tacked on, but even that is part of its uncomfortable charm.

It feels a little strange to watch films so willfully lurid on anything other than a worn-out VHS tape or dust-crusted film print, but this crisp, clear new Blu-ray edition is not without its advantages. Arrow piles on the extras, with interviews and featurettes galore (a mid-1980s interview with Lewis and producer David F. Friedman is particularly illuminating); while discussing print restoration with a movie like this is not not akin to talk of polishing the proverbial turd, they’ve certainly done their level best with the materials at hand.

Any self-respecting fan of this kind of stuff doesn’t need me to tell them that this is a worthy addition to their collection; that would be like telling a straight film buff to check out Hitchcock or Citizen Kane. For the splatter-curious, though, this is a fine, expertly executed gateway to a rich, strange, and eternally crimson-dyed world.

mvdb2b.com/s/BloodFeastBlurayDVD/AV107

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