Blood Feast

Believe it or not, this trailblazing piece of cinematic debauchery was released a mere three years after Psycho, which was apparently so controversial in part because of the near bloodless killing of a woman in a shower. Blood Feast obliterates the Hitchcock classic on the gore scale in the very first scene, when a woman taking a bath has her eye gouged out and a leg amputated. It just gets worse–or better–from there.

Blood Feast was written and directed by the “Godfather of Gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis, who would justly earn his nickname by pumping out one classic splatter film after another, like Two Thousand Maniacs, The Wizard of Gore, and The Gore-Gore Girls. Blood Feast was the first in this line of gory greatness.

Yes, it’s a trailblazing movie because of the level of blood and gore depicted, setting the stage for George Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, and the directors of numerous exploitation films in the decades to come. But it is not a very good movie. Thank Christ it comes in at just over an hour, otherwise it would be nearly unwatchable. The script is overly simplistic, the acting is atrocious, and the dialogue is so painfully bad that it’s hilarious. As example, when Dorothy Fremont (played by Lyn Bolton) is told that the caterer (played by Mal Arnold) is a murderer and is using human flesh to prepare the feast for her daughter (played by Connie Mason), Fremont exclaims, “Oh dear! The guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight.”

There is plenty more where that came from.

One scene I found particularly entertaining was when a woman who’d recently survived the attack of the killer is giving a description of the suspect to police from a hospital bed with bandages wrapped around her face. She suddenly stops talking and moving, and the orderly puts his head to her chest and immediately shakes his head ‘no’, indicating she is gone. Likewise, the doctor feels her radial pulse and confirms that she has died. No CPR, no heart monitor–she’s talking one second and dead the next. Maybe she didn’t have health insurance…

But it’s entertaining! And the gore is actually pretty good for the sixties. The blood is a little too red, but you get that with most early splatter films. Like I said before, it’s only an hour long–just right for a fleshy chunk of horror history like this.

The best part? You can watch it for free on YouTube!