Surprisingly incoherent and boring

People are voting emotionally.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Herschell Gordon Lewis recently died, so I decided to watch one of his movies. I rented his most famous one. "Blood Feast" is known as the "Citizen Kane" of splatter films, and so Lewis is known as the man who launched the genre. Let's just say that it doesn't pretend to be anything that it isn't. Without a doubt, it took guts to get this made (pun intended). It looks tame by today's standards. You may have seen it referenced in John Waters's "Serial Mom" (the son makes a poster saying BLOOD FEAST and the principal complains about it).All in all, it's an enjoyable movie. For one with such a small budget, it was well made, with the sound properly recorded (contrast it with the MST3K-riffed "Manos: the Hands of Fate"). Nice, brainless fun.

As far as I know, HG Lewis's Blood Feast is the first gore film. The film left its mark and is a very influential and very entertaining micro budget horror flick that would become a cult classic. HG Lewis may not have been the most talented film maker, nor did he have an abundance of resources to make his movies. But the man has style and knew how to entertain and build an audience. Having said that, Blood Feast is good for what it is. It is campy fun that obliterated the taboo of blood, gore and violent content in film. For the time,(1964)this kind of material was unheard of ,shocking and totally extreme. HG Lewis had balls for making this and thankfully pulled the chain on "good taste" and "moral fiber" by flushing them down the toilet for good. Blood Feast, was way ahead of its time and did well in the drive in circuit shocking audiences with chunks of blood red carnage splattering across the screen. Our hero, Fuad Ramses is on a mission from God.(the Egyptian God's actually) He is to prepare a feast in honor of Goddess Istar from the body parts of several female victims to insure that she will live again. No such thing has been attempted in five thousand years, so caterer and devotee of the ancient religion has to give it a go. Blood Feast indeed delivers and holds up as a great piece of campy entertainment. There also is creepiness and dark humor to accompany the gore. While I am indeed a fan of HG Lewis's work and he made a lot of similar films, there is something special about Blood Feast. This film, as well as many of Hershell's other films are very influential to many film makers and have entertained generations of horror fans. I would regard Blood Feast as essential viewing for horror fans, especially to those into more extreme or underground films.

Blood Feast apparently derives its notoriety from basically two facts: 1. it has gore; 2. it is at least recognized as the first "splatter" movie, in that it showed visceral gore. Both are indeed facts in that they are true. But what else? Is Blood Feast a good movie? Not really. The 1960's had already seen the in-your-face horror of Hitchcock's Psycho, but where that movie plays with the audience emotions in an intelligent way and is clearly a product of talented film making; Blood Feast is a prime example of cheap, exploitative and amateurish grind house film making. Maybe that is a merit in itself.The gore serves as the only major attention drawer in a film with abysmal acting, camera use, sound and script. Only watch this if you're a fan of "so bad, it's good". And even then Blood Feast disappoints.

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