Purely Joyful Movie!

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Yes, well... Any reason why I might recommend anyone seeing this? The black and white photography is crisp and attractive, as are most of the girls and the Les Baxter like music has some appeal. My disc has the ambiguous title of The Deadly Organ on it but it is almost universally known as, Feast of Flesh and with this title accompanies, Night of the Bloody Apes on the Something Weird label. To be honest The Deadly Organ is more appropriate but this is a tale with a monster, some girls and a lot of police guys doing a lot of chatting and no story at all. The night club scenes are OK because we get some silly dancing and the passable music but I must mention here that we also get, apropos nothing whatsoever, a striptease and it is the worst I have ever seen.

The swinging 60s saw protective parents world-wide concerned that exposure to way-out music might turn their kids into sex-crazed, drug addicts. In Emilio Vieyra's Feast of Flesh AKA The Deadly Organ, that's precisely what happens: young women are subjected to some cool organ grooves and become the zombie-like sex slaves of a masked maniac who hooks them on heroin; once in the grip of the 'monster', the women become his sexual playthings, but their inevitable fate is death, their 'master' stabbing them in the chest with his over-sized hypodermic needle.Although this film could be viewed as a cautionary tale for potentially wayward teens or as the ultimate nightmare scenario for concerned parents, I doubt very much if this was the makers' intention—it's far too lurid a piece of trash to be given credit for containing any kind of moral subtext or for deliberately mining the fears of the older generation. No... what we have here, I believe, is exploitation, pure and simple—a delightfully dated piece of nonsense featuring some mild gore, beautiful people soaking up rays on the beach, groovy dance scenes in a smoky jazz club, and plenty of bare boobage, with nearly every hot chick getting her threads off during the course of the film.Casual horror fans might find Feast of Flesh strictly Dullsville (Hell, even fans of this type of cheap South American schlock don't seem to have much positive to say about it), but I had a blast with the hilarious 60s slang ('this place is a drag... I'm splitting. Ciao!'), all of the tasty skirt (especially one particularly big-breasted sunbather and the gorgeous Gloria Prat as Beba), the terrible dubbing, and the wonderfully daft scene in which the police use a girl as bait for the killer, but fail to step in until after she has been fatally stabbed.

Feast of Flesh (1967) ** (out of 4) Argentina horror film about a masked killer who stalks women so that he can inject them with heroin and make them his slaves. Originally rated X when it was released to American drive-ins, this thing now is rather tame in its violence, subject matter and nudity but it's a shame the direction is so incredibly poor because we might have had a pretty good film otherwise. The look of the masked killer is the film's strong point but the rest of the film, while interesting, is rather dull due to the direction.

Emilio Vierya strikes again! Or to be more accurate, Emilio Vierya strikes for the first time as this was the first of a series of bizarre horror films by Argentina's most famous (and only famous) horror director. And though Vierya may strike first-time viewers as an Argentinean Ed Wood, there is definitely method to his madness--the cheesy delirium evoked by his films is entirely intentional. A man in a ridiculous monster mask lures female Argentinean swingers partying on the beach with his strange organ music(thus the suggestive alternative title "The Deadly Organ"). He then injects them with heroin to make them his slaves. Why? You wouldn't believe me if I told you, but it really isn't important.All the ingredients of a Vierya film are there--the free-spirited Latino hippies, the goofy music, the gratuitous nudity, the gratuitous dancing. His two regular actresses--Gloria Pratt and Susana Beltran--also appear. Beltran (who looks a lot like her Italian exploitation contemporary, Rosalba Neri)has the lead in this movie though, with Pratt relegated to a more perfunctory part. Thankfully, this one isn't padded with American-shot sex inserts like "The Curious Dr. Humpp", but unlike "Sangre de Virgenes" it is dubbed into English which is only a problem because instead of giving Beltran a sexy Latino accent, they give her this grating Texas one(!). And "Feast of Flesh", the title this has currently been saddled with by the distributors at Something Weird is very inaccurate as there is no flesh here in the gore sense and not much in the sex sense. The Spanish title "Placer Sangriento" (literally "Bloody Pleasures") isn't any more accurate. Both are bound to attract your indiscriminating gore fans rather than your more refined and erudite fans of bizarro Argentinean horror/sexploitation movies who will appreciate a film like this. I guess this movie really defies ANY title, but I like "The Deadly Organ" the best.