Blood Feast (1963)

This is what it's all about - Firsts!

Genre: Horror

Starring: William Kerwin (Two Thousand Maniacs!), Mal Arnold (Vampire Cop)

Directed By: Herschell Gordon Lewis (Color Me Blood Red • She-Devils on Wheels)

Overview: A serial killer collecting body parts in on the loose. An Egyptian caterer agrees to prepare an authentic feast in the name of Ishtar. Little do the guests know that these two things are all too closely connected.

First ever open-eyes death with brains hanging a full foot out of a skull!

Blood Feast is officially the first-ever Gore film ever made.  If there's any doubt that another film made before this could be more about gory displays, I dare you to name it because I want to see it. Seriously, I want you to top the copious and gross amounts of blood and chunks that this feature's got. 

Detective Pete Thornton: The killer must have thought she was dead.  It's a miracle she wasn't.

Frank, Police Captain: Well... she is now.

Detective Pete Thornton: Yeah... Let's go fill out that report. 

Yesiree Bob, Blood Feast is super awesome fun. Let's look at the acting first. Take a cardboard cut-out of a man and fold him appropriately into a chair. Then, take a mannequin and put him in another chair.  You have your two cops.  Now take a slice of delicious Canadian back bacon, put some lipstick on it, you've got your female lead.  Finally take an animated young dude, spray his hair and eyebrows grey and ask him to have a severe, pronounced limp (make sure you specify that it only be done in half the scenes), and there you have the villain - who, as you can tell is the most talented of the bunch, because he's alive.

Next the gore. Teach me Herschell! How do you make it so red? Does it wash out of the sheets you use as a backdrop for every single interior shot you have or are these single-use sheets? I want the recipe.

By far my favourite of the props (no, to my surprise, it's not the salad below) has got to be the life-size gold spray-painted statue of the Goddess Ishtar. The golden woman has whore makeup, complete with blue eye liner... it's awesome. 

First ever warm beef salad served with a raspberry vinaigrette dressing!

Performance: 3 Cinematography: 6 Script: 2 Plot: 7 Mood: 10

Overall Rating: 56% (Gorge Yourself on the Terrible!)

Aftertaste:

That's right - Mood: 10. Three words: Grindhouse, Grindhouse, Grindhouse. There is NOTHING that I can conceive of that is more perfect in conveying to - oh say - an alien who wants to know what Grindhouse means - than this. It is the perfect sub-genre-defining film. it's almost so perfect as to be a cliché of itself, before it was even finished being filmed. How something could be so perfectly original and unoriginal at the same time - it's like a fractal Moebius strip through time - it'll break yer frikken brain.