Herschell Gordon Lewis is a name I’ve often heard about but never really been keen to explore; the archetypal still from one of his 1960s-era movies in my mind’s eye is a leering sadist at a table where a nubile woman is submerged in shiny guts and paint-thick blood. Much like Troma cinema, I’m happy if this stuff gives you kicks but it’s just not for me. A key independent figure in the rise of the gore flick and exploitation cinema, I finally watched one of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ movies, Blood Feast (1963), his first major box office success. Much like Basket Case, these are horror flicks that I wouldn’t have personally sought out, but only watched on account of a recent mission to check off all the movies I haven’t seen from Danny Peary’s Cult Movies 2 book. It’s basically about a serial killer Faud Ramses (Mal Arnold in a truly eccentric performance, as if he’s trying to copy Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre in one go) who is dismembering women in an effort to hold a ‘blood feast’ to satisfy the spirit of an ancient Egyptian God. Shot on a low budget with non actors, this veers into Ed Wood terrain except for the fact that it’s in colour and it pushes the boundaries of extreme violence at the time – limbs hacked off, heads scalped,tongues ripped out, etc. It remains unpleasant (I kept thinking about the poor actors writhing around in the butcher shop meat used for entrails). Yet there’s also something quaint about this early splatter gore horror – whether it’s the grey paint hair of the killer, the actors playing the police seemingly reading or half-remembering their lines, or the pastel Fort Lauderdale colours where its been filmed. I actually liked it more than I thought I would. The sequence where Faud Ramses runs away from the cops in broad daylight through a garbage dump near the end had a certain primal artistic quality to me – like the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was surprised to read that even Danny Peary himself didn’t like the movie and found HGL quite sick as a filmmaker, and mainly wrote about Blood Feast due to its stature as a cult movie, a surprise cheapie hit that historically beat Night Of The Living Dead in terms of the escalation of gore/splatter horror on screen (and gained lifelong fans amongst other filmmakers such as John Waters). Streamed it from Kanopy.
VHS Tracking 