Blood Feast

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Audience Member This movie is the definition of so bad, it’s good. The whole movie feels like a parody horror movie you would see within a tv show. This was my first dive into Herschell Gordon Lewis’s work, and it somehow severely disappointed me, while also impressing me with how bad it was. I look forward to watching more! Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 06/24/24 Full Review Wayne K To help add a bit of context to a recent podcast episode my friend and I were doing on Herschell Gordon Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs, I watched the film he'd made the year before, Blood Feast. A simpler story, but with similar production values, acting quality and dialogue. These days, it's far less impressive than the average straight to Netflix horror film, but you need to look at it in the circumstances of the time. The blood, the gore, the threat, the supernatural elements. Back in the mid-60s, while films were still subject to some level of censorship, these things would have been difficult to find, and very appealing for this reason. It's undoubtedly a product of its time, and watching it with modern sensibilities might dilute its impact. But it's an indicator of where HGL's career was about to go, and why he left the mark he did on the world of exploitation cinema. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 05/21/23 Full Review Judy S This movie may be considered the first-ever splatter film, and it certainly deserves its title. The gore looks extremely fake, but that is part of its charm. Adding to its odd charm is the dreadful acting and the killer's extremely fake hair and drawn-on eyebrows. It's one of the most unintentionally funny movies that I've ever seen and the plot is ridiculous. Still, it's unintentional humor makes up for all its shortcomings. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member Emblematic illustration of a SPLATTER for avant-garde Kitsch collectibles: we are still in a pantomime of the silent expressionist. "Irreverence" Grand Guignol speaks to Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics. A mosaic of very small and rigid skits that look at the radio situation comedy; the final scene turns more 'ever in the usual cinema. It is so absurd that it can awaken attention from the armchair. Particular note: the aseptic insistence of the shots on bodily decay like tribal banquets. You're not quite sure if you're at the butcher's or a crazy jeweler. It is really meat. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/12/23 Full Review Taylor L The origins of the gorefest brought to you from the mad mind of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Years before audiences realized that they wanted to see boundaries pushed and their senses of good clean morality offended, Lewis saw the writing on the wall and brought gallons of blood and crates of anatomically questionable gore to the big screen. Make no mistake, Blood Feast is a terrible quality film. The acting is almost offensively bad, the pacing and writing are god-awful, the 'exotic' elements aren't even vaguely reminiscent of anything authentic. Some of the shots are bizarrely out of focus and the audio is in and out. Even the print quality is wildly flawed. By every standard, it deserved to be the critical flop that it was in 1963. But everything that served as a glaring detractor back then has switched polarity - Blood Feast is one of the great so-bad-it's-good films in the modern day, a satire of the '60s conservatism that would have condemned it. It's so superficial and silly that the thought of a preacher railing against it as part of a sermon is hilarious. And that's ignoring the sincere influence that the film has had on the horror genre, a true trailblazer for all the gorefests of later years, which still make their way through the modern slasher circuit. What Black Dynamite was to blaxploitation films, Blood Feast is to splatter horror, except that it was actually made before the splatter genre even existed. (3.5/5) Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 09/15/22 Full Review desmond b The trailer says "contains scenes which under no circumstances should be viewed by anyone with a heart condition or anyone who is easily upset." Or anyone who likes good movies, they might have added. The violence is gratuitous, particularly a scene where he whips a girl to death to collect her blood, and the gore is gloriously overdone, as if satirising its tribute to the restrained murder scene in Psycho (which of course had a far more powerful audience affect). The dialogue wanders in a thin band between wooden and absurd. My full review is at https://thecannibalguy.com/2022/05/08/the-first-splatter-film-blood-feast-lewis-1963/ Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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