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56%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #6,769
...out of 20,735 movies
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Strippers at a sleazy club are being mutilated at an alarming rate. A pretty reporter enlists the aid of a debonair detective to solve the case and land her a front-page story. Soon, the two are wading through evidence against a vegetable-pulverizing freak, a creepy college student, and a group of angry feminists.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: September 10, 2007
Herschell Gordon Lewis released Blood Feast way back in 1963, a film that is now widely regarded as being the first movie to explicitly show graphic violence and gore instead of shying away from it or merely hinting at it. He continued to use this shocking new style of filmmaking to his advantage, but as in any field, imitators soon popped up and started using the gore and extreme violence to their advantages as well. So, what's an innovator to do? Well, if your name is HG Lewis, you make a film that features everything that you were previously afraid to include in your work, go completely over the top with it, and then walk away from the business for thirty years. Yes, this was his last film prior to Blood Feast 2 from five years ago, and I have to say that this was a hell of a way to go out.
Just as was the case in most of his other films, the storyline here is pretty basic and really only serves to string along the gore sequences. It all begins when a stripper is found brutally murdered in her apartment, and this leads newspaper journalist Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) to go straight to Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress), a private investigator who is considered to be the best at what he does. For twenty-five grand, Nancy hires Abraham to investigate the case and find the murderer, and aside from the grand finale when all is revealed, that's basically it for the storyline. The real meat of the movie, as those of you who have seen Lewis' other films will have already figured out, is the gore: a stripper will be murdered in a particularly nasty way, Abe will investigate it, another stripper will be murdered, he'll investigate that one as well, repeat ad infinitum until the credits roll.
Since the gore is the highlight of the film, what better place to start in my critique of the film? Whereas the gore in most of the other films that Lewis is best known for was extremely graphic and some of these scenes even had a little humor thrown into them, they at least tried to stay somewhat realistic (as realistic as can be expected from films like these) and went for more of a horror approach than anything else. Here, the gore sequences are, quite simply, over the top. A large dosage of black humor is inserted into the mix, and this results in some pretty bizarre murders. Anyone who has seen this - even if it was during its initial release - will instantly remember the infamous 'nipple' scene, but let us also not forget the equally-amusing 'ass' scene which resulted in one of the best quotes ever: "face mutilated with a meat tenderizer, throat slit, and this one had her ass beat in." This is the stuff that HG Lewis shied away from in his earlier films, and as anyone who has seen said films will quickly confirm, that fact alone damned near places a "must see" stamp on the film.
With that out of the way, the rest of the film is basically a ho-hum mystery in which we try to piece together the clues and figure out who the killer is before Abraham does. This proves to be impossible as we're never given any of the clues that he gets (the ending has a lot of "I found this and that, and I went here and talked to so-and-so, and they told me..." revelations that we weren't privy to along the way), but does anyone really see the name Herschell Gordon Lewis - the Godfather of Gore - amongst a film's credits and go in expecting a revolutionary storyline? I think not. The storyline is simply there to string the gore scenes along and keep us interested in between the graphic displays of violence, and it does an acceptable job with that.
If you've seen any of Lewis' previous gore-and-violence films, you'll already know what to expect from this one: just imagine those other films, but with the violence levels cranked up and the line pushed even more. It certainly won't win you over if you didn't enjoy his earlier releases, but fans of those films will certainly fall in love with this one. 8/10.
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#1:
Cryptorchild
- added September 10, 2007 at 7:08pm
I really enjoyed this movie a lot. I loved
Abraham Gentry. He really made the movie for me.
The killers were pretty cool too. All in all, I
had a fun time with this one.
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#2:
bradbunson
- added September 17, 2007 at 7:31pm
i loved the guy who drew faces on fruit, then
smashed them.. great character.
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