Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned)   CLICK HERE to buy from Blu-ray + DVD combo Double Feature: Blood Feast, Scum of Earth   CLICK HERE to buy from Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast: Blood Feast, Scum of the Earth, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Moonshine Mountain, Color Me Blood Red, Something Weird, The Gruesome Twosome, A Taste of Blood, She-Devils on Wheels, Just for the Hell of It, How to Make a Doll, The Wizard of Gore, The Gore Gore Girls, This Stuff ll Kill Ya! + documentary The Godfather of Gore Blu-ray + DVD combo Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!

A serial killer who not only kills his exclusively female victims but also horribly mutilates them has the city in his grip of terror and baffles the police, as he leaves not a single clue at the scene of the crime. The audience of course knows a bit more, the killer is in fact mild mannered but terribly ham caterer Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), who worships the Egyptian (actually Babylonian) Goddess Ishtar, and needs all the bodyparts he gets from his victims to make the ultimate sacrifice in a blood feast ... and he persuades Mrs Freemont (Lyn Bolton) to prepare the blood feast for her as a surprise for her daughter Suzette (Connie Mason), who's into ancient Egyptian culture. Of course Fuad Ramses disguises it as an Egyptian Feast, and doesn't mention the part with the bodyparts and the ultimate sacrifice.

Suzette's boyfriend Pete (William Kerwin), incidently the cop investigating Fuad's murders, meanwhile desperately tries to piece together the clues he has found, and eventually learns about Ishtar and the blood feasts linked to her, he even learns that Fuad Ramses is secretly a scholar of ancient Egyptian history, and goes to his place to arrest him with his men, even finds a corpse in his kitchen ... but somehow he has forgotten that Fuad Ramses is already at the Freemont's place, preparing the central ingredients for his feast - Suzette ...

To find himself a niche in the drive-in market he had already been supplying with various nudie-pictures, Herschell Gordon Lewis made this little shocker that works not so much as a thriller or a horror film in the traditional sense ... but as a gross-out piece with its (for the time) outstandingly explicit gore effects, which the camera invariably lingers on. Subsequently, the modern gore-movie was born (for better of worse) ...

Seeing the movie on its own merits thogh it has to be stated it is a little too blunt and straightforward (even in comparison with Lewis' later gore films), and the wooden actors, cardboard characters and feeble storyline are too obviously just hangers for the bloodlettig, while ironic treatment of its subject matter (that would later become Lewis' trademark) is largely amiss here. But at the same time, not taken too seriously and by its nostalgic values and with an eye on drive-in sensibilities, this can be quite enjoyed not only for its blazing the way in terms of gore but also its shortcomings and the genre mainstays it created. And heck, it's obligatory for any horror fan to watch it anyways - and rightly so!

Almost 40 years later, Herschell Gordon Lewis did actually film a sequel to this film (called Blood Feast 2 - All U can Eat), again produced by David F. Friedman, that doesn't even shy away from poking fun at this movie.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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