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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.
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