Something Weird Video has given "Blood Feast" a great tribute with its DVD version. A beautiful print of the film was used, all of the garish colors are presented in their full glory. It contains one of the most interesting audio commentaries on a DVD that I have ever listened to. Director Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer David F. Friedman provide insights into everything you've ever wanted to know about "Blood Feast" - the casting, the special effects, the creation of Lewis' signiature music score, and much more. There are so many great anecdotes shared on the commentary: how Pine Sol was used to get rid of the smell of the sheep tongue (used for the infamous tongue removal scene) since it was being stored in a refrigerator and the power went out, how they had to spend money on a freeze frame at the optical effects lab because an actress pretending to be dead couldn't hold her breath (you can see her failed attempts in the collection of nearly 50-minutes of outtakes included on the DVD), a pizza parlor was used for the scene where the maniacal Fuad Ramses cooks a human leg in an oven, and how they first realized the film was going to be a phenomenon when they got stuck in a traffic jam on the way to its Peoria, Illinois drive-in premiere. P.S. - Bonus for trivia buffs: Robert Sinise, the editor of "Blood Feast", is the father of actor Gary Sinise.

The DVD of "Blood Feast" is a must own for fans of the film and film buffs thanks to the great quality of the film to DVD transfer and the extras included by Something Weird Video.


The film that gave birth to the genre of gory movies   December 10, 2003
 10 out of 12 found this review helpful

Blood Feast, the brain child of goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis is one of the most important horrible movies ever made. Without question, the movie really, really stinks in more ways than I would have thought possible, but this, ladies and gentlemen, 1963's Blood Feast, gave birth to the blood and gore genre we know and love today. One man, H.G. Lewis, decided he was going to make a statement; he was going to shock people; he was going to give people gore as they had never seen it before; nothing could stop him, not the atrocious script, not the mind bogglingly bad actors, not his insistence to never shoot a scene more than three times no matter how awful it came out, and not the lack of any funds whatsoever; as long as Lewis could afford barrels of Karo syrup, he was happy. Looking back now, it's pretty hard to believe that this level of gore actually shocked people in the early 1960s, but history tells us that it did. Believe me, we've come a long way since then, but it was H.G. Lewis who blazed the trail we tread today.

On the face of it, Blood Feast would seem to have some good things going for it: a catered feast secretly prepared with human blood and body parts, the influence of an ancient Egyptian religious rite, a number of dead bodies, and even a Playboy playmate in the form of Connie Mason (Miss June 1963). Despite all this, though, the movie drops an H bomb from the very first moment. Plot-wise, you have a series of gruesome murders striking fear all over town, with the killer bagging nubile young women at a rate of 3-4 a week. From each victim he takes a different body part (each time it looks like intestines to me, yet it can be an eyeball, an arm, a heart, whatever). The killer needs these "ingredients" so that he can bring the blood-thirsty goddess Ishtar back to life. The police are clueless, and I do mean clueless; they smoke cigarettes and sit at their desks as hard as they possibly can - heck, the chief even bangs his hand on the desk every now and again - but they just can't come up with a single clue (largely because they can't recognize a clue if it falls on top of them like a ton of bricks). Meanwhile, a wealthy woman is planning for her daughter's birthday celebration and, as a special surprise, she hires Fuad Ramses to cater the party. Ramses promises her an authentic Egyptian feast, and this idea goes over like gangbusters because daughter Suzette just so happens to be attending weekly lectures on ancient Egyptian cults. Suzette also happens to be the girl of one of the town's only two detectives, so you see how all of this starts fitting together.

While the gore is pretty unspectacular from our modern viewpoint, Lewis succeeds quite well at times. We don't actually get to see the actual killings, of course, but there are plenty of shots of our killer pulling out parts of human bodies in his blood-soaked hands, mixing up a batch of young woman blood soup, hacking off limbs and such, and of course cooking such delicacies. Lewis makes a point of admiring his gruesome handiwork, oftentimes panning the camera slowly across the whole body of a mutilated, blood-spattered, thoroughly dead victim. There is one scene in particular that impressed me, involving the appearance of a girl who has a sunken cavity in her chest where her heart used to be. By and large, though, the gore is quite campy to us modern-day horror fans, but one should try to appreciate it in its proper context.

I can't conclude without addressing the performances of the actors and actresses involved with this movie. This may well be the worst assembly of hopeless actors I've ever seen. I don't know where Lewis found these people. You can't just take people off the street and have them perform this badly; it takes years of devoted practice to become this bad a performer. Lewis must have had some of these kids in a bad actor's training camp from the time they could talk in order to coax such wooden, ridiculously bad performances out of them. Then there is the terrible music, which continually takes one of three forms: endless repetition of two drum beats, the playing of a kazoo-like instrument, and terrible pipe organ music of the type that worked well alongside silent movies but does not work at all in this film.

Basically, Blood Feast is a horribly campy, low-budget, sub-B horror movie that now serves as hilarious entertainment which can not be taken the least bit seriously. Were it not for its importance as the first true blood and gore film, this would be just another forgettable trek through the dark forest of bad horror movies. Its historic importance to the genre, however, makes it a film every gorehound must watch and pay homage to in some way.


The Blood Trilogy   August 20, 2000
 7 out of 13 found this review helpful

Starring: William Kerwin, Mal Arnold, Connie Mason, Lyn Bolton, Candi Conder, Elyn Warner

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Herschell Gordon Lewis' pioneering gore films in deluxe Special Editions.

Blood Feast (1963, 67 minutes) Mrs. Fremont hires crackpot Egyptian cultist Fuad Ramses to cater a party - and he prepares a Blood Feast made from the grisly body parts of nubile young women. The world's first gore film!

Two Thousand Maniacs (1964, 87 minutes) The 2000 Maniacs of a small Southern town celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Civil War by forcing a handful of Northerners to serve as guests in their macabre, blood-crazed fun and games.

Color Me Blood Red (1965, 79 minutes) When his girlfriend, Gigi, cuts her finger on a frame, maniacal artist Adam Sorg discovers a new shade of crimson that will make his artwork so special - human blood!

Please Note: Three-Disc Set.

Additional information

Copyright: Image Entertainment

Special Features: Audio Commentary, Interactive Menus, Photo Gallery, Theatrical Trailer, Scene Access, Outtakes

Video Format: Standard 1.33:1 [4:3]

Audio Tracks: English: Dolby Digital Mono

# Discs: 3

Layers: Single

# Sides: One

running time of 233 minutes.


THE LEGACY OF ED WOOD   May 15, 2000
 6 out of 21 found this review helpful

This is the first movie of director Herschell Gordon Lewis I have the opportunity to see. And I am disappointed. But it's clearly my fault. For years I've read the name of this director in horror movies dictionaries or encyclopaedias and I've begun slowly to believe he was a forgotten unknown genius.

So BLOOD FEAST is an exploitation movie destined for the 1963 american teenagers. Hence, the numerous close shots of the legs and the bosoms of charming young women during the movie and the sadism of the murder scenes. Apart from this sociological point of view, BLOOD FEAST, in my opinion, doesn't deserve more attention.

Mal Arnold plays the character of Fuad Ramses, the psycho-killer ; you won't have any difficulty to recognize him, he's the one with the dark blue hair. He is a vague cousin of german director Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse. In fact, if you watch BLOOD FEAST without sound and in black & white, the film could possibly be mistaken with a 1925 horror movie. Furthermore, there are only one or two camera movements in BLOOD FEAST, the musical score (is it music, anyway ?) is omnipresent and the actors and the dialogs are so ridiculously bad that you surely won't feel guilty if you do so.

A DVD for the curious ones.


Thank you, Herschell Gordon Lewis!   February 8, 2004
 6 out of 8 found this review helpful

In 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis, an independent filmmaker best known for making limited release "cutie" pictures, changed forever the face of American cinema when he released "Blood Feast." This film, as low budget as you could possibly get, heralded the era of the gore film. While it would be quite some time before Hollywood caught on to the fact that certain segments of the movie going public hungered for films containing nauseating scenes of explicit violence, H.G. Lewis took one look at the receipts for "Blood Feast" and decided he better quickly make another movie similar to this one. What followed was a series of gruesome zero budget shockers, films like "The Wizard of Gore," "A Taste of Blood," "2000 Maniacs," "Color Me Blood Red," and "The Gruesome Twosome." Lewis lensed the downright offensive "The Gore-Gore Girls" before retiring from the film business in 1972 in order to devote his time to join the advertising industry. It wasn't until 2002 that the director returned to form with "Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat," a movie which proved beyond a doubt that the Godfather of Gore still has what it takes to gross out an audience.

"Blood Feast" introduces us to a cast of intriguing characters set against lush, expensive set pieces crafted by the best designers money could buy in 1963. Moreover, the actors employed by Lewis represent the cream of Hollywood talent, surpassing the likes of Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn, and nearly any other legendary thespians imaginable.

Yeah right.

This is zero budget schlock, folks, the sort of movie you would make on a home movie camera if you didn't think your parents would ground you for wasting film stock. What we get in "Blood Feast" is an insane Egyptian caterer named Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) lurching around slaughtering local ladies in order to prepare a feast made out of their body parts to fulfill some sick ritual to the goddess Ishtar. Ramses intends to present his bloody course at the wedding party of a brainless young lady (played by Connie Mason, an actress with the allure of a speed bump) until the local cops step in and end his bloody spree (Lewis regular Bill Kerwin plays one of the police officers). There isn't anything more to it than that. Well, there are a few killings, gruesome little scenes like the trepanning on the beach, the tongue extraction, and the flashback to the Ishtar ritual where a guy in some cheesy get up removes what looks like a heart from some woman's chest. But you're not really interested in any of those scenes, are you?

Of course you are! The ONLY reason a viewer would submit themselves to the agony of a H.G. Lewis film is to see the gore! The incredibly lame acting, the wooden pacing, the slipshod editing, and the brain numbing dialogue certainly wouldn't pack in the crowds. Yes, the gore is a lot of fun here, with some of Lewis's best grue scenes ever gracing the hallowed halls of "Blood Feast." The drooping tongue alone should secure this guy a place in the pantheon of gore cinema. Still, fans that know and love Herschell like I do get a kick out of the other aspects of his films. I loved the soundtrack to this schlockfest, a mix of monotonous drumbeats, strings, and hypercheesy flashes of organ during those scenes where something "important" happens. As good as the soundtrack sounds here (!), the acting really grabbed my attention. Kerwin gives one of his worst performances here as the cop who wouldn't recognize a clue if it came up and tore his tongue out. Connie Mason turns in a bravura performance as the young airhead whose mother hires Fuad Ramses to cater her wedding party. Sweet, seductive Connie couldn't act her way into a paper bag, let alone out of one. If you can keep a straight face when you notice her reading dialogue off of cue cards, you are a bigger man than I. And that guy crying on the beach! Oh man, my friends, OH MAN!

I guess we should not express too much surprise that the first gore film ever made looks like the mess that is "Blood Feast." An unpopular genre like this one would never draw big buck investors or heavy studio support from Hollywood. Even today, the gore film--an extreme gore film--tends to rely on a miniscule budget compared to most other movies in different genres. After viewing many of Lewis's films I still cannot figure out how in the heck he convinced people to play these atrocities anywhere in the country. I understand the lure of a buck provides incentives aplenty to screen even the most egregious tripe, but the sordid gore in a Lewis film pushes the envelope beyond the bursting point. The director has stated on several occasions that censors did hack his films to pieces in some regions, but many prints made it through unscathed. How? In 1963? I wish I could go back in time and see "Blood Feast" in a theater just so I could watch the audience reactions.

The DVD edition of "Blood Feast" is one of the best Lewis discs available. You get an entertaining commentary track with Lewis and his partner David Friedman, stills aplenty, nearly fifty minutes of silent outtakes, a trailer, and an odd short film about carving meat (no joke!) starring Bill Kerwin and Harvey Korman (!). Parts of the film look magnificent for such an ancient motion picture, while other parts look like they went through a washing machine. Still, the gore comes through in bright color, no amount of poor picture quality could mar the ghastly acting, and the soundtrack sounds great. Get it, watch it, love it!