If you are the parent or guardian of an impressionable adolescent DO NOT BRING HIM or PERMIT HIM TO SEE THIS MOTION PICTURE, proclaims the somewhat sexist “admonition” in the top corner of the lurid black-and-red poster for the legendary Blood Feast, the granddaddy of all splatter/slasher flicks. In the near half-century since its barnstorming debut in America’s drive-in circuit, literally thousands of imitators have followed in its sanguine candy-apple-red wake, treating its rigid formula as a cheap, schlocky Rosetta Stone. Through its gallons of stage grue, exploitation producer David F. Friedman and his faithful journeyman director Herschell Gordon Lewis uncovered a simple yet lucrative recipe for success: keep the gore running down the screen (and make sure it’s extra vivid in all-important BLOOD COLOR), keep production costs dirt-cheap, and profit handsomely from millions of bloodthirsty, drunken moviegoers. What was an outrageous endurance test fifty years ago exists today, in light of its countless imitators, as a laughably crude, amateurish (yet still stomach-churning) piece of cinematic flotsam that nonetheless possesses an inexplicably mesmerizing power. Not once in its lean, mean 67 minutes will you find yourself even remotely bored.

As with all splatter/slasher movies, the plot is as threadbare as logic will allow, serving to link together exploitative elements: a weirdo with a knife is carving up beautiful young women in picturesque Miami Beach, Florida, mutilating the bodies beyond recognition and taking away various trophies from his victims. We start off with an obligatory curtain-raising murder; Sandra Sinclair from H.G. Lewis’ proto-roughie Scum of the Earth (not to be confused with Scum of the Earth) enters a spartan one-bedroom apartment, laughs off the frantic radio bulletins regarding the Miami Beach serial killer, disrobes for a bath, and finds herself face-to-face with the grey-haired, bug-eyed, knife-wielding maniac in a matter of seconds. Suffice it to say she does not survive the encounter with both legs intact.

Since Blood Feast does not even attempt to create an aura of mystery or suspense, we are immediately introduced to the weirdo at his day job. His name is Fuad Ramses, an “Egyptian” with a Mideast American accent, dark hair seemingly colored with silver spray paint, his own “exotic catering” storefront, and a hypnotic stare. What he does in the cavernous back room of his catering/grocery store is best left to the imagination, but don’t let that imply that Lewis doesn’t show us the grisly goings-on in fetishistic detail … but not at this early stage. Instead, a cartoonishly matronly well-to-do Caucasian lady named Ms. Dorothy Fremont makes a fateful trip into Ramses’ store, inquiring about using his dubious services for a dinner party for her daughter Suzette and all her rich, worldly buddies. Seeing an easy mark, Ramses locks eyes with Ms. Fremont and makes several hypnotic suggestions having to do with “an Egyptian feast”, a lavish ritual that he does not bother to explain but Ms. Fremont hastily agrees to pay an unspecified sum of money for. After all, as we are told at least four times in this brief feature, such an event hasn’t been performed for five thousand years.

As soon as Ms. Fremont takes her leave (without giving Ramses any down payment or personal information), the kook limps into a back room adorned with red curtains, lit candles, and a vaguely Asiatic looking mannequin. Ramses raises his hands and gaze skyward and cries, “Oh, my Ishtar! Your resurrection is at hand!!” Sure, Fuad may be a tad confused as to which religion he adheres to, as Ishtar is a Babylonian and Assyrian goddess, but who would take umbrage to the Earthly reincarnation of a deity representing sex, fertility, love and war?? Ishtar’s got a little something for everyone! As an added hilarious cherry atop this absurdist sundae, Lewis continually cuts to closeups of the mannequin’s face as if expecting her/it to deliver reaction shots to Ramses’ insane rambling.

The only two people investigating this case in the entirety of the greater Miami area are a pair of incompetent, slow-witted cops speaking entirely in Dragnet dialogue and hard-boiled cliches. “All this horrible butchery and not a single shred of evidence! Not even a fingerprint!” bellows the senior officer, a police captain known only as “Frank”, punctuating the sentence by pounding on his Formica desktop. To which hapless young Pete, the junior detective, responds “Looks like it’s gonna be one of those long hard ones,” without a hint of irony. Meanwhile, Ramses continues his reign of terror with nary an obstacle to get in the way of compiling all his ingredients for Ishtar’s Cannibalistic Resurrection Feast.

It’s quite difficult to discern whether Blood Feast is intended to be hilarious or just happens to be as a result of shoddy filmmaking combined with a frenzied production schedule. Filmed in a mere nine days with a paltry budget somewhere between 24 and 60 thousand dollars (most of which surely went into stage blood and development fees for the mandatory BLOOD COLOR), the film has an unfettered, crude sort of energy aided by a minimalist yet strangely effective musical score. An ominous kettle drum accompanies the limping Ramses as he stalks Miami in search of his victims, and a trio of blaring trumpets underline various “shocking” moments with the expected lack of subtlety.

And yes, the vaunted gore scenes are still queasily effective despite their primitive nature. This is before we had F/X savants like Rick Baker, Dick Smith, Rob Bottin and Tom Savini pushing the limits of practical effects makeup, so the candy-apple garishness of the stage blood tends to be enhanced with second-hand slaughterhouse scraps.

The infamous tongue-ripping scene in the motel room, for instance, revolves around a bit of sleight-of-hand involving a sheep’s tongue; a gruesome yet side-splittingly hilarious beach scene is a showcase for some bovine brain matter; the various chunks of meat lying around Ramses’ sanguine kitchen/torture chamber/Ishtar shrine seem to be rotting beef flanks purchased from local butchers (lying beside phony plastic mannequin limbs, naturally). Despite the creepy misogynistic nature of the murder sequences, where quite a few young twenty-something co-eds are desecrated before our eyes, any power they might have is undermined by the Z-grade acting, to say nothing of the noncommittal police investigation subplot.

Mal Arnold’s performance as Fuad Ramses achieves instant ham classic status, and the two cops have all the personalities of cardboard cutouts, but the real bad acting champion is former Playmate Connie Mason as the bubble-headed Suzette, who spends most of the third act blissfully unaware of her imminent doom and suddenly goes into unchecked hysterics the moment the boys in blue storm in to sort everything out. The actress playing her easily hypnotized mother is almost as wooden, but at least she appears to be able to memorize her lines. Mason, in an early expository scene in a living room, seems to be reading dialogue off a nearby lampshade! She was paid $175 for her performance; perhaps this is the sole instance in which Lewis and Friedman overspent their cash.

What more is there to say about Blood Feast? There is no subtext, no moral, no hint of any deeper meaning to its orgy of senseless carnage, yet it’s an essential piece of cinematic history. Its relentless humor is not of the (sheep’s) tongue-in-cheek variety that would later come to characterize Lewis’ gore epics, but rather of a more naive and perhaps unintentional fashion. Follow the example of 1960s drive-in audiences and load up with some cheap brew or else this might be the longest hour and seven minutes of your life.

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