Cinema
Blood Feast
Herschell Gordon Lewis · 1963
Synopsis
Miami Beach. A young woman is killed in her bath, beside a book of ancient rites. Fuad Ramses, a caterer of Egyptian origin, keeps a gilded statue of the goddess Ishtar in his back room, before which he prepares a mixture, and promises a feast of a kind that has not been served for five thousand years. Dorothy Fremont orders an Egyptian banquet from him for her daughter Suzette, who is passionate about Egyptology. Other young women are killed and mutilated; the detective Pete Thornton, a friend of Suzette, investigates with his superior.
Context
Shooting took place in Miami Beach over a few days, between four and twelve depending on the sources, on a budget estimated at about twenty-four thousand dollars; Lewis also composed the music and shot the images. The film earned several million dollars in drive-in cinemas, according to widely diverging estimates. Lewis and Friedman, noting that the market for nudie films was saturated, had drawn up a list of what the big studios would not do and settled on gore.
Who it is for
A film of sixty-seven minutes, in colour, with explicit mutilations; Variety judged it on release to be utterly clumsy.
Prizes and reception
No prizes; often regarded as the first gore film, and its director admitted that it was worthless but that it was the first of its kind.
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