So I rented Blood Feast.
Wow. Just... wow.
I admit, I'd never seen a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie before, and I didn't know what to expect. I guess he got a little overhyped. I've read a lot of Joe Bob Briggs, obviously, and I realize that the drive-ins didn't ask for a lot in terms of writing or production value or acting or ... well, anything besides some fake blood and a few breasts. But for Cliff's sake, this is godawful.
I can put myself in the shoes of someone who'd never seen someone's head lopped open and their brain scooped out, to whom the intersection of naked occasionally under-dressed women and bloody violence was a new concept. From that point of view, I can see how the boob-flashes plus the bloody wrist-stumps and disembowelings would be a mind-blower, and who cares if the dialogue is laughably awkward or the acting is well below the standards of community theater.
The effects are pretty tragic as well, though I guess at the time they would have been shocking. I've always thought that one of the reasons Night of the Living Dead works as well as it does is that it's in black-and-white, which nicely masks the cheesiness of the effects; one of the problems (also one of the strengths, I'll grant you) with Dawn of the Dead is the intense 70s colors, rendering the zombies bright blue or green and the blood day-glo red, shading occasionally into an almost neon fuschia. Blood Feast suffers from the same problem; the effects might be a little more gruesome if they weren't quite so... loud.
And the acting... oh, the acting. You'd have to be weird or desperate to take a job in this kind of movie back then, I suppose. So desperate because literally nobody else would hire you to say words in front of a camera (and, in these folks' case, not without reason), or so weird that you could not go amongst normal people. Basically, these are actors and technicians who made this movie while they were waiting for Ed Wood to get the funding together for his next flick.
As a piece of film history, it's sort of amusing. As actual entertainment, it's unwatchable. See if you can scout out a scene on YouTube, or watch the first couple of scenes and then call it quits: it's not getting any better, and that's forty minutes* of your life you can't get back.
Next up on my drive-in history tour is Bloodsucking Freaks. I've read extensively about it, which will probably guarantee more disappointment. But seriously, it's got to be better than this.
*Drive-in movies were no doubt shorter than we expect these days, though I also wonder if footage got excised from this little epic along the way; it clocked in at barely 50 minutes when I saw it.
I admit, I'd never seen a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie before, and I didn't know what to expect. I guess he got a little overhyped. I've read a lot of Joe Bob Briggs, obviously, and I realize that the drive-ins didn't ask for a lot in terms of writing or production value or acting or ... well, anything besides some fake blood and a few breasts. But for Cliff's sake, this is godawful.
I can put myself in the shoes of someone who'd never seen someone's head lopped open and their brain scooped out, to whom the intersection of naked occasionally under-dressed women and bloody violence was a new concept. From that point of view, I can see how the boob-flashes plus the bloody wrist-stumps and disembowelings would be a mind-blower, and who cares if the dialogue is laughably awkward or the acting is well below the standards of community theater. The effects are pretty tragic as well, though I guess at the time they would have been shocking. I've always thought that one of the reasons Night of the Living Dead works as well as it does is that it's in black-and-white, which nicely masks the cheesiness of the effects; one of the problems (also one of the strengths, I'll grant you) with Dawn of the Dead is the intense 70s colors, rendering the zombies bright blue or green and the blood day-glo red, shading occasionally into an almost neon fuschia. Blood Feast suffers from the same problem; the effects might be a little more gruesome if they weren't quite so... loud.
And the acting... oh, the acting. You'd have to be weird or desperate to take a job in this kind of movie back then, I suppose. So desperate because literally nobody else would hire you to say words in front of a camera (and, in these folks' case, not without reason), or so weird that you could not go amongst normal people. Basically, these are actors and technicians who made this movie while they were waiting for Ed Wood to get the funding together for his next flick.As a piece of film history, it's sort of amusing. As actual entertainment, it's unwatchable. See if you can scout out a scene on YouTube, or watch the first couple of scenes and then call it quits: it's not getting any better, and that's forty minutes* of your life you can't get back.
Next up on my drive-in history tour is Bloodsucking Freaks. I've read extensively about it, which will probably guarantee more disappointment. But seriously, it's got to be better than this.
*Drive-in movies were no doubt shorter than we expect these days, though I also wonder if footage got excised from this little epic along the way; it clocked in at barely 50 minutes when I saw it.
