BLOOD FEAST!

Blood Feast ~ 1963, Herschell Gordon Lewis, USA

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Clocking in at just over an hour, and with a reported budget of only $24,500, Blood Feast is the achievement that would forever enshrine Herschell Gordon Lewis as a name revered amongst horror aficionados the world over. While on first inspection, the lion’s share of this film sucks like friggin’ crazy, it actually can’t be overstated how ahead of it’s time Blood Feast really was. Often cited as the first ever legitimate gore film, this movie began a period of Lewis’ professional life where he would pioneer a new level of blood and guts based exploitation, and would eventually earn the honorary title “The Godfather of Gore.” Today, Blood Feast is over 50 years old, and is still far gnarlier and more explicit than most modern horror films. Time to step up your game, Hollywood.

THE PLOT~ Fuad Ramses, caterer, religious fanatic and serial teenage girl dismemberer, opens up a highly regarded catering business in what appears to be a sexless episode of Mad Men. Knowing that America is the land of religious freedom, he takes advantage of his newly acquired civil liberties and beings to horribly mutilate the shit out of young women- you know- for Ishtar. Can the police stop him before he finishes doing whatever the hell it is he’s trying to achieve? Hell yeah, but first a bunch of girls get the shit murdered out of them, and we watch it all in off-puttingly drawn out sequences of next-level motion picture violence.

How violent and bloody is Blood Feast? Well, today, the vilest, more despicable low budget splat merchants still use this as a benchmark, and I imagine John Waters probably thought it was the best thing ever when he was 16. So, it’s pretty bad.

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Lewis often said that he considered himself a business man, not an artist, so he viewed his motion picture work as an entirely commercial endevour. Kudos for honesty, but this attitude is reflected in every aspect of Blood Feast’s production, this is an artless, by the numbers motion picture that put very little energy into appeasing film theorists. Start to finish, Blood Feast is plagued with boring compositions, “just enough to get it done” dialog, horrendous acting, and thick, red acrylic paint substituting for blood. All of this juxtaposed against the disturbingly retro quaintness of the early 1960’s makes this film feel like some form of Satanic kitch, like a 1950’s themed burger joint operated by Jason Voorhees. The weird thing is that I wouldn’t want it any other way, if the acting were actually good, it would probably be really, really disturbing. Blood Feast is definitely a “bad” film if you hold it up to any artistic scrutiny, but it just feels so right. This is the humble birth of gore cinema, if it didn’t sort of suck, wouldn’t that just feel inappropriate somehow?

 

Additionally, time has been very kind to Blood Feast. The novelty of an early 1960’s gore film existing at all is tremendous, but its clumsy production, lousy story, and prehistoric tropes make the film markedly more fun today than it has ever been before, by all accounts, this is a movie that will continue to gain entertaining value as it becomes more and more antiquated. There’s just so much to laugh at! In the movie, one of our would-be mutilation victims is dating a policeman, who appears to be in his late 40’s- and that’s weird, because I think she’s in high school. Also, at the end of the picture, our bad guy dies in exactly the same way that The Shredder does in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, so I really want to believe that Eastman and Laird owned a battered VHS copy of Blood Feast back in the 80’s. Really, I want that to be true.

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There’s really no argument to be had for Blood Feast’s artistic merit. It wasn’t better than other gore films, it was just “first,” but that’s still important. At the end of the day, people don’t like Lewis’ output for its artistic merit anyway, and Blood Feast is a fun movie that deserves the worship it receives.

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Atragon!!!

Atragon – 1963, Ishiro Honda – Japan

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Somewhere out in the far edges of the extended Toho Zilla-Verese lives Atragon, a cool little movie about a futuristic submarine that must save the world from an invading, undersea Empire. That’s right, while Atragon may sound like the name of a wicked sweet dragon, or maybe a giant spider or something, that’s actually the name of the flying, submergible war ship featured prominently in the movie- and that’s because Atragon isn’t a kaiju film at all, but rather an action/adventure movie with elements of mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and horror blended in. It’s a good mix, a good movie, and nice reminder that Toho has made plenty of solid films that didn’t focus on towering, menacing lizards.

Now, that being said, there IS a giant monster in here- Manda, a serpentine, dragon type creature which later makes an appearance in Destroy All Monsters, and who also gets a name drop in a few other Godzilla flicks. Manda is the connection between Atragon and Godzilla, but his role is actually pretty minimal in this film, and oddly enough, that’s not a problem. We have plenty of fun without him.

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THE PLOT~ Weird, vaporous frogmen have been sighted in Japanese harbors, prominent scientific minds have disappeared mysteriously, and earthquakes continue to strike our cities with increasing regularity- just what the hell is going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on, business-as-usual, according to Toho. Apparently an ancient, highly advanced civilization from a long lost, Atlantis style continent called Mu has chosen this time to reclaim the surface world as their rightful property. Their message to we ignorant, non-underwater masses? Simple; “Return the surface world to the sovereignty of Mu and declare yourself our Imperial colonies, plus also make that guy stop building Atragon, we are not cool with that. No Atragon.”

“Atragon?”

No one has any idea what in the hell Atragon is. They soon learn, however. Apparently Atragon is a top secret, highly advanced, multi-terrain warship being built by a rogue Japanese Naval captain who revolted during the second world war. Captain Jinguji, believed dead by official record, didn’t revolt to avoid his responsibility to Japan, however, quite the opposite; Junguji is a fanatical hold out who still buys in to the rhetoric of pre-war Japan, and he and his men boldly maintain that while Japan may have surrendered, they never did. It is their intention to use their new warship Atragon to reinstate Japan to it’s former glory, and rebuild their once proud empire.

That’s all well and good, but we need to focus on whats important right now; clearly, Mu being so anti-Atragon is a indication that it’s more than likely our only defense against their invasion, so a small group of unrelated characters who have all been swept up into this adventure must seek out Jinguji, and convince him to use the mighty Atragon to save the world, instead of conquering it, as was his intention. Long story short, this hombre takes some convincing.

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The subtext here is all about confronting the old Pre-war attitude of the Japanese culture, and embracing instead a less Nationalistic attitude toward your fellow man. That’s something that may have had more poignancy to a Japanese audience back in the 1960’s than it does today, but we’re not totally incapable of investing in Atragon or it’s characters simply because we’re so far removed from this context. The movie remains relatable somehow, and even without that connection, the spectacle, and the interpersonal dynamics of our characters entertain us just fine.

Atragon is really great, and it deserves attention. The thing is just slathered with intrigue from frame one, and actually, from the pacing, and how our mystery is explored through drastically rising stakes and continued revelations, the film feels more like Herge’s Tintin than traditional Toho fare, and that’s totally awesome. I love traditional Toho fare, but this is a highly enjoyable foray out of what I’m used to from them, and Ishiro Honda’s reliable expertise is appreciated here as much as it ever was with his monster films.

If I’m going to seek out any weak points in Atragon, it’s worth mentioning that it’s quite predictable. Double agents are obvious from their earliest appearance, and there’s never really any question as to if Jinguji will agree to use Atragon to save Earth, once the terms of our situation are laid out it’s pretty clear which ways things are going to go. Still, it remains an enjoyable trip.

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The other problem here is with Manda. Frankly, he looks terrible. One would expect better monster effects from the studio behind Godzilla, but Manda is executed remarkably poorly, all things considered. He also could have been in the film a little more, but maybe the less we see of him the better, given that he looks like such a laughably unconvincing puppet… Which, of course, is exactly what he is.

Atragon isn’t very well known in the States at this point, but It’s a pretty good little adventure flick. If you’re a fan of Toho, or of Japanese cinema from the 1960’s in general, and if you can handle some time away from Godzilla, I would highly encourage you to check this movie out.

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