Blood Diner (1987)

 

Director: Jackie Kong

Screenplay: Michael Sonye

Cast: Rick Burks as Michael Tutman; Carl Crew as George Tutman; Roger Dauer as Mark Shepard; LaNette La France as Sheba Jackson; Lisa Elaina as Connie Stanton; Max Morris as Chief Miller; Drew Godderis as Anwar; Bob Loya as Stan Saldin

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #192 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

Note: All of the mutilations, bodily dismemberments and cannibal rituals were performed by seasoned professionals. Please do not attempt any of these stunts at home. Thank you.

Blood Diner is a paradox. A horror comedy which has content you would not be able to get away with today, between laments about not having a "schlong" from a brain in a jar to the inexplicable Nazi rockabilly band, but this is also a production co-produced and helmed by Jackie Kong, a female Asian-American director who was only in her twenties making this, which she managed to complete on a tiny budget with the financers biting at her heels.

It was meant to be Blood Feast 2, one of the other producers and screenwriter Michael Sonye fans of the original Blood Feast (1963), a film by exploitation legend Herschell Gordon Lewis where, trying to find something to sell to audiences when he was sick of making nudie cuties, he created the splatter genre of Grand Guignol gore films, selling fake blood and animal organs as props being splashed across the screen as the main spectacle. This production had the rights to Blood Feast in fact, and it was because it was not deemed a way to sell the film that this supposed sequel became Blood Diner instead. It is, then to go on a little tangent, now part of a curious history which involves the actual sequel, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002), which Blood Diner is closer to in tone but is much more lavishly put together even on its own low budget, and the serious attempt at remaking the film in 2017. It is aptly a curious family to belong to considering Blood Diner itself is a deeply strange and kooky work to begin with.

Our film's prologue introduces the narrative. Botching his attempt to summon the Lumerian goddess Sheetar during his massacre of the Happy Times All-Girls Glee Club, ("...armed with a meat cleaver in one hand and his genitals in the other..."), Anwar (Drew Godderis) passes on the rite to summon the goddess through a blood feast to his two nephews as children before the cops gun him down. Thankfully, twenty years later, the nephews Michael Tutman (Rick Burks) and George Tutman (Carl Crew) will continue on in his goal, but not before bringing him back from the dead. For whatever occult reasons, the brain is still pink and tender in his twenty plus year body buried in a grave, so Anwar can continue as a brain in a jar with eyes and an ability to still project a voice. The goal to resurrect Sheetar involves building a new body for her from "degraded" women, preparing a blood feast of human body parts, and have a virginal sacrifice; luckily, running a vegetarian health food cafe, the brothers have plenty of access to the people they need and, hiding the corpses into their food as a secret recipe, they have managed to gain more customers to pick from for the next course.

Logic is not to be found in this intentionally absurd world, where a nightclub bouncer gets his head squished under a bouncing low-rider and no one bats an eyelid. This is not a film wishing to be taken seriously as well as being a film, even in the context of the eighties horror boom, with a surprising amount of adult content then other productions, from the amount of cussing from characters to the nudity to the gore, even a nude aerobics sequence which ends with topless women being gunned down by one of the brothers with a Uzi wearing a Ronald Reagan mask. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were not naturally impressed with such a film, released unrated, though Blood Diner wears its absurdity proudly on its sleeve as a way to disarm and amplify this content further. This is likely as much why the film is as bizarre as it is, and a real one-off, that it is clearly made with irony, but actually managed to jump the usual bar into something dumbfounding to witness.

And that is without Jackie Kong becoming involved, who has her own style despite tragically only making four films in the eighties, and not helming anything in the nineties or the 2000s. Kong's debut The Being (1983), shot in Idaho about a monster terrorising the locals, was a more straightforward film but still showed her taste in eccentricity, and one of her most successful films Night Patrol (1984) was a broad absurd comedy about cops with Linda Blair. As interview material showed¹, for all the film's weird ideas in the script, its luridness and a death involving a woman's head being battered into a giant puff ball head, Kong added her own along the way whilst making it fully comedic, such as a rival vegetarian cafe owner only having one customer, a talking mannequin, until you realise he is a ventriloquist and that he talks to himself out of loneliness.

Helping the film considerably is that, even on a low budget, there is production value carefully put together with a style to the film's tone. Alongside the original score by the prolific jazz and rock keyboardist Don Preston, the production was lucky enough to access licensed doo-wop songs, adding to the tone. Kong as a director, alongside locations filmed in Hollywood, has scenes full of background detail and extras to add character to the world. Blood Diner is fascinating in that, alongside bustling with this sense of being fully fleshed out, that it is a concoction between fifties music, is based on an early sixties film and is made in the late eighties, a concoction of colour and a bold visual palette especially if you see the film as intended and have cinematographer Jurg Walther's work not seen in bootlegged form as was the case for years.

Some of the performances are shaky, but this is also a film where everyone is meant to be broad and exaggerated, goofiness in the police chief's tone of voice to someone scratching the side of their face at a crime scene with a loaded gun. Considering the "broad" acting of Blood Feast, especially Mal Arnold as Fuad Ramses, Blood Diner was not lowering the bar with some of its more idiosyncratic dialogue performances. In fact, that is neither a slight to Blood Feast either, as Herschell Gordon Lewis famously did not view his work as art, but still enjoyed himself and made sure his films were entertaining; Blood Feast was the first, and whilst deserving its legacy, the later films by Lewis would get closer to the campier tone that Blood Diner reached to and turned up to eleven.

That comparison to Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat feels perfectly apt, that an odd little film in itself whilst this is batshit weird at the best of times. One which has a character who is a brain in the jar like a fifties sci-fi film. One where Sheetar has stomach dentata. One where, for a tangent, one of the brothers for no real plot reason has decided to compete in an open invitation to wrestle pro-wrestler Little Jimmy Hitler. Yes, they hired an actual wrestler for the film and gave him both Hitler's trademark moustache and a red arm band. This is one of the jokes which may not play today or at least not outside of this film making it just weird. It is not the last time Nazis appear in the film for no discernible reason, as inexplicably a rockabilly band are dressed like Hitler whilst their lead singer is dressed as a Roman with a giant pompadour. And yes, wrestling itself has had Nazi characters and managed to be far more tasteless than this, which at least managed to be so goofball it disarms it a little bit².

And Blood Diner builds, and neither does it have flat bland scenes in between these moments to deflate it. It does not diminish in terms of escalation, to the point that, also adding this to her film and not part of the script, you suddenly have zombies and limb eating in the chaotic finale just because, alongside the general carnage and funkiness of the entire experience. The only negative to this entire film is that Jackie Kong did not helm a film for decades after the eighties, considering how young she was making this, and with a thoughtful head on her shoulders, she could have had an extensive filmography of genre films like this. Whether gender bias in the industry was involved, or even how the decline of exploitation films effected genre filmmaking into the nineties even if straight-to-video existed, this was an unfortunate result for such a bizarre yet technically accomplished horror film.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Psychotronic/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

=======

1) Killer Cuisine: The Making of 'Blood Diner' (2016) covers a great deal in an hour and was included on the Vestron Blu-Ray release made available in the United States and the United Kingdom.

2) One that can be potentially defended was Karl Von Hess (birth name Frank Faketty), who played a Nazi sympathizer deliberately created as a heel to be booed in the fifties, just after World War II when he was an active member of the United States Navy during it. Karl Von Hess played the character so well he would even be assaulted by wrestling fans, which back when pro wrestling was considered fully real could involve actual violence including being shot at or stabbed, which adds an additional risk.

More debatable is Kevin Bean, who in 2018 gained controversy for playing Blitzkrieg "The German Juggernaut", an attempt also at a detestable heel he played over the years unfortunately in a time period where this would be more complicated, alongside the that he is also an elementary school teacher, something which led to him being investigated even if he kept his job.

One time it did not even get into the ring was when in World Wrestling Entertainment, one of the biggest companies, in 2004 when former WWE writer Dan Madigan effectively destroyed his career then by pitching to owner Vince McMahon to have wrestler Jon Heidenreich return as a Nazi stormtrooper named Baron Von Bava, who had been cryogenically frozen before being revived by Paul Heyman, a former wrestling promoter/commentator and at that time a character who managed villain wrestlers. Baring in mind that Heyman was Jewish, a son of a Holocaust survivor, which did not help, Madigan managed to make McMahon speechless and leave for the whole day. Considering, around this time, McMahon allowed a notoriously tasteless angle to actual broadcast around this period called the "Katie Vick" arch, in which his real life son-in-law and a wrestler simulated necrophilia with a mannequin on mainstream television, it says a lot that a line could actually be crossed.