Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: W. Boyd Ford

Cast: J.P. Delahoussaye as Fuad Ramses III; John McConnell as Detective Dave Loomis; Mark McLachlan as Detective Mike Myers; Melissa Morgan as Mrs. Lampley; Toni Wynne as Tiffani Lampley; Chris Mauer as Mr. Lampley; Christy Brown as Bambi Deere; Christina Cuenca as Misti Morning; Michelle Miller as Laci Hundees; Kristi Polit as Trixi Treater

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #211 / An Abstract Film Re-Review

 

Decades after the events of Blood Feast (1963), in which his grandfather slaughtered women to create the titular feast for the goddess Ishtar, grandson Fuad Ramses III (J.P. Delahoussaye) inherits the old catering store he owned, finding the original Ishtar statue in the back, now less a gold painted mannequin but more of a stone idol. Immediately brainwashing him, it commands him towards the desire to recreate the blood feast again for the wedding celebration of Tiffani Lampley (Toni Wynne) and Detective Mike Myers (Mark McLachlan). In real life, Herschell Gordon Lewis did not make another film after 1972 beforehand, fully committing himself to the world of advertising where he made a huge success in his work. In this time, his films started to develop success for cult movie followers. We even got the unofficial sequel, Blood Diner (1987), where two brothers inherited their uncle's goal to create a feast of blood in her name.

There is an irony to be had that Herschell Gordon Lewis, never one to stay modest, confessed his contempt (in light heartedness mind) to the idea of art minded cinema, He nonetheless left a lasting mark on cinema through Blood Feast. Even if they were made just for money, the idiosyncrasies to how he made his films and his sense of humour to making them are one of his best virtues and are part of his DNA. This is more so the case as, when the long awaited sequel to Blood Feast came about, his most well known film, he would afterwards claim that it was never really his own project despite directing it and collaborating with his old producer colleague David F. Friedman. Yet my experience with some of his odder tangents beyond his gore films, the likes of How to Make a Doll (1968), suggest his fingerprints are still here. Symbolically this is perfect, as upon returning to film making, there had been enough time alongside his cult status for this to be put together with an entirely different mentality, drawn from the subterranean fringe culture that embraced his films in the first place.

It is definitely an interesting film for him, less a sequel than a remake set in the same world, one between the psychobilly music by Southern Culture on the Skids, and its jokey (and frankly weird) tone of his later work, which becomes a cultural signpost of alt-culture of the time of psychotronic cinema, rockabilly revival and early 2000s softcore titillation. It also means Blood Feast 2 is a tangent fest, the original film's premise replayed longer and with irony, liable to be off-putting unless you relent and accept those tangents are more interesting than the plot. One however not that different from his late sixties work and, ironically, is more focused than his own original gore films of yore.

And the type of ironic dithering here that came in low budget cinema from the 2000s onwards has grown on me, and especially in this case is far less an issue. I will openly admit here, to draw the curtain back that, I saw this film the first time in 2019, than revisited it only two years later in 2021, and what a difference two years makes. When you uncover the films of Lewis' career or even people working on the film like Joe Castro, the special effects creator on the production who made low budget films in this era from the shadow of the legend's career, it sheds a new light on the production in terms of how to digest it. This film also feels considerably wackier than wanting to come off as so-bad-its-good, which is close to Lewis' own career. This is the kind of film, to keep you on your toes, where one of the police detectives, the older veteran obsessed with food, suddenly breaks out into a weather report in front of a map just for one moment. It is never brought up again and such odd turns are numerous.

The plot is simplistic enough that this can get away with these weird moments of humour, closer to the camp mentality an overt parody from this period like Psycho Beach Party (2000) had, all whilst still between playing the plot straight as possible in spite of this tone. It helps the broad characters, one note, are at least fleshed out in terms of joke characters, and arguably in some cases a lot better in performances than Lewis' original films. Our food obsessed cop, sceptic about Ramses III being the culprit, and his younger partner, obsessed to bag Ramses III for the sudden string of murders taking place, are kept alive by these actors making them stand out as is the joke when they switch sides. That this older cop is quite good at his job, except eating over the corpses, adds to the humour in a positive way, or that their female secretary in the office turns out to be the smartest and most confident person in the room between them. The bride's mother, who is an overt stereotype for mother-in-law jokes, or even legendary film maker John Waters in a cameo as a Catholic priest, a life's goal as a fan of Lewis' work, playing as tasteless a joke in the role he would have been game for and visibly relishes.

And then there is J.P. Delahoussaye as Ramses III, who at first is actually given a great performance in context, at least a better performance over Mal Arnold as the original Ramses from the first Blood Feast, a "special" performance in itself in how arch it was. Normally I do not like including obscurer pop culture references without explaining them, so I apologise in having to draw from this one, but the exact comparison to what Delahoussaye's performance style becomes soon into the film, grandiose and almost nearing an accent, is when in the mid 2010s a veteran of American professional wrestling named Matt Hardy created an idiosyncratic persona from his previous one. An ageless mad entity obsessed with riding lawnmowers and shooting fireworks at his own brother, all to do something fresh, a "broken" character for a company called Impact Wrestling with a Cruella De Vil white streak in his grown out hair, and among the many other deliberately weird things using a manner of speech that can be described as Shakespearian wall chewing, gravitas of the hammiest sort Delahoussaye a decade earlier uses in Blood Feast 2 for humorous bombast.

All of this fits the film, one which saddles itself between this intentional humour and splatter, the raison d'être of Lewis' film. The original Blood Feast, despite its quirky kitsch, is important because it created the splatter genre of horror, back when on a limited budget Lewis had to use a cow's tongue and fake blood for the initial gore sequence. Decades later, and on the cusp of the new century, splatter and gooey special effects became more over the top and available in lowest budgeted productions. This is seen metaphorically here in how the main practical effects designer is Joe Castro, the director of the low budget series of Terror Toons films which started the same year as Blood Feast II, the third one of the last works Lewis did before his death playing himself as the narrator of gristly reinterpretations of fairy tales. The gore in Lewis' older films, even as sleazy as in a later work like The Gore Gore Girls (1972), was crude and deliberately silly even if utterly revolting, especially as he eventually started lingering on real animal offal as it was, for a lack of a better word, being fingered, to relish the exclamation point.

The same is the case here where, despite how gruesome it is, there are overtly farcical details like Ramses III using kitchen implements, even using oven gloves to hide his fingerprints, or the infamous scene of someone's face being peeled off, the skull underneath still looking around like a perverse animatronic. The gore is most accomplished here, keeping the sense of ickiness to it even when Delahoussaye is chewing the walls too. Even in mind Castro, to the detriment of some of his own films, can be too grim in some of how realistic his content looks, he was the right person to have when, despite Blood Feast's reputation, most of Lewis' films from the late sixties on became more deliberately grottier whilst being ridiculous

The softcore nature of the film is a distinction from before too as, even whilst Lewis made nudie cuties before he made gore films, and at least one porn film he denied making, Blood Feast II at times feels like it was a 2000s softcore film meshed in DNA with a splatter film which is distinct. Lewis' films do have the issue, which cannot be ignored, that he usually had female victims most of the time, one of the few exceptions Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), but the softcore nudity is a caveat in itself and comes off instead as more ridiculous. There is an absurdity at points too when you have lead Tiffani and her friends have a lingerie shower party, of putting on and taking off negligee, which comes off as absurd.

The specific type of softcore here is I can pin point to the early 2000s straight-to-DVD film, like Jim Wynorski's Busty Cops (2004), which became common on the lower shelves of even British DVD rental stores and those I admit freely I have seen a few of, like the aforementioned one above¹. Films which are on the verge of porn and are very statically shot even before they get to the nudity; films, from the few I have seen, that the likes of Misty Mundae (real name Erin Brown) starred in, which were low budget and in many cases strange. It is the same here, where nude scenes are paraded in their own separate space, where a woman wanders a house very naked to Devil's Stompin' Ground by Southern Culture..., or when the lingerie party happens and, for two of the people participating, the film is nearly looking to turn into a softcore sex sequence until Ramses III stumbles in.  

Eventually the film's strangeness becomes compelling. One of the strangest running gags compels this opinion from me - in which a minor character dies, the mother-in-law's husband, and his body inexplicably starts popping up in future scenes, even at the wedding reception at the end of the film. There is a sense of the film being self aware of itself and trying to top what it did previously in how genuinely eccentric it can be, even having a character correct the mistake from the original film that Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess, not an Egyptian one. Even one of those nude scenes, for the police secretary, is played as a bizarre dream for a police officer where her breasts become two iced deserts and for her, when he wakes, to chastise him. What in any other case would be a sloppy early 2000s production, a predecessor to Neo-Grindhouse in being too ironic and not taking itself seriously, instead in this case is camper than a boy scout conventional and genuine in its weirdness. My growing admiration for ultra low budget films too, this one with a lot more production value too, helps considerably as is the fact Lewis made a lot of low budget, weird films. Knowing he himself worked on the likes of Something Weird (1967), living up to that title among other grab bags of eccentricity, really argues that this film is more closely linked to the others, in lurid content for the sake of luridness,and weird characters. Characters in his old work, as here, would have not batted an eye either at the catering Ramses does even when having visible human fingers in rolls to snack on.

An outlier in the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis's filmography it may seem, it does not feel that much of one despite the claims of this. Tragically as well, probably for this reason, this film has be made obscurer and even lost when, in context, it was insanely entertaining whilst in very bad taste and ridiculous. One that, due to one of its songs having been played on the trailer for Arrow Video's promo reel in their early days, has grown on me considerably with fondness. Blood Feast II does feel like a feast, a vast contrast to the quick and sudden shocks of luridness of the director's first film of the two, but a long and peculiar thing for me to delight in.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Camp/Eccentric/Grotesque/Psychotronic/Weird

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

 

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1) And that particularly example, still irredeemable, did show how bizarre these films could get, with random nude egg breaking in a group shower and a talking lama as a police chief. Those scenes still linger with me despite being a long time ago.