Synapse Films: Blood Feast (2016) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Synapse Films

Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1963 regional splatter epic Blood Feast for good or for ill is one of the most important horror films ever made.  Credited with being the first official “splatter” horror film with graphic depictions of onscreen violence and gore, it told of a demented caterer named Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) who murders women and cooks their body parts as part of a grand feast honoring the Egyptian goddess Ishtar.  

The homegrown Floridian $24,000 flick became a drive-in favorite and amassed some $4 million at the box office despite a Tsunami of negative reviews and censorship cuts including a Video Nasty banning in the UK which lasted for nearly 40 years.  Still gruesome despite some of the blood effects looking a lot like paint, the film is credited with being among the first films outside of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to show characters dying with their eyes open.  Not long after, HGL went on to complete what he called his Blood Trilogy with Two Thousand Maniacs! Done a year later and Color Me Blood Red the year after.

 
In 2002, shortly before Eli Roth and James Wan unveiled the Hostel and Saw films ushering in a new subgenre of so-called “torture porn” horror, HGL returned to the director’s chair with his first official direct sequel to his 1963 hit with Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat.  Though the film had trouble finding a distributor for about a year, its inception coupled with the aforementioned Roth/Wan outings all but rolled out the red carpet for what would or would not become an official souped up modern remake of Blood Feast.  

For good or for ill, German Le Petite Mort director Marcel Walz picked up where Jörg Buttgereit and Srdjan Spasojevic left off with his 2016 official reworking of HGL’s seminal splatter classic Blood Feast.  Though HGL himself cameos in the film as a museum professor, this is far from the impish spirit of the original Herschell Gordon Lewis flick and has none of that film’s distinctive personality or charm.  Once again, the limb severing shenanigans take place in a dark basement with a pig-masked killer in surgical gear, for the umpteenth time.

 
In this new revised version of the story, Fuad Ramses (played by Robert Rusler) is a family man who moved with his wife and daughter to France to run an American diner.  Business is poor so he takes up a second job working the night shifts at a local museum based in ancient Egyptian culture.  Gradually increasingly obsessed with a sultry statue of the seductive Egyptian goddess Ishtar, he becomes convinced she is speaking to him and has a secret plan for him in which he intends to make good on her long-awaited bloody feast in her honor.  Soon, he begins making human meat pies ala The Untold Story and as the bodies start to pile up with Ishtar “demanding” more blood he starts setting his sights on his wife and young daughter as “honored guests” of his impending cannibalistic dinner.
 
Rewritten by Philip Lilienschwarz and Marcel Walz with slick dark and brooding digital cinematography by Roland Freitag that looks very much like A Serbian Film visually and given a grungy score by Klaus Pfreundner, this new “improved” redux of Blood Feast is an attempt to channel Herschell Gordon Lewis into the new millennia…it doesn’t really work.  

While Marcel Walz also serves as production designer and the film has a shiny sheen to it, lensing all of the dark basement set pieces beautifully and the performances by the ensemble cast from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge actor Robert Rusler, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 starlet Caroline Williams and Click actress Sophie Monk give it their all, the film could easily be mistaken for another generic midnight movie horror streamer.  While the original was, for what it’s worth, rife with character and personality, this new take is chilly and dark, aiming for high-end grossouts instead of inspiration.
 
Synapse Films’ new 4K UHD of the uncut, uncensored version of the film is rendered beautifully with plentiful extras and a making of featurette as well as an audience scare cam.  Sporting DTS-HD 5.1 audio, the disc looks and sounds lovely and comes with a slipcover as well as reversible art.  But still, fans of the Herschell Gordon Lewis regional epic are probably not going to like this and begs the question just which audience this is tailored for?  

Horror goers raised on the new onslaught of steadily more extreme and explicit shockers aren’t going to know who invented the first splatter movie and won’t get anything out of his cameo mid-movie and on its own terms the cannibalistic horror flick in the present horror landscape is more than a little generic.  Fans who only know this new version won’t be disappointed with the 4K UHD from Synapse but fans of the one which started it all in the first place likely will be.

--Andrew Kotwicki