HG Lewis

Blood Feast is arugably the first gore film ever. I say arguably because when I say "it is the first gore film" some egghead usually knows of some other movie made in someplace like Japan which is "really the first" and we get into a big argument and I wonder why I am having a fight over a low budget gore movie when I could be watching it instead of fighting over it and I get depressed and my day is ruined.....

Anyway, Blood Feast is director Herschell Gordon Lewis' first gore film (Ha! Can't disagree with me there!). It's crazy, very funny (mostly unintentional but I'm sure Lewis had his tongue in his cheek for many of the scenes) and very very bloody. Some of the SFX are bad but at least Lewis delivers what the ads promised! It's one of my favorite movies of all time but it's not for everyone....It's usually called part one of his "Blood Trilogy" which continued with 2000 MANIACS and COLOR ME BLOOD RED.

Oh yeah...and then there's this:

THE BLOOD TRILOGY- Something Weird-1996-WARNING: The video you are about to see is for BLOOD FEAST completists only! If you are a fan of H.G. Lewis' first gore film (I am; it’s one of my favorites!), then you may find this little oddity interesting. It’s made up almost entirely of outtakes and unused footage from FEAST as well as COLOR ME BLOOD RED and TWO THOUSAND MANIACS. It begins with the well-known BLOOD FEAST trailer. Then segues into the all silent and not as entertaining as it sounds scenes although there are some highlights. You get to see BF star Thomas Wood/William Kerwin working as one of the crew and lots of lingering close-ups of Mal Arnold/Fuhad Ramses’ handiwork. The girl in the bubble bath who has her eye gouged out is more revealing in her outtakes than in the actual finished scene! And there’s really no rhyme or reason to the whole thing. It’s just a big ball of raw footage that sometimes plays like a bad nightmare!

Added to this at the end of the main footage is a bizarre short called "The Art Of Carving" starring Wood/Kerwin and Harvey Korman (who had been in Lewis’ LUCKY PIERRE) in an educational lesson on the proper way to carve a turkey and other meat! I’m not sure if Lewis had anything to do with this but it certainly is a mind boggler coming right after all those gory outtakes!

The tape ends with a Kerwin trailer warning (in b/w) for THE GRUESOME TWOSOME, followed by the original trailer and Mal Arnold’s weird warning for THE WIZARD OF GORE, also followed by the trailer. It’s an interesting artifact but as I said before this is definitely for completists only.



THE GORE GORE GIRLS-For his last movie Herschel Gordon Lewis returned to the gore genre (after making two “hillbilly” movies). It’s his most brutal and sick and features Henny Youngman as a strip club owner who’s dancers are murdered in various horrible (but of course phony looking) ways. The killer plucks out eyes, mutilates a face, shoves a head into boiling oil and pounds one stripper’s buttocks with a tenderizing mallet!

A cocky private detective (Frank Kress who looks like Alan Arbus) investigates and occasionally talks to the camera. He’s assisted by a female reporter(Amy Farrell)who gets drunk several times and winds up winning a strip contest. One suspect sits at a bar and mashes melons with a hammer. Most of the jokes fall flat but there are some good unintentional laughs. The story is interspersed with some tame strip teases but some of the victims die topless. Ray Sager, the star of Lewis’ previous gore film THE WIZARD OF GORE is in there someplace too. Screenwriter Alan Dactman never seemed to work again! Producer/director Lewis (who also composed the jazz score) stopped making movies after this and got into other businesses. However in 2002 he directed a sequel to BLOOD FEAST entitled BLOOD FEAST 2: ALL YOU CAN EAT!! Thanks H.G.!!!!

Thanks for reading!