REVIEW – Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat

Christian Sellers — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:56:56 +0000

Herschell Gordon Lewis has never fooled himself into believing that throughout his fifty-year career he was making anything other than crap. Much like his 1960s counterpart Russ Meyer, Lewis’ output has ranged from guilty pleasures to abominations, but it is in the years since his retirement during the early 1970s that his legacy as the godfather of gore has truly been cemented. In that time, both the slasher and splatter subgenres have been heavily influenced by his crude and excessively gory T&A movies, and so when news that he was finely making a comeback after three decades to direct a sequel to his most acclaimed work, Blood Feast, expectations were, well, mixed. There is no denying that Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat is utter garbage, but that is, after all, Lewis’ trademark.

Decades have passed since deranged caterer Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) hacked his way through an assortment of beautiful, young women in an attempt to resurrect a long-dormant Egyptian goddess and now his grandson, Fuad Ramses III (J.P. Delahoussaye), has taken over the family business. Seemingly unaware of his family’s bloody history, Faud is hired by Mrs. Lampley (Melissa Morgan) to cater her daughter’s wedding but he is soon put under the spell of a statue that holds the soul of the goddess. After abducting young beauty Misti Morning (Christina Cuenca) and transforming her into the first course, Faud embarks on a murder spree in an effort to gather enough body parts and guts to resurrect his new master. But two detectives, Loomis (John ‘Spud’ McConnell) and Myers (Mark McLachlan), are on the case, with the latter having a gut feeling that the recently arrived caterer knows more about the disappearing girls than he will admit.

Paper-thin script, awful acting, ridiculously over-the-top gore and gratuitous nudity… yes, we’re back in the world of Herschell Gordon Lewis. It is amusing to think that, thirty-nine years after the release of Blood Feast, his sequel is just as terrible as its predecessor in every possible way. Age certainly hasn’t softened the legendary filmmaker (who was in his early seventies when he shot the movie) and All U Can Eat is once again full of his usual moments of stomach-turning splatter. Whilst Lewis had conceived the premise of the original movie (along with his then-wife Allison Louise Downe), the script for Blood Feast 2 was written by first-timer W. Boyd Ford. Instead of going all post-modern like most horror filmmakers after Scream reinvented the genre, Lewis almost remakes his classic with an almost identical plot and terrible acting.

Delahoussaye is clearly aware of how ridiculous both the script and his character is and so he plays Faud with his tongue firmly in cheek, as does the rest of the cast. McConnell is so pitiful in the lead role that he recalls Thomas Wood’ performance in the first film, but his over-the-top turn is balanced out by McLachlan’s easy-going sidekick. The majority of the victims are scantily clad young woman and none of them prove to be memorable or likable enough to provoke much sympathy. Whilst Lewis had at least attempted to make a serious movie with Blood Feast, the sequel’s desire to be funny and ironic proves to be its undoing as it comes across as annoying.

The film’s strongest asset is the gruesome special effects, this time provided by Joe Castro. In one particularly memorable sequence, a girl’s hand is fed into a meat grinder, whilst another shows a close-up of eyes being removed. But this minor distraction is not enough to save the movie from its Troma-like stupidity, and although the first film could be forgiven for being a forty-year old movie from a relatively inexperienced director, Lewis should have learnt something about the art of filmmaking after so many years. It is nice to a director refusing to sell out or become softer with age, but Blood Feast 2 can only be described with one word… crap!

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REVIEW – The Gruesome Twosome

Christian Sellers — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:41:06 +0000

Herschell Gordon Lewis had never been known for his subtly. Having conquered the ‘nudie cutie’ genre with Living Venus (loosely based on the life of Playboy’s Hugh Hefner), Nature’s Playmates and Boin-n-g in the early 1960s, Lewis and his producing partner, David F. Friedman, then turned their attention to gore with Blood Feast, supposedly the world’s first splatter movie. Over the next decade, Lewis would subject audiences to all manner of grizzly exploitationers, from Two Thousand Maniacs! and Color Me Blood Red to the notorious cult classic The Wizard of Gore, before suddenly retiring from the industry for thirty years, eventually resurfacing with 2002’s Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat. Following on from 1967’s A Taste of Blood, Lewis produced what was arguably his most unpleasant and sleazy picture, The Gruesome Twosome.

Several beautiful young women studying at a college have mysteriously disappeared, falling victim of the sweet-yet-sinister Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis). With the help of her simple son, Rodney (Chris Martell), Pringle has been abducting and scalping her victims, luring them in with the aid of a ‘room for rent’ sign advertised in her window. There is a method to her madness, however, as she only chooses girls with the finest hair as stock for her Little Wig Shop business. Concerned that her fellow students may be in trouble, Kathy (Gretchen Wells) sets out to uncover the truth, only to risk becoming the Pringles’ next donor.

As with every other Lewis/Friedman production, The Gruesome Twosome suffers from the usual issues with inept acting, terrible script and pedestrian directing. Most of the cast were first-timers and some, such as the case of Wells, would chose not to act again. Thus, the performances are abysmal and not even the villains are able to act convincingly. The dialogue is also at its usual poor standard, with Mrs. Pringle regularly talking with her stuffed cat Napoleon. By far the most annoying sequence is the opening credits, in which two mannequin heads talk to each other, in a scene that was clearly added in an effort to boost the film’s running time.

The Gruesome Twosome may appeal to fans of 1960s camp charm, with pointless dance routines and an overabundance of pretty girls. But those who are unfamiliar with Lewis’ quality of work and only know him by reputation (as the ‘Godfather of Gore’) will be disappointed by the films themselves, which more often than not fail to live up to their legacy. The feeble story is strung together with little characterization or style, with an amateur script once again from Blood Feast’s Allison Louise Downe (who at the time was married to the director).

Where the movie does score points, however, is with the truly revolting special effects, in which Rodney’s young victims are shown in close-up being slowly scalped as he slices their hair from their blood-soaked heads with his knife. Far more nauseating than what was presented in Blood Feast, the scenes of violence are at times genuinely unsettling and are the film’s only truly effective elements. Ostensibly a feature-length set piece for the gory makeup, the effects are amongst the most convincing of Lewis’ career (alongside The Wizard of Gore). Fans of splatter will at least find something to enjoy in between the scenes of talking and dancing.

Lewis’ fifth splatter movie (following on from Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Color Me Blood Red and A Taste of Blood) to be shot in between a stream of nudie and roughies, The Gruesome Twosome showed little sign of the filmmaker progressing as an artist or storyteller, but did demonstrate what an intelligent businessman and marketing genius he was (hence his later career as a leading figure in the world of marketing). By today’s standards, the film fails on all counts but it is easy to see how this would have shocked audiences forty years ago, if not by the graphic violence then by the truly awful acting.

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REVIEW – Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat

REVIEW – The Gruesome Twosome