Ahhh,this one takes me back.I was twelve or thirteen when I first ordered tonight's review,along with its follow-up,2,000 Maniacs(1964),from Cult Video,and though I'd already read enough about the movie,nothing could prepare me for the first time I popped it into the Panasonic.Globally recognized as the first splatter film,Feast hasn't got too much else going for it besides that dubious distinction.The acting is abysmal,the camerawork is shoddy,even the soundtrack,ineptly provided by H.G. himself will have you bleeding out of the nose like the fountain at Trevi.My prejudicial love for it aside,this is quite possibly one of the worst movies ever made.As you droogs would expect,this also makes it one of the most enjoyable sixty-seven minutes you could ever spend.Watch as non-actors with hokey drawn on eyebrows stumble through ridiculous dialogue while bowing to a clothes mannekin painted gold.Watch Playboy Playmate for June 1963,Connie Mason,so uncomfortable in front of a camera lens that she shivers,as she makes out with Bill Kerwin,a guy who looks old enough to be her father.Watch animal entrails being amateurishly splashed over curvy Floridian cuties of the day.Awful as it is,it remains the pioneer for all gore flicks that would follow,and deserves its place in horror movie history.
Dig Fuad's crazy hypno-brows.One glance and bitches are under his power.
Victim number one overhears a news broadcast on her transistor radio telling all women in the area to lock their doors and windows,as a killer is loose.Sounds like the optimum time for a bubble bath,with her copy of "Ancient Weird Religious Rites" written by Fuad Ramses(Arnold)nearby.The author pays the young bubblehead a personal visit,and with a long knife,pokes her eye out before some prolonged off-camera hacking produces a bloodied mannekin leg.He'll take that,thanks.Mrs. Fremont(Lyn Bolton),a society well-to-do who looks as though she jacked Minnie Pearl for her wardrobe,inquires about throwing a party for her daughter Suzette(Mason) at an Exotic Catering service,run by none other than...Fuad himself.This guy doesn't keep all his eggs in one basket,does he."Have you ever had...an EGYPTIAN FEAST?"he asks,using his hypno-brows to convince the woman to book him for the party.He limps to the back of his store afterwards,where he's got an altar to Ishtar or Macy's summer Mod line of 1963,one or the other,set up.He talks to the Mother of Gold Spray Paint in Fashion Pose about the upcoming feast,and the ingedients he's yet to collect.Ingredients?A young couple necking on the beach at night is disturbed by a machete-wielding caterer with a limp,the man is knocked cold,the woman is de-brain-ified with the blade,and for some reason,a boa constrictor bears witness to the horrible crime.Afterwards,the Chief(Scott H. Hall) and his lone detective,Pete(Kerwin)discover that both victims belonged to some sort of book club.Pete may have a fledgling hunch about the connection...
Marcy(Ashlyn Marton)didn't have any brains,H.G. had to fake it.
Pete's been cradle robbing with Suzette(judging by Pete's age,he may even have been fallopian tube robbing),and after attending a stuffy lecture on the blood feast of Ishtar,spiced up by a low budget fantasy fleshback sequence,their necking party is interrupted by Pete's police radio,announcing another victim has been discovered,only this one is clinging to life.At the hospital,the girl whose face has been hacked off,and both eyes gouged out,sputters out the clue that the killer kept saying the name "Eetar" before her life support machine farts out.Eetar...Ishtar.Nah,couldn't be.Fuad then abducts Suzette's bubbly,top heavy pal,Trudy Sanders(Toni Calvert)in broad daylight,right from the Fremont's pool.This man's uncanny.Back at his catering digs,he whips Trudy and catches the blood from her wounds in an urn,before throwing that mannekin leg from earlier in the pizza oven.When Pete finds out that the Fremonts are having an Egyptian feast,he phones the professor who gave the lecture,and finds out that Fuad Ramses wrote the book on the subject,the same Fuad Ramses that's catering their party,the same Fuad...you get the idea.Pete,now officially with a hunch,rides over to Ramses Catering place with the chief,and they find the makeshift altar,the gold store window mannekin,a blood draped mannekin on the table,everything.To the Fremonts,old chum!Fuad has Suzette strewn out on the kitchen table with her eyes closed,reciting feaux-Egyptian gibberish,when Mrs. Fremont stumbles upon him,about to lop off her domepiece with his machete.Her screams cause him to limp off into the street,kinda odd,since he was so bold about his killings prior to this.The cops arrive and give chase,but Fuad and his gimp leg prove too agile for the young,healthy officers,and he manages to unwittingly hop into the back of a garbage truck,getting himself compacted amidst piped in phony screams,like the garbage he was.Pete haughtily recalls how he finally cracked the case in sixty minutes,when it took the audience about three,and we see Ishtar,perhaps ready to return to the front window at Macy's at last.
Astrid Olson provides the beef tongue for the Fremont's Egyptian feast(cue cheesy organ).
Despite the myriad of shortcomings it displays,Feast's amateurish gore effects are still kind of shocking today.I'd love to see the audience's expression back in '63 when they were first hit with raw animal entrails and flesh in color.It must have been amazing to witness.Kerwin and Mason would return the next year for Lewis's 2,000 Maniacs,which we'll tackle at a later date,a much more polished effort from the "Godfather of Gore" himself,and more likable entry,for sure.I can remember me and the boys yukking it up on a regular basis with Feast back in the day,drawing pictures of Fuad's eyebrows and Ishtar's fashion pose.There'll always be a spot reserved for it in my black little heart.On the scale it rates one wop.
Fuad(Mal Arnold)gets compacted amidst dubbed screams like the trash that he is.
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