"Nothing So Appalling in the Annals of Horror!" the ads proclaimed - and, for once, this wasn't hype. When Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast premiered in 1963, it was the first of its kind: a low-budget gore film that treated blood, viscera and severed body parts like they were naked breasts in a nudie movie. (Lewis, not surprisingly, had started out in the exploitation industry lensing nudies.) A surprising success on the drive-in circuit, it led to a new career direction for Lewis, who quickly cranked out a series of splatter cheapies (2000 Maniacs, Color Me Blood Red, The Wizard of Gore, etc.), ultimately changing the look of horror cinema forever. The candy-colored blood in George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead would probably not have been possible if Lewis hadn't earlier painted the town of Miami overly bright red.

Feast is one of those movies that's frequently discussed among film geeks and gorehounds (John Waters even cites it in his early career memoir, Shock Value), though it's not been widely seen by most regular folk. With good reason: by any critical measure, the flick is a piece of crap. Directed quickly and with actors so unstudied that one of 'em has to read his lines off his palm (while his buddy carries around a notepad that he pretends to write in, but you know he's really using it to jog his memory), packed with Playboy playmate victims who behave so awkwardly in front of the camera that their killings almost seem a mercy, and centered around a hammy blue-haired villain whose every evil pronouncement is punctuated by a campy trilling organ, the movie's only lure is its extreme and thoroughly unrealistic goriness. (When it first came out, the horror fan magazine Castle of Frankenstein branded it "amateur night at the butcher shop.") I recently re-screened this cheesy movie landmark in its Something Weird DVD incarnation. It'd been years since I'd first viewed it, and I was certain that the pic couldn't be as awful as I remembered it. If nothing else, watching it again made me feel better about the quality of my long-term memory. . .

The flick revolves around Egyptian caterer Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), a specialist in "exotic foods" who by night is a serial murderer. It opens with one of his killings: a buxom young blond in a bubble bath, with a book entitled Ancient Weird Religious Rites on the tub, is stabbed in the eye by Ramses who suddenly appears in the bathroom. Like the killers in 80's era slasher pics, Ramses has the ability to instantly show up anywhere and get away quickly even though he walks with a severe limp. The madman chops off one of his bathing victim's legs (we're treated to a lingering close-up of its bloody stump), dashing off with the dripping appendage. He returns to his shop, where he has a large bubbling pot and a gold-painted manikin doubling as the statue of an Egyptian goddess. (No, it's not Kim Cattrall.)

The Miami police (Thomas Wood and palm-reading Scott Hall) are stumped. Though Fuad has performed his atrocious murders without wearing gloves and just plain stumping around the crime scene, we're told he's left no clues. "Well, we're just working with a homicidal maniac, that's all," detective Pete deduces, but despite such Sherlockian insight, the caterer quickly gets away with two more murders: lopping off the top of one young girl's skull so he can swipe her brains and then yanking out the impossibly long tongue of a second. (Reportedly, a sheep's tongue was utilized for the second gore effect.) The machete-wielding Ramses is collecting body parts in sacrifice to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar (not the last time that this poor deity'll be attached to a lousy movie), and he's selecting his victims through a book club he's created for his own dire uses. All of his victims have the same Weird Religious Rites hardback in their apartments, though when one survives long enough for the police to question her, she says that the killer chanted, "All for Eat-ar!" Which doesn't say much for that gal's ability to retain what she's read.