Conventional film history wisdom would have you believe that the first films to push the boundaries of onscreen violence were Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch the following year. Bull.
Five years previous–while the big studios that financed Penn’s and Peckinpah’s movies were still fearfully soiling their collective pants over the last vestiges of the Hays Code–a huckster out of Florida repainted movie history: to his own ends, and in vividly bloody red.
B-movie director Herschell Gordon Lewis experienced a couple of modest grindhouse hits at the dawn of the 1960s with nudie-cutie exploitation flicks like The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, and that initial taste of success spurred his motivation. Lewis wanted to produce something that’d bring in untold fortunes at the box office. But as an exploitation filmmaker lacking the funds to compete with the major studios on their own level, he knew his ticket to ride would entail content that mainstream Hollywood was too chicken-shit to touch.
Nudies had been done to death by grindhouse directors already, so Lewis and his producer Dave Friedman sat down and compiled a list of all of the other sensationalistic elements that the majors avoided. They eventually agreed on one that had yet to be worked to the hilt–gore. In 1963, Lewis shot Blood Feast–the world’s first gore movie–and the notion of what could and couldn’t be shown on a cinema screen was irrevocably altered.
Starting tonight, the Grand Illusion Cinema commemorates the career of this cult maverick with a six-day run of Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore [Ed.: There’s an age check to watch the trailer, it’s that good!], a documentary covering Lewis’s exploitation career. In addition to detailing the director’s entire (mutilated) body of gore-film work, the film reputedly explores his forays into juvenile delinquency flicks (Just for the Hell of It), roughies (Scum of the Earth), and seedy rock-and-roll flicks (Blast-Off Girls).
The doc’s co-directors couldn’t be more qualified to tell Lewis’s tale. Frank Henenlotter has made a career out of extreme, way-left-of-center exploitation flicks of his own (Basket Case, Frankenhooker, Bad Biology), and Jimmy Maslon was one of the key figures at Something Weird, the video label that did so much to preserve Lewis’s warped oeuvre for posterity. If you’ve got a cast-iron stomach and a yen for the weird, this sounds like a must.
Speaking of must-views, The Grand is augmenting screenings of the Lewis documentary with late-night showings of the mutilation maestro’s signature work, Blood Feast, this weekend and next. The movie’s plot is as dementedly high-concept as you can get: Girl hires crazed Egyptian caterer with painted-on eyebrows; crazed Egyptian caterer mutilates bouffant-topped girls; cops bumble around, stymied; and said caterer cooks a rather, ahem, unusual feast.
Nearly fifty years on, this first foray into extreme gore still packs a visceral punch. The director also wrote, edited, and scored Blood Feast; created his own crude-yet-effective gore effects; and shot the whole movie in bright day-glo hues. It’s like watching a kitschy Eisenhower-era postcard brought to life, then spattered with entrails.
That juxtaposition provides the key to what makes Blood Feast a lot more entertaining than your typical splatter-fest: It’s funny as hell, often intentionally so. There’s a sick sense of humor on display that’s really not far removed from the dismembered knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or from Sweeney Todd’s periodic spasms of gallows giggles. Watching someone get their tongue graphically ripped out may not sound like the traditional notion of fun, but it’s all (pardon the pun) in the execution.
Incidentally, yours truly had occasion to meet Herschell Gordon Lewis two years ago at a horror movie convention. During his appearance, the maestro performed the self-penned theme song from his 1964 classick, 2000 Maniacs (think Brigadoon meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) to an appreciative audience of horror geeks. Pay no attention to the dork filming the whole thing.
