RG
Roberto Giacomelli
•Fuad Ramses III inherits a catering business from his grandfather. But the shop where the boy sets up his activity was the scene, forty years earlier, of bloody ritual murders committed by his grandfather himself. Fuad finds a statue of the Egyptian goddess Ishtar in the back room and, just as happened to his ancestor, he remains under her influence, forced to kill young women to honor the goddess and allow her resurrection. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lampley hires Fuad to take care of the catering service for her daughter Tiffany's wedding.
Thirty years after his last directorial effort ("The Gore Gore Girls", dated 1972), Herschell Gordon Lewis returns behind the camera and tackles the sequel (but it would almost be more appropriate to call it a remake) of his first film, the cult "Blood Feast".
Lewis, who is known by the nickname "The Godfather of Gore", i.e., the godfather of gore, since he introduced this element into the world of horror cinema, had left the scene because he considered the genre already saturated with films similar to those he directed: what was initially considered very innovative had lost its verve and originality had given way to conformity. Since Lewis considered it pointless to continue on a path already too well-trodden, he decided to change sectors, ceded the rights to his works, and threw himself into marketing, distancing himself from the world of cinema.
In recent years, Lewis's cinema has been celebrated on more than one occasion, to the point that two of his films have even enjoyed remakes ("2001 Maniacs" by Tim Sullivan and "The Wizard of Gore" by Jeremy Kasten) and he himself has been contacted more than once by producers eager to make him return behind the camera. Lewis has held firm, discouraged by the scarcity of productions and the lack of a real contract that guaranteed him pay, until in 2002, exactly thirty-nine years after his debut with "Blood Feast", producer Jacky Lee Morgan manages to convince him to shoot this mysterious "Blood Feast 2".
It should be said that Lewis is not particularly proud of "Blood Feast 2", he has more than once reiterated that he was merely the executor of someone else's project and that the final result was not as hoped... in the end, it is difficult to give him the wrong, since "Blood Feast 2" is really trash, a semi-demented splatter with a visible low budget. Yet,
despite its macroscopic limitations, the Master's return has its (albeit futile) reason for being, a certain perverse charm that cannot fail to fascinate the fanatic of old-fashioned artisanal horror.
"Blood Feast 2" should simply be taken for what it is, i.e., a goliardic and nostalgic work, a four-dollar splatter that, if seen with the right spirit, can entertain. The underlying amateurism is evident, with all bad actors reciting a rickety script (work of W. Boyd Ford) full of over-the-top dialogues and visibly fake but excessive and funny special effects. The pace is sustained and marked by the numerous deaths that make up - in short - the entire skeleton of the film, although one has the impression that the duration is excessive and that ten minutes less would have benefited the entire film.
What disappoints most about this film is the real utility of the operation: okay, it marked the return to cinema of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but why repeat the previous film word for word without adding anything new? A photocopy film that has to its credit just a massive dose of irony, something that was missing in the original, and the "novelty" of a series of soft-core scenes with naked siliconed beauties, something
unthinkable in 1963. And to think that in 1987 Jackie Kong directed "Il ristorante all'angolo" whose working title was precisely "Blood Feast 2", a film that paid homage with respect to Lewis's work, but rather than repeating the same story, substantial changes were sought, including the insertion of demented irony. "Blood Feast 2", therefore, seems unmotivated, a work to be greeted with affection by the fan but which, in fact, has no real merit.
Curious the homage to "Halloween" in the names of the two detective protagonists (Loomis and Myers) and tasty the cameo of the American trash king John Waters in the role of the pedophile reverend.