Customer Reviews

Blood Feast 2 - All You Can Eat

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Blood Feast 2 is one of the most unlikely sequels in the history of cinema. Lewis appeared to have retired from filmmaking for good following The Gore-Gore Girls in 1972 leaving behind film to pursue a career in advertising. Lo and behold few people would have expected him to return to the fold 30 years later with a sequel to Blood Feast, his most infamous film ever. Who knows what really possessed Lewis to make this film? It is never explained despite the numerous features on this special edition DVD, but Blood Feast 2 proves that Lewis still has the ability to deliver the goods even in his twilight years. Think this movie might be a little soft considering Lewis is now 75? Think again.

In an unnamed small southern town, an independent caterer opens up shop. The caterer's name is Fued Ramses, whose grandfather was the one that sacrificed people in honour of an Egyptian goddess in the original Blood Feast. Well, Fued seems to have picked up a few tricks from grandpa's trade as he grinds fresh human meat for his delicatessen. A dork by the name of detective Myers is suspicious, being able to put 2 and 2 together and figure out that the murders in his small town have coincided with Ramses' recent arrival. This detective is also soon getting married to a pretty girl named Tiffany. Tiffany's mother has enlisted Ramses' catering services for the wedding, obviously unaware of exactly what kind of "meat" Ramses' catering specializes in. As the wedding approaches, the people invited prepare themselves accordingly, including Ramses who will ensure the meat at the wedding is fresh and bloody.

Fans of Lewis will not be disappointed as this film is packed to the rafters with plenty of nauseating scenes of gore. I still find that the bodies looked too much like mannequins however the internal organs are definitely a vast improvement over Lewis' earlier films. I don't get out to see guts, livers and pancreases very often but to me this stuff looked uncomfortably authentic, as did the color of the blood. There's also no shortage of naked voluptuous women in the movie. Although Lewis has never been able to attract people with semi-decent acting abilities, he certainly knew where to find the babes for this movie. Speaking of the acting it was unbearably bad as can be expected however I couldn't help but wondering throughout the movie if this wasn't intentional. The actors are so bad that one could probably pluck people right off the street that would do a better job than this. But is good acting even allowed in an H.G. Lewis film? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that Lewis probably doesn't even allow decent acting in his movies, as bad acting has become as much a trademark of his films as the infamous gore. So to bad-mouth one of his films simply on the basis of atrocious acting to me feels like a moot point.

Really, I thought this film was great. I've already mentioned the babes and the gore but another thing I particularly liked was the retro 50's and 60's style to it. Many of the characters wear clothes from that era and most of the male leads have enough gunk in their hair to keep the marketing executives of hair gel companies very happy. Oh and how could I fail to mention the music, the entire soundtrack is played by Southern Culture on the Skids whose rockabilly twang has rarely sounded as good. Not to mention that the Butthole Surfers have a tune in here too. Throw in a cameo appearance by "Pink Flamingos" director John Waters and an extra disc packed with special features and Blood Feast 2 turns out to be an essential package for Lewis fans. The behind the scenes footage in the extra disc reveals that cast and crew seemed to have a blast of a time while making this movie. Blood feast 2 is also injected with lots of great humour. Much of the dialogue in the film was intentionally laughable of course, especially whatever came out of the detective's partner's mouth, a loudmouth who wears tacky Hawaiian shirts and has a rabid appetite for doughnuts. It's good to see that Lewis doesn't take himself or his films any more seriously than he used to as I've always found self-deprecation to be the funniest type of humour. Best line: "I only use the freshest meat in my sandwiches".

Yes, this sequel is 40 years in the making and has been talked about probablly more than any other sequel in horror history over the past few years. Jackie Morgan succeeds where others have failed, not only coaxing the over seventy year- old "Godfather of Gore" Herschell Gordon Lewis back into the director's chair but also bringing back David Friedman, producer of the original. The crown jewel of this cult film follower's wet dream is the participation of infamous cult director John Waters in his cameo apperance as a minister, of all things! The plot is inconsequential because what everyone is interested in seeing is the blood and guts style stomach churners that Lewis is famous for and he definately does not disappoint. Add some extremely campy dark humor to the mix and you have all the makings of a cult masterpiece! A must see for gorehounds or fans of HGL!

Splatter fans will have much to enjoy in the return of the "Godfather of Gore," H. Gordon Lewis to filmmaking. "Blood Feast 2: All you can eat" is not a sequel to his infamous 1963 classic, "Blood Feast," but rather a re-make. This is a movie that couples lots of blood and guts with a wink and a nudge. "Blood Feast 2" needs to be seen with a rowdy crowd of friends.

The plot is silly and the acting is cheesy, but it's all done with tongue in cheek (or ripped out). A quick summary: Fuad Ramses III (played to perfection by J.P. Delahoussaye), grandson to the Ramses of the first film, has returned to town to resume the catering duties of his grandfather. He's actually a slave to a goddess named Ishtar (not the movie), housed in a statute, commanded to dismember as many people as he can for his bloody buffet.

Hot on his trail are two bumbling cops, Detective Myers (Marc McLachln), whose weak stomach gets the best of him at crime scenes; and his partner, Detective Loomis (John McConnell), who eats just about anything that comes in reach of his fingers. Loomis is a big fan of the dishes Ramses offers up to him, like his delicious "ladyfinger" sandwiches.

It's all good fun. The script is silly and the jokes come as fast as the blood and guts. Oh, and the nudity. Lots of nudity. The gore is cheesy and well done, and there's plenty of it. There's little point in describing the technical details of the DVD set; this is one of those films that was not produced as a centerpiece to an expensive home-theater system, as you talk about anamorphic widescreen with DTS 5.1 sound. You just pop it in and have fun.

Forty years after inventing the gore film, Herschell Gordon Lewis returns with a sequel to his classic schlockfest "Blood Feast." Entitled "Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat," the Godfather of Gore once again grosses out viewers with a cornucopia of sickening scenes, hammy acting, stilted dialogue, and corny gags. Over the past few months, I have learned to admire this pioneer's original efforts and when I saw a new release from the master, I just had to run out and pick up the DVD. The biggest surprise about "Blood Feast 2" is the gore, which attains new depths of soul shattering nausea. Gone forever are the obviously fake store mannequins of the original films, replaced with special effects on a level never before seen in one of his movies. "Blood Feast 2" revels in gruesome scenes of carnage, and does so in a way that would make Peter Jackson sit up and take note. This film will delight rabid grue fans.

The viewer of "Blood Feast 2" quickly arrives at the conclusion that something ominous looms on the horizon. The opening sequences of the film show two vagrants stumbling around behind a strip mall where they see an eerie red light seeping out from underneath a door. The light causes the two men to immediately attack each other in a gore scene that ranks as one of the most startling opening scenes in B movie history. A minute later, we see Fuad Ramses III returning to his grandfather's decrepit catering business. In the original "Blood Feast," Fuad Ramses went a little off his head and began abusing the local contingent of lasses in order to pay bloody homage to a statue of the Goddess Ishtar. Fuad's grandson seems like a nice sort of fellow, hardly the type of chap to fall for such bunk as ancient statues and cannibalism, but a local cop, Detective Myers, has a different idea about Fuad, and he quickly pays a visit to the young man in order to straighten him out. It seems that some of the townspeople are chary that the shenanigans of forty years ago may once again claim a few victims. Fuad Ramses III assures the officer that his grandfather's business will assume a sterling reputation under his tenure, and all seems right with the world.

Wrong, of course. Fuad Ramses III discovers the old Ishtar sculpture in the backroom and quickly falls under its spell. Soon the carnage starts anew, as several young ladies disappear under mysterious circumstances. It turns out that the cop who visited Fuad is a complete dunce, and his suspicions that the recent disappearances might have something to do with the reopening of the catering shop fall on the deaf ears of his portly partner, Detective Loomis, a guy who spends most of his time eating at his desk while ogling the pretty, smart mouthed redhead who works at the police station. As for the young Fuad, business promises to pick up when he discovers that Detective Myers will soon wed the beautiful daughter of Mrs. Lampley. Ramses despises this coiffed, wicked woman, but he realizes he needs the business if his enterprise will succeed. The wedding reception is a real hoot, especially with the surprising appearance of John Waters as the officiating priest. The conclusion delivers oceans of gore.

H.G. Lewis really outdid himself with this highly entertaining sequel. First, the gore is simply mind blasting. In his earlier opuses, Lewis always allowed the camera to linger on the unfolding carnage, a technique he uses to sickening effect here as well, but the special effects are SO much better in "Blood Feast 2." The last movie I saw that reveled in this type of grue was Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive." Don't get me wrong; Lewis's film does not approach the frantic pace of Jackson's film, but the gore here truly turns the stomach and made me ask on more than one occasion: "Did I really just see that"? Imagine seeing a corkscrew used to grim effect, more than one evisceration shown in loving detail, a peeling (best left unexplained), and numerous limbs in places other than where they should be. I'll watch "Blood Feast 2" again just to study the nasty special effects work.

Simultaneously, Lewis plays for high camp in this outing. Bad acting and atrocious dialogue are as commonplace in a Herschell Gordon Lewis film as trees in a forest, but this movie is one of the first ones I have seen from this director where he really lets the actors look like they are having a blast. Melissa Morgan, the actress who plays the ultra snarky Mrs. Lampley, takes her performance so over the top that it simply defies description. I cannot comprehend how a woman could manage to stand upright with that much makeup on. Another winner of the Udo Kier award for overacting is Mark McLachlan as the supremely dense Detective Myers (look for Myers's nausea gag; it's a hoot that just gets funnier and funnier as the movie progresses). In fact, everyone does a great job of doing a bad job acting.

I was a bit disappointed with this Special Edition DVD. There is no Lewis/Friedman commentary included, although you do get a bonus disc with behind the scenes looks at the gore effects, a couple of deleted scenes, and short (very short) interviews with Lewis and the cast and crew. The movie disc comes with a mess of trailers for several gory horror films from the likes of Joe D'Amato. Overall, "Blood Feast 2" is an unabashed gore classic, and I hope Lewis and company make another film in the near future. How about a sequel to "The Wizard of Gore"?

I'd just like to point out that actor Mark McLachlan pulls off the finest Tom Cruise send up impersonation I have ever seen. Uncanny and side splittingly funny, McLachlan nails Cruise's mannerisms and tics that make up the main body of Cruise's early acting roles. Genius pure genius, not to mention that McLachlan looks like Cruise circa Top Gun.
Oh yes and the gore in this movie will make you feel nauseous, unless you work in a slaughter house or have a psychological condition.
A good anti conservative movie for this time zone, plus John Waters as a preist, marvelous.

If you're not a fan of the old HGL movies, you should check this out. The cinematography is much better, production values are watchable, and the humor and gore is top-notch.

Blood Feast 2 is basically a re-imagining of the first with a contemporary feel to it, a new chef opening a catering business where the last store in the first Blood Feast occured. The two detectives in this movie are hilarious, especially the one who eats all the time. The boobage is high quality, I'm impressed.

HGL's self-awareness allows this cheesy, gory, fun-fest to come off well intentioned and very entertaining. It makes me hope HGL makes another movie and soon!

Highly recommended!!!

I really didn't expect this to be anything more than a rehash of times past, to be honest.

Hm, I was very surprised, to say the least. It's more of a remake than an actual sequel, although it's constructed to work as the latter as well.

Let me just say it has the same feeling of story, flow, wonderful acting and very reasonable character reactions in it...

All drenched into a great sleazy soundtrack and - this is the biggest change - really great and (more of less) realistic FX!

If you are into Herschell's works, don't pass this one up. It's absolutely brilliant!

Herschell Gordon Lewis is back, and better than ever! In 1963, Lewis directed the first "gore" movie--"Blood Feast." After directing a host of other gore classics, HGL called it quits in 1972 and became one of the leading experts in marketing--he's written over twenty books on the subject. Of course, eventually someone HAD to make "Blood Feast 2," and here it is. Herschell Gordon Lewis hasn't lost a single ounce of what made him so memorable. It's all here. Everything you would expect from the "Godfather of Gore" rears its ugly head onto the screen. And I do mean ugly. Bad, over-the-top acting, cheesy effects, minimal camera angles, dancing strippers that do nothing to enhance the plot, and more gore lingering than ever before, make up the bulk of this movie. However, if you're looking for a standard HGL script, you may be surprised--this one is really well done with more black humor then any previous Lewis film. At one moment, you're disgusted by the largest liver ever seen inside a human body, and the next minute, you're laughing your head off at the ridiculous dialogue and one-dimensional characters that also linger in the film. For fans of cult films and B-Movies, this one is not to be missed! It comes from the man who brought us the gore film, and he's back after being away from the camera for thirty years--much too long! It's a shame this film didn't get a bit more push from its producers and unlike previous HGL movies, it took quite a while before it was even released. Perhaps they should have asked their director for some marketing advise. In the world of HGL, you write the movie (sometimes), shoot the movie, edit the movie, and release the movie. There are no audience surveys, no focus groups, and certainly no good taste. If you know HGL, make sure to see his latest. If the world of B-Movie Madness is new to you, see the original first, but don't miss this classic sequel--it will leave you aghast! Let's hope he makes another.

Blood Feast 2 finds Herschell Gordon Lewis returning to the genre that brought him the most recognition - the splatter film. A lot of things have changed in the 39 years since the original Blood Feast (1963), but the essences remains. Blood Feast was widely influential in its time. Many directors followed Lewis' lead using exploitative gore to various degrees of success. However, with Blood Feast 2 (2002), Herschell is no longer the innovator. Where films such as 2000 Maniacs, She Devils on Wheels, and the Gore Gore Girls forged new paths in the 60s, There are two new generations of horror directors working today from John Carpenter and George Romero to Takashi Miike and Eli Roth and this is reflected in Blood Feast 2. The film contains countless references to other films such as Halloween and Fritz Lang's M. It even references the electric knife from The Gruesome Twosome!

Herschell Gordon Lewis is proud of his oeuvre, as he has stated in many interviews and commentaries, but he also knows that his films are not "high art". A number of factors such as time, money, personnel gave his films a special cheesy look. I was interested to see if the results would change now that Lewis has a bigger budget, more time, and a fair amount of celebrity. I'm happy to report that the film still feels as though it were finished in about five days. The camera work is in focus (as Herschell always insisted), but that's about all that can be said for it. The sound recording ranges from moderate to very poor. Some parts have such obvious dubbing that it seems almost intentional. The color isn't too bad, but the film looks cheap and a little grainy. This, however, could be the fault of Media Blasters who do a consistently terrible job of producing DVDs.

The acting is as terrible as ever. It's not always apparent whether the actors are trying to be cheesy or not. It's hard to believe that so many talentless individuals could be gathered to appear in one single movie. This results in many many laughs. There's nothing funnier than an actor tripping over the punch-line of a joke that is itself so bad it that it hurts. Characters, their motivations, and their temperaments can turn on a dime. One minute the young detective is bullying his secretary, the next minute he's cracking jokes. There are some wonderfully over-the-top moments featuring character actors being silly - Herschell is not above resorting to slapstick humor if necessary. There are even a few cameos by John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble etc.), David Friedman (Lewis' partner in crime), and others.

The big draw is of course the gore, of which there is plenty. It's not so constant that it becomes tiresome, but rather is interspersed throughout the film. It's most similar to Wizard of Gore - lots of digging around torsos and such. The gore is no more convincing than it ever was. When Faud III is digging eyeballs out of a corpse, it looks as much like a dummy as the earlier films.

Overall, there is a lot here to interest the rabid HGL fan. If you've seen all of his movies, listened to the commentaries, and read the books about his work, Blood Feast 2 is incredibly rich. There were more little inside jokes than I could count. Herschell went all out with the puns for this one. There are some terrible, awful jokes that make your eyes roll right out of their sockets.

The best part of Blood Feast 2 is that it's consistently bad, but never dull. Lewis directed some steaming piles that drag on and on (Monster A-Go-Go springs to mind), but this has nice pacing through and through. There aren't any moments of obvious filler as in The Gruesome Twosome - everything seen is justified. Well, as much as a gratuitous lingerie party featuring five "model/actressess" can be justified!

The down side is the DVD production (lack of) quality. Media Blasters should be simultaneously thanked for releasing titles that are guaranteed to be poor sellers and scolded for putting out such shoddy releases. The video quality is substandard. There are some interesting special features (especially on the Special Edition), but some aren't even worth messing with because the quality is so bad. Disc one features a photo gallery of HGL and company that is so pixelated that one must wonder how much work went into making this "Special Edition". Complaining is probably useless because few others would want to touch this project, but Media Blasters should take a look at Cult Epics, Synapse, and even Criterion.

Aside from the poor video quality, the extras are pretty lame. The special edition comes with a second disc that contains about twenty minutes of video - TOTAL. There's an "on the set with HGL" where we get to see Herschell talk about how a camera is going to come down a flight of stairs. Wow. There's a "behind the scenes with the cast and crew" where a guy goes around to various people asking what they do. Amazingly, literally 80% say "nothing" or "I don't do anything" and the other 20% are actresses. There's a "behind the gore" feature that's an amazing minute and forty seconds of an actor cutting off a head and then digging through a skull. Finally, there are three deleted scenes which are uniformly dull. These extras are pathetic. The original price of $35 is beyond obscene! I wouldn't even recommend the special edition to anyone. The movie itself is the *only* good thing about this package. The extras will disappoint you - they're worthless. I think the presence of an extra disc for the "special edition" is a sneaky move on the part of Media Blasters to trick consumers into thinking that they're something of substance to be found. Certain they could have fit these twenty minutes onto the movie DVD, especially considering the video quality that they found acceptable. Don't be fooled.

Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat is a great film from a true innovator. It's constantly entertaining, campy, and always funny. Don't bother with the two disc set though. There's nothing there.

I first saw the R rated version of this that had about 6 minutes of gore cut, resulting in this tame version to have little gore. Still, I liked this movie! The gore level was low but this movie redeemed itself with its comedy and sexy scenes!!! This still was a hell of a good film even without the gore! Later I bought the unrated uncut version which is the orgiinal film with all 6 minutes of gore put back. It still basically is the same movie with or without the gore, but the unrated movie just featured extended scenes of unneeded storyless torture, violence, disembowlment and even more that was kinda fake looking,but still at a gross out level. I liked this movie with or without the gore, but for those gore hounds out there, check out the unrated version, cause this has wall to wall with gore!!