Okay, ugly-American horror-hounds such as myself might have to stop calling Blood Feast the first gore film. The Japanese may have beaten the USA to the punch a few years earlier. There are some serious gross-outs in this story of a nice guy who downward spirals his way to the literal Hell, which is a non-stop torture show of punctured flesh, gushing blood and Expressionist imagery.
The only thing that might hold this one back from true splatter status is that, aside from an opening flash-forward, the red stuff doesn’t start really flowing until the last half-hour or so. Herschell Gordon Lewis would never make us wait that long.
It’s all good, though, as this is still a terrific “arthouse” horror film with a story that’s all sorts of fucked up.
Our main man is a seemingly harmless theology student named Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) who has a pretty and wholesome fiancee (Utako Mitsuya). Meanwhile, his sinister friend Tamura (Yoichi Numata) seems dead-set on getting him into trouble (Numata is harshly lit from below like a monster the first time we see him, so we know he’s up to no good).
Next thing you know, people around Shiro start dying as an indirect result of things that he does. He’s wracked with guilt, he wants to turn himself in to the cops, but first he’s got to see his mother who’s about to die in a rest home that’s full of insane people.
Oh and while that’s going on, one of the people Shiro indirectly kills is a member of the Yazuka who gets hit by a car in which Shiro is the passenger–that rascally rabbit Tamura is driving–and now the dead man’s mother and girlfriend decide to take personal revenge (they could have easily gotten some other Yakuza guys to do it for them, but I guess that wouldn’t be weird enough for co-writer/director Nabuo Nakagawa).
All of this leads to EVERYONE dying and going to Hell for about a half-hour of flames and carnage and a few even more wild, out-of-nowhere plot twists to come. The afterlife can be a sonofabitch sometimes.
People in 1960 must have felt assaulted by this film. It’s still nutzoid today.