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The Kids Truck Store - Blood Feast 2 - All You Can Eat
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List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $11.99
Your Save: $ 7.96 ( 40% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Shriek Show
Starring: John McConnell, Mark McLachlan, Melissa Morgan, Toni Wynne, J.P. Delahoussaye
Directed By: Herschell Gordon Lewis
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9781586554101
Format: Color
ISBN: 1586554107
Label: Shriek Show
Manufacturer: Shriek Show
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Shriek Show
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2003-07-29
Running Time: 92
Studio: Shriek Show
Theatrical Release Date: 2002
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Herschell Gordon Lewis makes a stop out of his time machine with Blood Feast 2.
Comment: (A quick note about the Amazon listing: There are several listings for Blood Feast 2, and they are all rated R. Look at the duration of each movie. You want the 98 minute version, which is the UNCUT version. The Special Edition is also UNCUT. I assume we all want the uncut version because we're not here for the soliloquies.)
I don't want to go into the level of detail that Gordon Lewis fans know, so I'll present this review for a Lewis virgin:
HGL made movies in the 60s, a time where drive-in movies displaced male testosterone from peep show porn into gore and violence. His strawberry marmalade, ketchup, tomato paste brand of hack-em-ups was signature long before the Troma Brothers and Bloodsucking Freaks came around. How Lewis manages to revisit all his dramatic devices (tongue dislodgings, brain removal from cranium, eye-gouging) and make them look exactly the same almost 40 years later is a testament to the man's unyielding devotion to budget first, then craft.
After all, a jar of strawberry jelly isn't what a jar of strawberry jelly was 40 years ago. Have you seen the ingredients they put in today? Absolutely frightening!
What Lewis brings to this installment of his art is sprinklings of culture from the time that has elapsed since Blood Feast. There is rockabilly and heavy metal, the Butthole Surfers, in addition to a hilarious ode to Lt. Lorenzo from the 80s tv show Silk Stalkings (played deftly by Mark McLachlan), and a reference to Emeril Lagassi's "kick it up a notch" (BAM!) that will delight food fans and fetishists from all around.
McLachlan, bearing a resemblance to Tom Cruise may have spent many hours studying Mr. Glib, as he masters all the most annoying traits of Cruise's method acting. His partner Detective Loomis (John McConnell) eats nonstop from the beginning of the movie to the end. There's a string of sexy girls (now in somewhat updated, but still strangely outdated attire) and a rich mother that's right out of a John Waters movie.
For John Waters's fans, it is a delight to finally see Lewis's #1 fan pay homage to his mentor onscreen. JW plays a priest who scours a wedding for new choir boys. Devilishly evil! (Don't worry, the boy lost like he's in his mid 20s!)
All in all, a cheesy and over-the-top flick from the originator of the genre. Yes, there is Airplane-style silliness, bad, cheap jokes that make you groan and roll your eyeballs out of sheer embarrassment, and a type of violence that is so juvenile that only unemployed feminists can write a thesis on.
What one really wants to see is how Herschell Gordon Lewis can conquer inflation and make an incredibly low budget movie in the millenium look as if the same exact amount of money was spent as in 1963's original Blood Feast. And in this department, Lewis never disappoints!
Customer Rating:
Summary: 4 1/2. an absolute gorefest.
Comment: blood feast 2 is the sequel to the 1960's film blood feast directed by herschell gordon lewis. i havent seen the original but i'm aware of its reputation of being the first splatter film ever made. blood feast 2 is the only film i have seen of mr. lewis and after being very entertained and my thirst for gore being more than quenched i will probably seek out his other films. this film is very entertaining and very, very, very gory. the plot involves the grandson of the killer from the original blood feast inheriting his grandfathers catering buisiness and after being possed or hypnotized or something by a magic statue of the godess ishtar he begins murdering and mutilating the bridesmaids of a wedding hes catering and using their flesh to prepare the wedding food. this may sound campy and it is. the whole film is campy and corny. some of the acting is pretty bad, but the actor who plays the killer does a good job at being demented, charming and funny. also the 2 cops are funny to watch. the film is more of a comedy than a horror film. the only thing that makes it a horror film is the extremely graphic carnage and gore. the film is filled with disembowlment, eye gouging, throat cutting, scalping and many other forms of mutilation. the gore scenes are long and very graphic and the special effects, while not 100% convincing are pretty good. this is, as the bach of the dvd states, a gorehounds wet dream. this movie is almost buying for the splatter alone, but the entire film is fun and never gets boring. as i said before, the film is really a comedy and if it took itself seriously than the gore would be some of the most gross and brutal stuff ever(not that it isnt gross or brutal, it is). the comedy works, the gore is amazing and the whole film is very enjoyable. any gorehound should pick this up, just make sure you get the uncut version.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Blood Feast: B30
Comment: Herschell Gordon Lewis may have directed Blood feast 2, but he really doesn't consider it one of his films. The reason for this is because he was pretty much a hired-on director for the film; It wasn't his script, the whole idea had been put together and planned out before he even came on board. In fact, the film was all edited, cut and released without Lewis even seeing it! Lewis knew what he was getting into, but he took on this project because he had the itch to make a movie again. Hell, he'd had that itch for quite a few years and when he was approached with a treatment for Blood Feast 2, he happily accepted. He did have fun shooting the film though. Regardless of Lewis' lack of final cut, this movie is pretty fun. It's pretty much what you'd expect one of his films to look like in the 21st century. The acting hasn't improved(or Lewis won't allow it to), the gore is still plentiful and of varying degrees of quality, and it's all still done for laughs, maybe moreso in this film than any of his others. The film is very low budget, yet it looks higher budgeted than any of his previous films. The plot of Blood Feast 2 has the grandson of the killer from the first film inheriting his grandfather's catering business. The new and younger Fuad Ramses decides to set up shop and run his catering business, but he quickly falls under the spell of that evil goddess, Ishtar, and soon he's out collecting those body parts for a brand new blood feast to resurrect the goddess. Opportunity knocks in the form of a wedding reception he's hired to cater. Soon the bridesmaids are becoming ingredients for the feast. Two detectives are hot on the case, one of them is the son of the detective from the first film. Essentially, it's a rehashing of Blood feast, you could almost call it a remake. Lewis piles on the gore, which like his later films, consist of many shots of hands digging in bellies/torsos, pulling out organs and squeezing them and playing with them. And people thought Lucio Fulci lingered on gore shots!! The gore scenes are accompanied by music from rockabilly/surf band Southern Culture On The Skids, giving the scenes a goofy yet different feel from the organ and jazz music we used to hear in the gore scenes in Lewis' older films. I found this movie to be quite funny. It's full of bad puns(which I love), cartoony slapstick and sometimes clever exchanges, usually between Ramses and the detectives. The detectives are a hoot. While Blood Feast 2 may not break the ground that Lewis' films did years earlier, it's a nice throwback to those good ol days, and shows that 30+ years out of the director's chair hasn't hindered Lewis one bit. Lets just hope he gets the urge to do this a bit more often.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Classic HGL...
Comment: I wanted to like this movie because I like HGL in interviews, I love his commentaries on his older DVD's, and I like horror. Campy horror is okay, exploitation films are great, gore is fine by me. Sadly, I cannot recommend this movie. The good? Well, this is the type of film where women decide to have a "lingere shower" prior to a wedding and model said lingere for each other. More nudity than you can shake a stick at. The bad? Most everything else. The jokes are occasionally funny, but mostly just terribly unfunny. The acting is miserable because it seems intentionally bad (one of the hallmarks of a good bad movie is that it wants to be good). Fuad Ramses III is cringe-inducing; the music is over used and too campy; the script is closer to "Hell Asylum" than "2,000 Maniacs." If you like gore flicks, stick with the original.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Herschell is back for more!
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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From the godfather of gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis, comes the most eagerly awaited sequel in the annals of splatter cinema! The cannibal caterer is back with a new recipe for gross-out, comedic carnage that literally blows chunks across the silver screen! From the groundbreaking production team of H.G. Lewis and David Friedman, the maniacal masterminds responsible for Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs, and Color Me Blood Red, Blood Feast 2 is a gorehound's wet dream!
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