BLOOD FEAST (2018) ***

Blood Feast is one of my all-time favorites.  It had already been remade as Blood Diner (and to a lesser extent, Mardi Gras Massacre) and had an excellent, underrated sequel.  Because of that, this remake didn’t seem all that sacrilegious to me.  Besides, Two Thousand Maniacs and The Wizard of Gore had already been remade.  It was only a matter of time until someone got around to remaking this.

Robert Rusler stars… let’s take a moment to acknowledge how great that sentence is.  With the one-two punch of Weird Science and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 in 1985, he delivered two of my favorite asshole performances of the ‘80s.  He’s worked steadily throughout the years, but this is probably his meatiest role to date.  I can’t tell you how good it is to see him mostly unchanged and clearly having a ball with a rare lead role. 

Sorry, where was I?  Oh year, Robert Rusler stars as diner owner Fuad Ramses.  Together with his wife (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s Caroline Williams) and daughter (Sophie Monk), Fuad opens an American diner in Paris.  Before long, he’s knee-deep in financial troubles and resorts to taking a night job working as a security guard at a museum to make ends meet.  When he stops taking his anti-psychotic pills, he goes nuts and starts seeing visions of the goddess Ishtar (Sadie Katz from Wrong Turn 6) who demands sacrifices in order to be brought back to life. 

There are some nice nods to the original.  The fact that most of the action takes place in a diner is a fitting shout-out to Blood Diner too.  It’s also nice seeing Herschell Gordon Lewis himself popping up in brief cameo in his final film appearance.  

I’m still not sure how I feel about the domestic scenes of Fuad and his family.  Making him a semi-relatable character was an odd choice, but it helps to give this version its own identity.  (I did like the fact that the Connie Mason character from the original is now Fuad’s daughter.)  Rusler takes things very seriously and he’s admittedly quite good.  The whole movie rests on his shoulders and he is more than up to the challenge.  He even manages to make the role his own along the way.  While I personally miss Mal Arnold’s over the top theatrics, Rusler was enormously fun to watch. 

The original Blood Feast invented the gore film as we know it, but it still manages to pack a wallop more than fifty-five years later.  There’s plenty of gore to be found in this version.  We get castration, throat slashing, butt carving, and scalping.  There’s even a clever update of the original’s famous tongue-ripping scene.  My beef is that unlike the original where all the kills were bathed in bright light so you could see them in all their glory, the director of this one, Marcel (Seed 2) Walz drenched them in darkness.  Sometimes, it looks atmospheric, but most of the time, it’s just too dark.  

Blood Feast kind of stumbles a bit in the second act.  The build-up to Fuad’s mental breakdown is handled well enough, but some of the kills are lackluster (especially compared to the original).  HOWEVER (and that’s a big however, if you can’t tell) the final reel is a real showstopper.  Once we finally get to the blood feast, all bets are off.  I don’t want to spoil it for you (although I will say it’s kind of like if Panos Cosmatos directed the end of Hannibal), you’ve just got to see it for yourself.  I can definitely say that while the main course is a bit undercooked, Blood Feast ’18 delivers on the dessert.