| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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BLOOD DINER
Rating:  ½
USA. 1987.
Director – Jackie Kong, Screenplay – Michael Sonye, Producer – Jimmy Maslon, Photography – Jurg Walther, Music – Don Banks, Makeup – Bruce Zahlava. Production Company – PMC Filmworks.
Cast:
Rick Burks (Michael Namtut), Carl Crew (George Namtut), Drew Goderis (Voice of Uncle Anwar), Lanette La France (Sheba Jackson), Roger Bauer (Shepard), Lisa Guggenheim (Connie Stanton)
Plot: Michael and George Namtut dig up their uncle Anwar’s brain and, under his instruction, build a body, from parts of girls they dismember, to house an incarnation of the two million year old goddess Sheetar. The leftover body parts are meanwhile served up as vegetarian delicacies at the diner they run.
This low budgeter from woman director (a unique rarity for the splatter film genre, as far as one is aware) Jackie Kong, is a delight. It’s a film that delights in its own stupidity. Kong’s outrageous inventiveness and lack of pretension makes it a far more perversely enjoyable film than many big budget studio counterparts. This is the sort of film that Troma kept seeming to want to make but perpetually lack the ability to do.
The blissful stew of elements seems to be thrown together as though to see how many exploitation ingredients can be combined at once – topless aerobics massacres; wrestlemania, with Carl Crew thrown in the ring against a goose-stomping Adolf Hitler lookalike; and a marvellous climax that mingles green disco dancing zombies clambering for a potful of human limbs, a goddess with a toothed vagina in her stomach blasting lightning bolts, and is scored with both classical music and parodied punk. The gore is hilariously absurd – when a guard is whacked over the head his eyeballs go flying out, a scene where the whole diner is sprayed in vomit, the diner owner trying to drive with his hands severed at the wrist. But the funniest of all scenes in one where Rick Burks, promising kinky thrills, coats a bimbo in batter and then shoves her head into a deep fry vat which she emerges from her head a beehive of fried batter, which Burks proceeds to swat across the other side of the room with a large stick. The idea of an Egyptian goddess being worshipped two-million years ago is just one of the deliberate non-sequitirs.
The film was originally intended as a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1992
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