In 1963 moviegoers were treated to something they hadn’t really seen before when they settled in to watch Blood Feast from the director Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prior to this film violence and gore had never been depicted on screen in such an explicit fashion. The film isn’t particularly good; in fact, I’d say it’s quite bad. Lewis himself has even said as much on multiple occasions. There is no denying the film’s importance, however, with some going as far to dub it groundbreaking. I’m not sure I’m willing to step out on that ledge, but it absolutely paved the way for the many splatter films to follow.

While Blood Feast is mostly bad, it’s important to note that Lewis and producer David F. Friedman were not taking themselves seriously when they made the movie. They saw an opportunity to exploit violence and ran with it. The film doesn’t contain much of a plot, but it does have a few fun ideas that could be expanded into something better. In 1987 director Jackie Kong attempted to play with those same ideas when he made a tribute of sorts entitled Blood Diner. This effort is much better and fully plays up the camp factor, but still doesn’t get it quite right. It is most certainly a loving tribute.

Now here in 2016 director Marcel Walz has taken a third crack at delivering a good Blood Feast movie and I was fortunate enough to take a sneak peek at the workprint. Along with writer Philip Lilienschwarz, Walz builds on the original ideas Lewis created to give us not only an actual story, but a much darker and far grimmer film.

Robert Rusler stars as Fuad Ramses and his family, wife Louise (Caroline Williams) and daughter Penny (Sophie Monk), recently relocated from the United States to France. The family now lives in a little town just outside of Paris where they run an American diner. The diner isn’t doing too great so Fuad has to pick up a second job working the night shift in a museum of ancient Egyptian culture.

After a few nights at the museum, Fuad gets drawn to a statue of Ishtar, an ancient goddess who is basically the goddess of everything. Before too long Fuad begins to have visions of Ishtar speaking to him and eventually seduces him. Ishtar wants Fuad to deliver her an Egyptian feast, which is a lavish dinner where the main course is human flesh. Once the feast is complete Ishtar will be set free and she vows to spend eternity with Fuad.

So again this plot isn’t too far off from the original Blood Feast but there is some more depth and detail to it. We don’t know why, but Fuad is on medication. One morning he accidentally drops all his pills down the bathroom sink. Being off his medication coupled with the stress of running a struggling business and getting little sleep due to working two jobs, it’s very easy to see how Fuad would begin to get these visions and hallucinations. These are fairly little details but it gives us some more insight into where Fuad is currently at in his life making it much easier to buy this story.

Rusler easily gives the best performance of the film. He plays the role of Fuad very calm and mellow. At first he just seems like your typical dad and it’s whatever, but once he turns it feels pretty sinister. I mean the dude is chopping people to bits and hardly seems phased.

In addition to the beefed-up story, the gore, which is the main reason we all tune into a movie called Blood Feast, is far better in this remake than the original. Naturally you would assume a film coming out today would have better effects than a film that is 53 years old, however, we all know that’s not always the case. The filmmakers could have cheaper out and taken a digital approach, but they did not. Instead, they brought in a special effects wizard in Ryan Nicholson and he did a wonderful job. There are a number of extremely gruesome scenes of basically just torture. Fuad captures unsuspecting victims and takes them to his basement and goes to town. And these are scenes of straight brutality. I don’t want to go into too much detail as to what you see because I think part of the fun is being surprised, but there’s a lot of stretching of skin before it rips that is quite gnarly.

In addition to the gory makeup effects the film is quite stylized. Roland Freitag, who also plays a cop in the film, served as the DP and does a tremendous job shooting the film. All the scenes with Fuad and Ishtar are especially strong. It’s something about the lighting. The scenes are actually quite dark, containing a lot of shadows and creating an ominous tone throughout.

The film’s final scene, which is the actual blood feast, is everything you could want. The entire movie builds up to this and it does deliver. One of my begin issues with the original Lewis film is that you never actually get the blood feast, but Walz wisely makes sure to include that in his version. This is another scene that highlights Nicholson’s great work and shows off the darker side of the remake while mixing in some dark humor. The music here is especially nice as it builds and builds, almost having a whimsical nature to it, which when played over this moment of extreme cannibalism is quite striking. There’s some nice juxtaposition between what we are seeing and what we are hearing.

There are a few moments of clunky dialogue and one scene that is a little awkward to watch, but those few moments are hardly a bother when considering the totality of this film. When it comes to a remake this is everything you could possibly want – there are loving nods to the original that fans will surely notice and yet the film stands completely on its own. Blood Feast is a delicious splatterfest that will have horror hounds going back for seconds.