Blood Diner (1987) Review

Blood Diner (1987) Review

 

Blood Diner is a fever dream of a movie. The irony that the whole thing is utterly tasteless when it is primarily about food is not lost on me. After a tongue-in-cheek (albeit wordy) PSA about how the content of the film may offend sensitive viewers and the cannibal rituals were performed by professionals, it begins with a mother calling her two sons “shitheads” then leaving them alone in the house while she goes out to buy “goddamn tampons” and a serial killer is stalking the nieghbourhood carrying a meat cleaver in one hand and his genitals in the other. The killer breaks into the house, and the kids are…thrilled! It’s their beloved uncle Anwar! Twenty years later they dig up their uncle’s corpse and put his eyes and brain in a jar (just like what would happen to the villain in Robocop 2 a few years later) so they can follow his demands. Anwar tells them they must build a body for the ancient goddess Sheetar before they resurrect her, and the body must be made out of various female body parts sewn together. These brothers are sure busy guys, because in addition to resurrecting Sheetar and murdering women they also run a successful vegetarian restaurant, but there’s a reason they don’t tell anyone what their secret ingredient is.

So, we have the brain of a maniac in a jar telling his nephews what to do and a bustling diner with patrons completely unaware that they are being served human body parts by these two unhinged cooks. All of a sudden it cuts to a taping of a naked aerobics show with several half-nude women dancing around, then they are blasted away by the brothers with machine guns who are wearing Ronald Regan masks! They butcher them and follow Anwar’s instructions for making Sheetar. You kind of expect the completion of Sheetar to happen at the end, but they actually finish the body well before the halfway mark, kind of like how Dr. Frankenstein creates the Monster early on in Frankenstein. But, they still have to prepare for the “blood buffet” and sacrifice a virgin in order to bring Sheetar into her new body, and some cops are catching on to who is behind the grisly crimes happening around town.

There are a few scenes with the brothers trying to kill people, and these scenes are pretty funny in a morbid kind of way. But, there’s also a wrestler by the name of Jimmy Hitler (?) on the TV who one of the brother’s really hates, and they have an exhibition fight later in the movie. What does this have to do with anything? I’m not quite sure. It makes as much sense as a rival restaurant having a dummy mascot that somehow talks. By the end the blood buffet is enacted amidst a wacky concert and the movie hits the point of absolute insanity. I can’t count how many times it made me say “What?” and can’t even recount all of the shocking moments. It’ll go from a naked chick doing karate in a cave to the brothers chopping off the hands of a rival chef who kidnapped their uncle’s brain and the handless rival chef trying to drive away but crashing into a hill going extremely slowly and still dying from it.

Originally, this movie was supposed to be a sequel to the Herschell Gordon Lewis film Blood Feast, but it was altered to be its own thing, though it clearly was inspired by the aforementioned filmmaker’s splatter films of the 60’s and 70’s. The cannibal stuff and intended comedy make it feel like a spiritual successor to Motel Hell at times, but it goes much further with its sick sense of humour. I’m surprised Blood Diner was directed by a woman, Jackie Kong—not sure if she has any relation to the King of Skull Island or not, but she definitely has some dark, uncompromising filmmaking sensibilities. I’m also surprised the budget was as high as $300,000, which is to say it looks and sounds incredibly cheap. The makeup effects are bad, the acting is bad, the dialogue is bad, and worst of all is the sound. I don’t understand what happened. It’s as if they re-recorded all the dialogue after the scenes were shot, and there are moments when there are sound effects missing or it choppily switches from music to sound effects and then to different music. Aside from the auditory atrocities, most of the fake-looking blood and body parts come off as intentionally lame to add to the humour, but it still gets incredibly disgusting and depraved, especially at the end when everyone turns into green-skinned zombies.

Blood Diner is one of the trashiest, sleaziest, most ridiculous food-related-horror-comedies I’ve ever seen. It’s up there with Poultrygeist and Microwave Massacre with its lack of ethics about how far to go with the concept, but if you enjoy dark, twisted flicks like those, then this one will definitely elicit some laughs, especially if you enjoy really weird stuff and poking fun at horror clichés.