2. THAT’S COOKED: Has to have a cooking scene; could be food or drugs or Soylent Green (oops, we burned that one for you).
You keep your serial killer uncle’s brain in a mason jar, butcher immoral women and serve up the leftovers to unsuspecting vegetarians. Who are you? You’re the stars of director Jackie Kong’s Blood Diner. Originally conceived as a follow-up to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast, this ended up being its own thing. And despite being told for years how bad it was, I can’t believe how much I loved every moment.
Brothers Michael (Rick Burks) and George Tutman (Carl Crew) are under the strict telepathic supervision of their uncle Anwar Namtut (Drew Godderis, who directed L.A. AIDS Jabber). Who cares if he happens to be dead and stored in a glass jar? Anwar tasks the boys with completing an ancient ritual to resurrect Sheetar (Tanya Papanicolas), a Lumerian goddess. To pull this off, they’ll need to harvest specific body parts from various women, stitch them together into a flesh-puzzle and throw a grand blood buffet featuring a fresh virgin sacrifice. Naturally, the brothers run a wildly popular vegetarian diner as a convenient front to scout for victims, while a pair of mismatched detectives, Sheeba Jackson (LaNette LaFrance) and Mark Shepard (Roger Dauer), slowly piece together the carnage.
This movie has it all and by all, I mean a squad of killers wearing Ronald Reagan masks open fire on a women’s topless aerobics class, a man taking a shovel to the head so hard that his eyeballs pop out, a body split in half and someone getting their face battered and deep-fried like crumblies at Long John Silvers. Also: pro wrestling, drive-ins and movie punks.
I love that Kong was one of the few female filmmakers of the time, even if people thought that, with her name, she had to be a man. This is just pure fun.
You can watch this on Tubi.
