Review #314: Blood Diner (1987)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #31 - Blood Diner (1987)

Watch it here on Tubi!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Well, it's the end of another October. I started this month off with some of the most important movies that jump-started my love for B-horror, so it makes sense that I end the month just the same. When my wife Lisa and I first started our weekly Bad Horror Movie Night tradition, we would spend most weeks hanging out at our friend Mike's house with a big box of old movies on VHS that had been donated to the library where Lisa worked. There were a lot of ridiculous ones in there (like Blood & Donuts or Microwave Massacre, or the time we had three different 80s horror movies called Mom, Mother, and Mother's Day) but the one that instantly became an all-time favorite had to be Blood Diner. This movie is the perfect mix of campy, creative, and horrific, and has so many ridiculous moments that I won't even be able to mention them all.

Blood Diner starts off with a long text crawl warning the audience about the film's upcoming mutilations and cannibalistic rituals, as well as a commentary about the real-world blood cults that the filmmakers do not condone. After this text crawl, a crazed cultist named Anwar Namtut has just gotten done ritualistically killing a bunch of people, so he visits his two young nephews, Mike and George, to pass on the legacy of the Lumerian Cult of Sheetar before being gunned down by the police. Fast forward 20 years, and Mike and George have dug up their uncle's body and used Lumerian magic to animate his brain so he can guide them to complete the ritual he started so many years earlier. The brothers open up a vegetarian restaurant and use it as a front to pick out sacrifices for their ritual, eventually constructing a body for the goddess Sheetar and drugging a crowd of clubgoers to commit wanton cannibalism in honor of their deity. But, the police have been following the trail of murders and will do their best to stop this ritual before it takes place- will the police succeed, or will the brothers resurrect their goddess for the first time in 50 million years?

I fear that my description of the plot just now might have made this movie sound even remotely serious. It really isn't. This is one of the silliest movies I've ever seen, and there's a dozen moments from the film I could throw out right now that would make that clear. There's a subplot about George becoming a wrestler so he can beat up Little Jimmy Hitler. There's a local group of cheerleaders who have started a nude aerobics class in order to seem cooler than the other local groups of cheerleaders. There's a scene where a woman gets her head turned into a deep-fried ball of dough and runs around with a Hushpuppy Head until one of the brothers kills her with a broom. There is a character in this movie, with about a dozen lines who appears in multiple scenes, yet is portrayed by an inanimate puppet (and I cannot, for the life of me, tell whether the characters think he is a real person or not). There is no way this movie was meant to be taken seriously by ANYONE- it's silly from beginning to end.

There's a couple things I could complain about in this film (like the fact that Uncle Anwar and the police chief are played by actors who look and sound very similar, to the point where I couldn't tell if this was an intentional joke on the part of the filmmakers) but it would take serious effort on my part to do anything but gush about Blood Diner. This was very clearly a passion project for somebody, and by all accounts everybody involved was having a blast day in and day out. (Well, that might not be accurate- back in the days when IMDB had message boards I recall reading a post from someone who claimed to have been an extra during the big club scene at the end, and they said it was a miserable experience. But by all other accounts, it was great.)

Blood Diner is a fantastic experience. It's unlike anything you've ever seen. To this day I still quote multiple lines shockingly often ("Friends call me Vitamin, see? Get it! Vitamin C!") and I will always love it and recommend it to anyone who's willing to listen. It's the perfect example of a cult classic and if you watch it with a group of friends you'll all be roaring with laughter. Sheetar guarantees it.

Overall Rating: 10/10 Fish Finger Surprises

Nostalgic Rating: 10/10 Stomachs From Two Immoral Girls

Blood Buffet: Apparently this script was originally written to be a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis' 1963 film, Blood Feast. However, when it finally got enough attention to get made into a film, they were unable to get the rights to make it a sequel, so it was made a standalone movie instead. As a result, they weren't allowed to use the phrase "Blood Feast" at all in the film- so we got the phrase "Blood Buffet" multiple times instead. (And for what it's worth, Herschell Gordon Lewis himself ended up making a Blood Feast sequel in 2002- Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat- which ended up having an incredibly similar plot and tone to Blood Diner.)