Furdell Classic Cinema Theatre, Vol. III: Blood Diner

Principle characters:
a. Michael, the more apparently-stable brother, who uses his perfect hair and power of hypnotism to lure victims to their deaths.
b. Georgie, the clearly insane brother with a talent for cooking (people) and screwing around. (Repeated line: "Georgie, stop screwing around.")
c. Uncle Anwar, a Sheetar-enthusiast and ritual murderer whose brain is resurrected by his nephews. He often laments the loss of his "schlong."
d. Sheetar, the ancient goddess in question, who the boys hope to vivify by stitching together body parts from several "immoral" women.

a.

b.

c.

d.

Plot Synopsis:
Describing the plot would kind of miss the point, so I'm going to put more effort into the Final Analysis. The film's first five minutes do a good job of setting up the plot: Anwar is passing along the crazy to his nephews.

True to their word, when they grow up the boys resurrect their uncle's brain, murder a bunch of people, secretly feed them to other people under the guise of "health food" at their diner, and plot to reincarnate their beloved evil god Sheetar in a virgin sacrifice at a dance club.

Final Analysis: This movie was really hard for me to pin down. Going in, we thought it was going to be a straight-up bad 80s gore flick. It is, and it isn't. Blood Diner is clearly made by people who love bad movies so much that they wanted to make one, and they did. Its treatment of schlock cinema is too loving to call it a spoof; it's not an homage, because how can a bad movie pay homage to bad movies?

To give you an example, consider Grindhouse, the recent Tarantino/Rodriguez tribute to 70s exploitation cinema, which I loved. It's a tribute to schlock, but it isn't schlock -- the actors are talented, the writers-directors are arguably two of the best in American cinema, and everyone on the crew was probably a seasoned professional that knew his or her job very, very well. The scratches on the celluloid were actually CGI scratches. The scratches in Blood Diner are real.

Take this early scene, which got a huge laugh during our viewing. It's badly written, badly acted, badly lit and badly shot -- but can that possibly all be intentional?

I don't think we caught on to the filmmakers' intentions until midway through the film. When the two main detectives -- inarguably terrible actors -- are investigating the brothers' latest crime scene, one of them scratches his head with his own gun. Was this a coincidence, or could it be an homage to worst-film-ever contender Plan 9 From Outer Space?

Seconds later, the detective in question scratches his head again and this time accidentally pulls the trigger, setting off a comical echoing sound effect. Yep, it's an homage.

I don't think that a bad movie paying homage to its predecessors would necessarily be compelling by itself, but Blood Diner gets a big boost from that surrealism I alluded to earlier. As James kept remarking, it was impossible to predict anything that was going to happen, particularly with regard to characters' reactions to the carnage around them. We thought we'd found a character whose actions made sense -- a random floozie who ran away from the brothers' diner screaming after finding her deep-fried friend's headless corpse -- but even she stopped at the door and went back to pick up her purse and all the random stuff that fell out of it (and was subsequently slaughtered). Check out the reactions of some club-goers when a bouncer is brutally murdered right in front of them:

Overall, shockingly, I'd characterize Blood Diner as a film of actual, non-sarcastic merit. If nothing else, I can't think of any other film where a group of people set out to make something really shoddy, and went completely all-out, and succeeded. Even Earth Girls Are Easy had an Academy Award winning actress in the lead. If you have any interest in schlock cinema, Blood Diner is a must-see.

The Female Perspective^TM with Julia Katz: Overall I'd say it's a movie worth seeing. It has a certain...niche. It's like self-conscious cliché horror. I thought when [Georgie] dipped [a random floozie's] head in the fryer, that was a pretty good scene, because she came out and her head looked like a tater tot or something, and you know, I can suspend my disbelief to a certain point, but...At the end Sheetar has to eat something. They were offering her that virgin sacrifice, so that she could manifest. So you'd think, oh, it's a human form, she'll have to eat it through her mouth. But there's this hole in her abdomen, and not only is it split open to form like a birthing canal, but it has these little sharp teeth. So it's basically a vagina with teeth. And in the end [Georgie] gets hoisted on his own petard and gets eaten by the vagina. That was also very memorable. Sheetar, she's a man-eater. (Note from Andrew: Julia was awake for the entire film, but she seemed kind of out of it. More so than usual.)