FREAKS ONLY: BLOOD DINER Is Like No Other

“FREAKS ONLY” is a series where I churn through gross movies for total weirdos. Welcome to the party.

Rating: 😋🔪🥩
Trailer

I watched The Mask for the first time recently. It was okay, but one of my Twitter mutuals said it was “for freaks only.” While not entirely wrong, that reminded me of the many, many other movies for freaks I've seen, such as the 1987 non-classic Blood Diner. One of the scant feature films by director Jackie Kong, Blood Diner is a deeply bizarre movie that occupies the limbo between John Waters and Tobe Hooper. It's a decent solo watch, but the genuinely unbelievable moments of Blood Diner are most enjoyable when inflicted on other unaware participants. If you're a freak who knows some freaks, then read on.

Blood Diner begins at Herschell Gordon Lewis, the bloody schlockmeister who spearheaded the splatter genre with nasties such as Two Thousand Maniacs! and Wizard of Gore. If you know him already, great. If you don't, put down this article and go watch yourself some culture. In 1963, Lewis unleashed Blood Feast, a sicko shocker about Fuad Ramses III, a caterer who dismembers girls for a cannibalistic sacrifice to the goddess Ishtar. The movie is racist, violent, and everything else you'd expect from a film which birthed a genre about amputation and titillation. This dripping trail of bad taste leads straight to Blood Diner, the essential companion piece to Blood Feast.

Originally conceived as a straight sequel, Blood Diner is both spiritual successor and pastiche, affectionately picking up where Blood Feast leaves off. The film gets rolling when killer Anwar Namtut pauses his evasion of justice to visit his young nephews, George and Michael Tutman. The two boys, already exploring cooking and hypnotism, are tasked by Namtut to continue his sacrifices to goddess Sheetar. He steps outside and is blown to pieces by cops, leaving the adult Tutman boys to resurrect him years later. They pop his talking brain in a jar, buy a restaurant, and go to town. Organs splatter and a sacrifice is prepared as Blood Diner hyperdrives into another dimension, leaving any sense of reality behind.

To be honest, a straight-laced follow-up to Blood Feast would’ve sucked. I can’t imagine that a direct continuation of “man kills girls for cannibal sacrifice” would be remarkable at all amongst the 1980s’ megadeluge of low-tier horror movies. Director Jackie Kong knows this. Her approach to the material barely cares at all about the “horror” aspect of Lewis’s film, instead hyperfocusing on the unintentional comedy of Blood Feast and other missives of exploitative schlock. Kong summons every trick in the book to make Blood Diner as intentionally trashy as possible, and for the most part, it works. The film is an unhinged bad-taste blast of cartoon sleaze that must be seen to be believed.

Nothing is off the menu in Blood Diner. Blood, guts, sex, vomit, drugs, cannibalism, vehicular manslaughter, puppets, aerobics, and spray tans all combine in a whirling vortex of the most surreal scenes to ever grace a horror comedy. Namtut’s talking brain seems pedestrian in the grand scheme, especially once we see a woman’s head turned to a ball of fried dough and smacked off like a baseball. George and Michael gun down a “nude aerobics” class, and face off against “Little Jimmy Hitler” in a wrestling match. Visual gags include a shopping list for dog dicks. A rival cafe owner speaks through a mannequin for absolutely zero reason, and a dude’s head gets crunched under a car blasting “La Cucaracha” on the horn. Shortly put, it rules.

The film’s lowbrow chaos is infectious. It’s hard not to cackle, especially when George and Michael themselves are churning through victims with escalating glee. They apply a certain amount of irreverence to their sacrificial task, tracking down the trashiest possible victims and barely hiding their activities. The titular “blood diner” is their own Tutman Cafe, a hot vegetarian joint with the best food in town. Can you guess the secret ingredient? It’s not hard, I promise. Eyeballs are buried in bowls of olives and fingers are fried to make “vegan” fish sticks. The Tutman’s number one customer is a horrendously ADR’d man named Vitamin, who gets a standout scene projectile vomiting all over the diner.

These endless weirdo sequences are funny enough already, but Kong goes the extra mile to make this outing a real piece of garbage. Blood Feast is immediately dated with 1960s fashion and aesthetics, which Blood Diner preempts by caricaturing every possible aspect of ‘80s culture. Very little escapes Blood Diner’s warped gaze, with the decade’s health crazes, club scenes, counter culture, music, and more all placed on the chopping block. Most costumes in the film are astounding, with Blood Feast’s pink dresses and big hair swapped for wild new-wave trappings and even bigger hair. It’s a lot to process at once, and Blood Diner never lets off the gas.

That being said, the movie doesn’t hit 100% of the time. Blood Diner’s main subplot involves an “odd couple” of detectives investigating the Tutman killings, learning to work together as they pick up the bloody pieces and dodge their, again, poorly ADR’d chief. It’s a suitably goofy story, and both performers are legitimately charming, but it lacks the screwball inspiration of anything involving the Tutman boys. There’s another lark about Michael Tutman manipulating naive cheerleader Connie for use as a sacrifice, but it doesn’t deliver much of anything. The pacing of Blood Diner isn’t great either, but we’re talking about a film where a newly handless man tries to drive with his stumps while blood splatters the windshield. You can only ask so much.

If you’re a fan of truly wacky shit, Blood Diner is absolutely essential. It’s rare to find a film that aims for “intentionally so bad it’s good” and makes the mark, but Blood Diner hits way more than it misses. A lot of the material sticks thanks to Kong, who directs the egregiously bonkers film without a single wink or nudge. There’s none of the meta jokes or referential bullshit that would seep into later horror comedies, only impish killers and absurd theatrics. All said, it’s a great party film, and certainly a movie for freaks. As one character would say, it’s for “deranged maniacs, chief. Perverts with sick, sick minds.”