Blood Diner

Some sage comic of the stand-up variety once observed that, if you slightly rearranged the letters in the title of the execrable Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty film Ishtar, you got the word "Shitar". Which sounds just as bad. I suppose you could pronounce it exactly as it is spelled, and it would sound like the word "shitter." Which is an apt enough description of where that particular movie belongs.

In Jackie Kong's 1987 direct-to-video turd Blood Diner, there is a character, a Babylonian demon or something stitched together from mutilated body parts, named "Sheetar." A play on Ishtar, but also a close-enough approximation of "shitter." Which is where, most likely, Blood Diner ALSO belongs.

I discovered it in the pages of a magazine (believe it or not) called Gorezone, which was a sort of spinoff of Fangoria. How they got this stuff on newsstands in that day and age is anyone's guess, but it certainly seems now to have been the harbinger of the cultural degeneration that has plagued the steadily-declining American landscape in the ensuing decades.

I don't give a fig for whether or not the country declines--in a Marcusian sense, I suppose to push the legs out from under the buffet table of the ruling class before they obliterate ALL life on this planet through their unthinking, rapacious greed, is actually a good thing. And I like violent, sexy, kinky, and weird entertainment. Because I have a Roman soul. What the hell; EVERYTHING dies in the end.

Gorezone focused on, you guessed it, GORE films, of the usually straight-to-videocassette variety. (Note to Millenials: videocassettes were little plastic cartridges with two spools of magnetic tape between them. The film or television program was recorded on tape, and played back, via a rather large, cumbersome machine, which was hooked to the television via a cable. There were entire shops full of such plastic cartridges sitting on shelves, with video boxes festooned with violent, garish artwork, depicting violent, sexy images of violence and sex, in a manner calculated to elicit the correct dopamine response from the jaded, cynical prospective viewer, who had often been badly-burned by inferior product in the past, product promising a lot yet, oddly, often failing to deliver.)

Sex and violence were what the viewer of such salacious horror-cum-softcore product was seeking out. Something more shocking, vile, and titillating than the last affair, which had already upped the ante of their psychological sensitization to violence and erotic mayhem.

Blood Diner, though, isn't really about any of that. It's more or less a Troma-level joke at the expense of the arguably superior product proffered decades before by the late Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose Blood Feast it most closely resembles. It involves two brothers from a mysterious cult (modern politically correct culture would chafe at the depiction of them as foreign devotees of a Thugee-like death cult) who are tasked by their uncle Anwar (Drew Godderis), right before his cleaver-wielding self is gunned down by the police, to resurrect the ancient goddess "Sheetar" for the "Blood Buffet." So that she may rule the earth once more. I think.

Years later, they dig up Uncle Anwar and keep him as a talking brain floating in a jar, a pair of eyes attached to said brain. He berates his "idiot nephews," Michael and Georgie (played respectively by the late Rick Burks and Carl Crew), who must stitch together a Frankenstein-like body for Sheetar from mutilated parts. All the while, they run a vegetarian eatery that seems curiously popular. At one point, in a fabulous gross-out scene Monty Python might be proud of, Georgie, a wrestling fanatic, jumps over the counter to demonstrate his chokehold on a fat vegetarian food critic, who projective vomits all over the other customers.

Next, Michael and Georgie bust into a topless aerobics studio (full of perfect, 1980s jazzercise bodies) and, wearing Ronald Reagan masks, gun down the nude models in an orgy of violence that seems positively familiar due to modern headlines. Later, bored cops use their bare hands to scoop up mutilated body parts and toss them into plastic garbage sacks.

Two detectives, one a disco-loving, smoothed up little wet fart (Roger Dauer) that seems as if he wandered in from a Police Academy movie, and the other a no-nonsense black woman with a curiously indefinable accent (LaNette La France), are put on the case of the mutilations. The chief is also the same actor that plays Anwar, Godderis, and he occasionally punches Dauer in the gut when he gets angry.

The rest of Blood Diner follows thusly.

Michael attracts the attention of quintessential naive, mousy Eighties teenybopper Connie (Lisa Elaina), who has a Svengali-like ability to hypnotize. The brothers continue stalking and slashing and mutilating victims. Uncle Anwar, the brain in the jar, is stolen by the owner of a rival eatery. The brothers cheerfully chop off that luckless bastard's hands, causing him to curse while driving away, his bloody stumps gushing out and splattering the windows, totally blowing the shit out of his visibility and causing a fatal wreck.

A prostitute has her head and body battered (with literal cooking batter), and her noggin gets deep-fried into a giant hush puppy. Punk rock kids at "Club Dread" get turned into zombies by magic hunger pills, while they devour a cannibal stew sitting in the center of the floor. Sheetar is set up on stage next to the relentless new wave band whose singer is dressed like Little Richard carrying a battle ax. The two detectives show up, shoot people, and the Tutman brothers (dressed in weird, silvery, pseudo-Egyptian priest costumes), try to feed Connie to the gaping, piranha-like mouth in the center of Sheetar's stitched-together abdomen (her mouth is pirahna-like, too).

A lot of zombies get shot and there is blood everywhere. The End.

Later, Sheetar goes walking down Hollywood Boulevard (or some damn place in L.A.) looking like the average streetwalker. A horny young 1980s jock in a vintage convertible picks her up. She tells him her name is Sheetar. He can't be happy with the state of her orthodontics.

Blood Diner is a relentlessly stupid horror comedy that has attained cult status because it is even more gleefully silly and sick than the average Troma fare. 1980s narcissism (aerobics, health food) are mocked and parodied, alongside the rising tide of violence, both in entertainment and, increasingly for that era, in real life. The cinematography is sordid, the special effects very fake; none of the violence is rooted in any sort of reality.

Such films DID go a long way to subverting and parodying the staid, conservative, bourgeois values of that Reagan era of material acquisitiveness and the quest for bodily perfection and social status. The conventions of that era are mocked, and partly by the soundtrack, which features Eisenhower-era tunes of a kinder, gentler, but no less hypocritical American Ideal. Think poodle skirts and hula hoops, and slam them up against nude aerobics, new wave music, and mass slaughter.

The film has a sleazy, scummy, malodorous stench, like the heavy urine funk wafting up from the men's room at a city bus terminal. Its laughs aren't funny, it drags on too long; it exhibits a noted contempt for the very type of early splatter and sleaze picture it supposedly is paying homage to.

But as a relic of a bygone era, you can't go far wrong by watching this forgotten, uh, "gem" is probably not the right word. There's probably more I could say here, but I just don't have the energy.

Perhaps I should have partaken of the Blood Buffet.

Hail to Sheetar.

One final note. Actor Rick Burks, "Michael", is killed at the end of this movie. In real life, Burks, a part-time actor, and aspiring musician was killed in a tragic car accident in L.A. on February 19, 1989. He was twenty-nine years old.

Life imitates, one supposes. RIP.