5. Blood Feast (1963)
Outrageous trash from Gore Meister HG Lewis, Blood Feast is nonetheless an historically important relic. This is because of the gruesome scenes of gore which far exceeded anything that a cinema audience had ever seen before. The Pope of Trash, John Waters, said that when he went to see Blood Feast at the drive in and saw people jumping out of their cars to puke in disgust, he knew then what he wanted to do for a living. Fuad, an Egyptian caterer, is hired to do a young girl's birthday feast, but he is more intent on making a sacrificial altar to the Goddess Ishtar. This involves the killing of nubile young women and the dismembering of the required body piece for the altar. So Fuad goes around pulling out Connie Mason's (a Playboy centrefold) tongue, another woman's brains and assorted limbs from various victims. It is very much animal innards gore but still pretty revolting. Eventually some bright spark cops on to the fact that Fuad is a killer and his reign of terror is ceased. The limping Fuad with his silly eyebrows makes for a comical baddie, yet the film was considered so potentially dangerous to British society that the BBFC put it on their Video Nasty list in 1983 - twenty years after its production and long after a slew of even more revolting films had been passed by the Censors. It is a testament to Blood Feast's ick factor that such a blatantly trashy, Poverty Row movie was considered so dangerous. In fact, most of H G Lewis' films were not submitted to the censors until fairly recently, nasty trash that they are (but so compelling!).