There are bad movies. Then there are movies so bad you feel like you should write a formal apology to your eyeballs. Blood Feast (no relation to the 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter classic) is a 1972 Mexican “horror” film that dares to ask the question: What if a man with a helicopter and a mullet fed women to cats for 62 minutes? The answer is: nothing good. Nothing at all.
Directed by René Cardona Jr.—who has the dubious distinction of making this before even worse films—Blood Feast is a one-way ticket to cinematic hell, and the ferry ride is piloted by Hugo Stiglitz, who delivers a performance so wooden you’ll start checking him for termites.
Let’s break it down, because this one deserves a full autopsy (though not by Hugo—he’d pickle the head and feed your limbs to house cats).
The Plot (Such As It Is):
Our “protagonist” is Hugo, a wealthy playboy who seduces women via helicopter. That’s right: he flies above parks, spots bikini-clad targets from 800 feet up like a discount Batman, and then lands his chopper to pick them up for a date. No one questions this. They just get in.
This should already tell you two things:
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This is a fantasy written by a man who thinks basic aviation qualifies as foreplay.
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Everyone in the film is operating with the survival instincts of boiled lettuce.
Once charmed, the women are brought to Hugo’s massive castle estate, where they’re wined, dined, and then murdered with the help of Dorgo, a hulking groundskeeper who communicates entirely through ominous glances and body odor. The women’s heads are preserved in jars, and their bodies fed to cats—because Hugo owns what appears to be a zoo-sized pit of feral felines. It’s never explained why. Nothing is.
Somewhere along the way, a doctor pops in, presumably to check on Hugo’s mental health, and ends up cat chow. Eventually, even Dorgo gets offed, which is probably the only sensible career decision in the movie.
The “climax” features a woman escaping after bravely not being afraid of death, which apparently short-circuits Hugo’s predator logic. She rips open the cat pit fence, the cats escape, and sensing his weakness after a minor head injury (??), they devour him like furry vengeance demons.
The Cast: Or, The Real Victims Here
Hugo Stiglitz stars as… Hugo. That’s not just lazy writing—that’s narcissism in script form. He wears the same blank expression throughout the film, whether seducing women, murdering them, or watching his feline murder pit snack on leftovers. You could replace him with a mop in a turtleneck and get the same performance—possibly more range.
The women—whose names don’t matter because the movie doesn’t think they do—are indistinguishable except for how they die and how many times the camera lingers creepily on their thighs. They are interchangeable scream props with flowing hair and exactly zero lines of memorable dialogue.
And then there’s Dorgo (played by Gerardo Zepeda), who gives the only performance that could be described as “memorable”—though only in the sense that you’ll remember him every time someone says “groundskeeper” and you flinch a little.
The Horror: Spoiler—There Isn’t Any
A movie about a thousand cats eating people sounds like it should at least be interesting. Unfortunately, Blood Feastmanages to make mass feline homicide boring. The cats never seem remotely threatening. They just sort of mill around, looking vaguely annoyed—like they were promised Fancy Feast and got B-roll instead.
Even when Hugo meets his end, it’s not a gory spectacle. It’s a man slowly lying down while the director tosses house cats on him like plush toys at a third-grade carnival. There’s no suspense, no tension—just a man being slowly, indifferently inconvenienced by the animal kingdom.
The Helicopter: Character or Curse?
Let’s talk about the helicopter, which gets more screen time than most actors. The film is obsessed with it. We get endless aerial shots of Hugo stalking women, flying over the same rooftops again and again, occasionally set to what can only be described as “Discount James Bond music if it were arranged by an angry kazoo.”
At some point you begin to suspect the whole movie is just a tax write-off for fuel costs. Maybe Cardona thought helicopter footage automatically meant “high production value.” Spoiler: it doesn’t. It means padding.
The Editing, Oh God, the Editing
This movie has the rhythm of a drunk man trying to salsa dance in ski boots. Transitions are abrupt, shots linger way too long, and dialogue is chopped together like someone edited it with garden shears. There are at least four separate scenes where we just watch cats meow into the camera for a solid minute like a hostage video. It’s supposed to be chilling. It’s not. It’s a feline focus group rejecting the script in real time.
Final Thoughts: A Thousand Cats, and Not One Good Movie
Blood Feast / La noche de los mil gatos is a surreal exercise in how not to make horror. It has all the ingredients for a cult classic—grotesque murders, absurd villain, animal horror—but none of the execution. The tone is flat, the violence is tame, the acting is nonexistent, and the cats look like they’d rather be anywhere else.
You’ll walk away from this film with no fear of cats, no appreciation for helicopters, and a burning desire to send a strongly worded letter to Hugo Stiglitz’s agent.
½ star out of 4.
Recommended only for collectors of the strange, the terrible, and the tragically feline.
