Rish's Reviews
I saw this in a double bill with Vampyres, aka Daughters of Dracula, in a run-down, uncomfortable revival theater with a group of Horror fanatics, aka the dregs of society, one night recently. While seeing horror movies, even bad ones, is infinitely preferable in a theatrical venue, a man's got to know his limitations.
So, a pretty-ish woman with a daytime talk show drags her stuffy sports reporter boyfriend to a magic show where the illusionist appears to brutally butcher women who volunteer from the audience. She is interested and brings her boyfriend back night after night to see what new sick "illusion" the magician creates. When the volunteers begin turning up dead, killed in the ways they were gorily dispatched onstage, the boyfriend becomes suspicious. That, and a whole lot of poorly-memorized dialogue.
In my travels, I happened upon a friendly Irish fellow, who would often describe bad films with the phrase, "Aw, that movie was shite." I am certain that my friend would gladly announce that The Wizard of Gore was shite. Awful is too kind a word to describe it. It was horribly acted, horribly made, with a budget equal to a public access show in Butte, Montana. The titular character, Montag the Magnificent, was so cheesy, moronic, and over-acted that he made Warner Brothers cartoon characters look like Ben Stein.
Some audience members were entertained, but I guess there weren't enough ecstacy tabs to go around. For a minute there, we clapped along with how bad it all was, but then I realized it wasn't going to get any better. Some of them still played along, trying to make it fun throughout . . . and it WAS fun for a few minutes, but sirs and madames, the movie was 96 minutes long! I'd never seen a film by Hershell Gordon Lewis, and now I never will again. It was as dull as an economics lecture in a language you do not speak. There might have been enough material for a half hour show (minus commercials, of course), but not a feature . . . or even a good half-hour show. In my notes I wrote, "Silly, bad, awful." But let me add to that "Obscenely stupid, intolerably boring, and irritatingly gory."
I get the impression Mr. Lewis was something of a poor man's Ed Wood, only with a lot less passion and talent. It reminded me of the videos I'd shoot as a kid, but if those amateur shorts were half as bad as The Wizard of Gore, then I fully deserve the life of misery I endure. There was a concept toward the end that I thought might actually be kind of clever, but as usual, the idea I got of where the plot was heading was much cooler than where it actually went.
But because it's so stupid, I'm able to excuse The Wizard of Gore more than I would be a more professional piece of crap, like Lost Souls or Halloween: Resurrection or Psycho 1.2. There's something almost charming about how bad the film is, and Hershell Gordon Lewis has developed something of a cult following over the years, probably due to the affable ineptitude of films like this.