The Gruesome Twosome

The Gruesome Twosome are a little old lady called Mrs Pringle, who runs a wig shop, and her retarded son Rodney who murders and scalps pretty college girls. A student called Kathy investigates their disappearances. Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, the "Godfather of gore", Gruesome has four splatter scenes, very graphic but even at 72 minutes the film is heavily padded out. The beginning has a bizarre 4 minute conversation between two talking styrofoam heads, later added to stretch out the running time. We are also treated - if that's the corrected word - to drawn out scenes of groovy dancing, car racing, etc, again just to pad out time. Kathy's initial investigation is strictly comical, featuring that horror staple, a creepy janitor. Elizabeth Davis as the very eccentric Mrs Pringle is a lot of fun, she has a stuffed, scary looking big cat as a pet, called Napoleon. Hilarious! The acting at best is amateur but generally it is abysmal. This is a very cheap looking, crude movie, on purely technical merit I would score it only 2/10. However I do enjoy bad, strange and cult movies, this one leans towards the so bad it's good type. To date "Blood. Feast" is still my favourite HG Lewis movie.

Mrs. Pringle and her half-witted, needs-to-be-institutionalized son Rodney run a small business called the Little Wig Shoppe, which is also next to a room they "rent" out to beautiful college co-eds with long hair. Of course at Mrs. Pringle's establishment only 100% human hair is used. Does she then buy a lot of hair? Don't bet on it. Her son uses a knife(and later an electric carving knife) to scalp these girls for their hair and also various organs(Thursday is Napoleon's night for liver). That's right, I forgot to mention the third member of this happy little family. His name is Napoleon, and he is a stuffed Lynx(or Bobcat). Mrs Pringle talks to Napoleon throughout the whole picture. Business is booming for Mrs. Pringle till a young girl decides to investigate the disappearance of her long-haired friend out searching for an apartment. As far as Herschell Gordon Lewis flicks go, this one is decidedly a notch above films like Two Thousand Maniacs, The Wizard of Gore, and Color Me Blood Red. It has the best acting in it that I have seen for any of his films, not good but almost average! Ronnie Cass plays the demented mother with a likable camp. The film is also one of Lewis's better shot films in terms of direction. Sure we have a ridiculous scene in the beginning with two styrofoam heads with painted faces and wigs talking, but the film has a pretty good pace throughout. Am I saying this is good? No, but is it very entertaining. It also has some pretty good music in it, "Right Napoleon?" As for the gore, it's there but there really is not a lot of it and it fortunately never reaches the hyperbolic level of Lewis's The Wizard of Gore.

H.G. Lewis like to stage bloody set pieces. However in order to show them off he likes to make a feature length film. Many of them aren't very good and they're padded out to make the 70 minute mark. The gruesome Twosome is one of those films. The film revolves around a crazy old lady who makes nice realistic looking wigs and her ogreish son. She has a secret in her wig making that you'll find hair raising. They're many filler scenes placed through out the movie. The most notorious one (and clever) takes place in the beginning where two wigs are holding a conversation. The gore set pieces are cool but you'll have to sit through the movie to experience them.

Recommended for campy cult fans.

B

The Gruesome Twosome is another excuse for splatter pioneer H.G.Lewis to paint the screen red with gore, and this he does with several messy murders of hot young women, whose hair is destined to be turned into wigs by batty shop owner Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis).

In between the grisly but not very convincing killings (a scalping, a decapitation, and a disembowellment, all performed by Mrs. Pringle's mentally disabled son Rodney), Lewis treats the viewer to lots of inconsequential padding solely designed to take his film to feature length.

Amongst the craptabulous filler on display: a bizarre pre-credits sequence involving two talking styrofoam heads wearing wigs; snoopy student Kathy (Gretchen Wells) tailing the college janitor, who she believes to be responsible for several disappearances on campus; Kathy and her sorority pals gyrating to groovy music while eating KFC; a drive in movie that features crisp munching and fruit fondling; a beach party; and some stock car racing.

With its grainy picture, terrible sound, amateurish acting, cheap effects, bad editing and basic direction, The Gruesome Twosome is par for the course for a Lewis movie. If you're a fan of the man's work, you'll probably dig this as well. If you've no great love for HGL's unique style, this one is unlikely to change your mind.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for all the lovely young ladies.

The Gruesome Twosome is a lot like any other Herschell Gordon Lewis film in that it features a ridiculous plot line, a plethora of useless performances, buckets of gore and some real nasty sequences. As usual, the director sets out his plot and it doesn't go anywhere from there. There aren't any twists in this film and what you see is very much what you get. While this simple formula is fun, it is rather monotonous also; and if you've seen a few other HG movies prior to seeing this one (as I had), it's safe to say that there isn't all that much here. The film kicks off with a suitably demented scene that sees two head models with wigs having a conversation with each other. From there, we learn that a wig maker's shop is getting its realistic hair straight from women's heads, as the old woman who runs the shop employs her retarded son to scalp the young women who comes looking to move into the abandoned apartment next door. The piece is made more ridiculous by the way that the old lady talks to Napoleon; who just happens to be a big stuffed cat!

I'm never really sure if HG Lewis movies are meant to be bad, or if the director is just grossly talentless. The acting is so bad that it's arguably not even acting; between speaking parts, some of the actors are visibly laughing - I don't know if the whole thing is meant to be a joke. The film only lasts for the seventy or so minutes, and so you'd expect that even a plot as basic as this one would be able to be stretched; but the Godfather of Gore obviously didn't know what to do with it, meaning that way over half of the film is made up of useless scenes that add nothing to the plot and serve only in making the whole piece more weird. HG movies have a sort of otherworldly feel about them stemming from the fact that they are so inept; nobody in real life acts like the people in HG movies do, and this movie adheres to that styling. The characters are non-existent and the way they react to the local murders is purely stupid. The murder scenes themselves are grisly as usual, but as is the case with everything else in this film; they're impossible to take seriously. Overall, this really is a terrible movie; but there's something about HG movies that make them better than most trash, and while I won't argue with bad words against this film; I did enjoy watching it.