Living Venus

Cheap sexploitation, wallowing in its sleaze and punctuated by several not very relevant naked-lady sequences, this below-B epic has opportunist William Kerwin leaving his gig at a respectable wedding magazine to found a Playboy-like sex rag, aided by ace photographer Harvey Korman (!), and turning waitress Danica D'Hondt into a supermodel, who also turns improbably into a hopeless alcoholic when Kerwin rejects her. The main mystery in Gordon's and David Friedman's screenplay is what she, or his weepy prior fiancee, or anybody would see in him: He's ambitious, uncaring, shallow, and impatient, with a catchphrase of snapping his fingers and exhorting, "I guarantee it!" He also has a faithful secretary, Janette Leahy, who goes through over a bottle of scotch a day, which is supposed to be funny. Kerwin can't bring this rotter any charm, but Korman amiably plays an amiable shlub, and D'Hondt, despite her character's impossible character arc, is actually touching. Sleazy as it is, Lewis got sleazier, Still, as an indicator of what dirty old men and lewd young schoolboys thought was hot 60 years ago, it's interesting.

I started watching Herschell Gordon Lewis's films in the usual order: Blood Feast and then all of gore-series, then the rest of his works, as I found them online. And if many of his bloody horrors are practically unwatchable by modern standards - due to the slow pace, boring storytelling, terrible acting and just bad taste in general, I was very surprised that Living Venus is a fairly normal, pretty good film, despite the low budget (although it is not noticeable). And even the actors play well and believably!

I will not retell the plot - there is no point in it, but I will say that it is there, it is a quite exciting and it was interesting how the story ends. And how surprised I was that it ended not stupidly and absurdly, but rather tragically and unusual for films of those years. This is definitely something people did not expect to see in a movie back then, but there was no bad taste and cheap tricks in this one, like in other Lewis works. I also liked the main characters, they all had different and, importantly, well-developed characters. I was interested to see how their lives would turn out, and - another big surpise - each story in the plot was finished.

As for the cheap production - I can't say that everything here is cheap and bad. In some way, even the opposite: there are scenes on the street, and scenes in different locations, and even has a Rolls-Royce and a fancy Chevrolet, as the characters' cars.

The camera angles change quickly, this is not a monotonous stationary camera, as in Lewis's future films. And there is a decent soundtrack, no worse than in other more popular films with famous actors.

So to all those people who want to immerse themselves in the work of the Godfather of Gore, I recommend watching this, the first film. It will complement the idea of the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis, who could have made more worthy films, but simply did not see the point in it if it did not bring in big money. And cheap shock was a success, even if the film was made at an unimaginably poor level.