The Wizard of Gore

This might have been an excellent short. And it works wonderfully as a fetish movie if seeing young women getting tied up and mutilated is your cup of tea. As a feature movie it's just dire.

Unusually for a horror movie, it features a young professional woman in one of the leading roles -- and she doesn't even get raped and mutilated in the first five minutes for being a harlot! She investigates a magician who performs gory tricks in his show, with the same girls he performed his tricks on later dieing accordingly. This repeats itself no less than four times (if I counted correctly), each scene lasting maybe ten minutes and being as linear as train tracks in a desert, until her boyfriend muses: "All those girls who went on stage in the show died in the same manner later in the evening. Maybe there's a connection?". His girlfriend is so impressed by his cleverness that she proceeds to fornicate him out of gratitude -- and rightly so. It was the most intelligent moment of the entire movie.

I'm not asking for too much, am I, here? I just want to be entertained. For that, I'm willing to forfeit good taste, intelligent plot, competent acting at the door. In the Wizard Of Gore, though, Herschell Gordon Lewis reveals himself as a gore fetishist. The premise of blurring reality and imagination may be interesting, but it's never developed into a story. Fail!

While its strange, mystical sense of suspense aids it, this movie is pretty mediocre in all other aspects, and yet I still find myself enjoying it. It's got terrible acting, bad picture quality and shaky, flawed transitions between scenes (and even stranger ones when it tries to demonstrate the Wizard's "power"), but it's still enjoyable. I wouldn't call this a horror movie so much as a strange combination of fantasy and gore, but it fits my Halloween bill well enough. The Wizard of Gore doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but then, like Phantasm, it isn't really supposed to.

There is a 2007 remake of this around, and I might just be inclined to check it out, to see what modern film-making could do for this little gem...

Some say the Wizard of Gore is one of HG Lewis' weaker flicks, but I must disagree. Blood Feast may have been more ground-breaking and unintentionally hilarious, but W.O.G. stands up fine against that movie and any of his other gore films. There is a certain cheesy charm to Lewis movies, no matter if they are skin flicks, gore flicks, or even kiddie flicks. In this movie, the wonderfully hammy Ray Sager plays the Wizard and his main occupation seems to be delivering quasi-fascistic prattle to audiences with mutton chop sideburns, interspersed with running his fingers through the tomato-sauce covered animal organs that erupt from his victims, all to the audience's delight. There is some weak storyline involving an independent woman reporter and her well-tanned boyfriend, who try to solve the mystery of the Wizard, the fools. However, this is pretty much just window dressing for the 5-6 gory scenes of the Wizard doing his thing. In particular, there is an eyeball poking and manipulating scene that would have done Lucio Fulci proud. And please don't forget the awesome furniture and late 60's bourgeois home furnishings and polyester pantsuits that make all of these late 60's films look like "Barbarella" by todays standards. If anything, you have to love the fact that there was actually a time in this country where you could make a movie like this and it would be distributed. Thinking about the time period when Lewis was doing his thing and the way he was doing it is enough to blow your mind even more than his movies. If you haven't checked them out, you are doing yourself a disservice!

Another sensationally over-the-top splatter party directed by everyone's favorite horror lunatic; THE Hershell Gordon Lewis! "The Wizard of Gore" might not be his 'best' film, but it's definitely a fun experience and actually one of Lewis' most ambitiously plotted films, since he toys with subjects like hypnotism and optical illusions. None of the magical tricks are properly explained, as Lewis' sneakily avoids that in the dumb finale, but at least he tried to do something extra and ingenious with this film. Ray Sager, some sort of crossover between Vincent Price and porn actor Harry Reems, plays Montag The Magnificent; a self-acclaimed illusionist genius who butchers girls from the audience live on stage but has them return to their seats again in one piece. A young reporter, who's always dragged along by his girlfriend to see Montag's shows, discovers that the girls turn up dead after all and their corpses are damaged exactly like they appeared to be on stage. It's rather curious how you never grow tired of the way Lewis displays the gore in his movies! The sequences here in which female bodies are disemboweled, impaled or even crushed with an industrial punch press are overlong, monotonous and completely implausible, yet you stare at the screen with a gigantic smile on your face. Of course, these are the only significant scenes in "The Wizard of Gore" as the rest of the film hangs together by lousy acting, embarrassing dialogues and a shortage of decors. By the year 1970 and after having unleashed a handful of similar horror movies already, Lewis still couldn't care less about building up tension or continuity and went straight for exploitative grossness. The least you can say is that his work is an acquired taste, but he shall be forever worshiped by drive-in fanatics and other sick puppies, like myself. Amen, Mr. Lewis

In a role for which the filmmakers were originally hoping to get Vincent Price, Ray Sager dominates the proceedings for "The Wizard of Gore". A stock company player for gore master Herschell Gordon Lewis, Sager was the last minute choice to play the title role. Montag the Magnificent is an illusionist who hypnotizes pretty female members of his audience into participating in elaborate gags. (Sword swallowing, being punch pressed, chain sawed in half, etc.) They seem to be fine after the performances, but hours later, they suffer horrible and fatal wounds. Inquiring journalist Jack (Wayne Ratay) and his TV host girlfriend Sherry (Judy Cler) decide to investigate the illusionist.

"The Wizard of Gore" has got to be one of HGLs' all time grisliest exercises in sadism. He really seems to take a perverse delight in having Montag run his hands through the pulpy innards of his volunteers. The gore is pretty tacky, but there's just so damn much of it that it's sure to amuse lovers of cinematic violence. As for the movie itself, there's not really that much going on, but at least HGL and his screenwriter, Allen Kahn, prevent this from being purely ordinary shenanigans by injecting a healthy dose of strangeness and surrealism. They definitely push the whole "what is reality and what is illusion" idea, which is brought home by the denouement.

The main drawing card is Sager, who exhibits a welcome theatricality. Judging by his work here, he could have easily had more leading roles, even if only in HGL movies. The rest of the acting is no more than passable, but it doesn't leave one rolling their eyes quite as much as the acting in some of HGLs' other works.

If one wants to see Lewis at his gory best, "Blood Feast" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!" are a safer bet. This one is dragged out much too long.

Six out of 10.