O Mágico Sanguinário

One thing you have to give to Wizard of Gore is that it is aptly titled, because it is indeed very gory and definitely not for the squeamish. Fans of this repetitive, tired genre will certainly be entertained, while the rest of us will be puzzled and forget the film as soon as we have seen it.

"Gore"'s most notable flaws are as follow: 1-The script is terrible. The movie is poorly written and yet, it appears they were overambitious in their attempt to give meaning to the mess.

2-The direction is just awful. Poorly shot, confusing scenes, repeatedly failing to engage us with the characters or even to shock us in the least.

3-Crappy actors not at their best. The mind boggles as to why a cult is centered around Crispin Glover. He is doing his prototypical, mediocre impersonation of himself. Always one-dimensional and incapable of subtlety in the ironic touches he tries to inject in his roles. Bijou Phillips, who once held promise she might develop into a solid indie actress has failed to develop further and continues on her path to b-movies and other forgettable roles. Beyond being pretty, you need a certain gravitas and I now wonder if she will ever get it. As for Kip Pardue, he's more a never was than a has been and I guess is on par with the kind of lead a poor movie deserves.

Ignore the high IMDb rating, unless you're in love with Crispin Glover or the kind of movie fan who has made it a mission to have the entire Brad Dourif collection.

An underground reporter (Kip Purdue) stumbles upon a magician (Crispin Glover) who kills his assistants on stage. What first looks like an illusion starts to get more suspicious as they turn up dead the day after. How is a local strip club tied in to this? And what happens as layer after later is peeled away from the surface?

The biggest flaw of this film, from director Jeremy Kasten, is the fact it's a "remake" of a Hershel Gordon Lewis film. I kept comparing the two in my head, which was very unfair to Kasten's work because the films have very little in common. Aside from a magician whop performs bloody tricks, the entire plot is reworked, as are the characters. The best I can recommend is that if you are going to see this one, do not see the original first. Without that influence on your opinion, you may like this one.

What is not to like? The cast is great, not least of which includes horror veterans Jeffrey Combs and Brad Dourif, as well as the Suicide Girls. Crispin Glover has a long history in horror, as well, and Kip Purdue (who I am not very familiar with) has a personality that uniquely fits this tale. He is the one character who could not be changed without altering the entire film.

While I prefer the original film, it is not really fair to compare them. Montag the Magician is not even the same guy, and there is the whole other stripper and mind-control drug aspect here that was never even hinted at in the 1970 version. So I cannot say, "Skip this one and go see the original." As much as I want you to see the original, I think this film has its merits. It certainly upped the sex and nudity, which may appeal to viewers.

Horror remakes are generally lamented by lovers of the genre, and for good reason - as not only are the majority of them lame and uninspired, but there's also the fact that we simply don't need new versions of perfect films such as The Omen and Dawn of the Dead. But that is not such the case with Herschell Gordon Lewis' oeuvre, as while many of his films were entertainingly bloody, they also wouldn't be considered perfect. 1970's The Wizard of Gore was certainly one of the director's most promising features given the plot line - but unfortunately the resulting film was not so impressive. The plot here focuses on Edmund Bigelow; a reporter who becomes entranced by the stage shows of Montag the Magnificent; a magician who as part of his act selects girls from the audience and proceeds to butcher them on stage - only for them to appear intact at the end of the show. However, the magician's tricks take a more sinister turn when several of the girls used in the show turn up dead in mysterious circumstances and our lead character begins to question his own sanity.

This film is really just a remake in title only as while the plot is similar to the earlier version; here it's expanded on so much to the point where the two are unrecognisable. Indeed, I would even say that the film takes more influence from modern day magic films such as The Prestige and The Illusionist. It has to be said that the film is not completely perfect as the plot gets a little too complicated after a while and we soon get the point where explaining everything that is happening is simply not possible. However, it's all carried off with such a great style and so long as the plot is faintly coherent, it's easy to enjoy the film for its style which encompasses a supremely macabre atmosphere and some great grisly death scenes (although sadly, HG's completely over the top blood scenes are lost). The cast is impressive with Crispin Glover giving a whirlwind performance as the central magician; his dialogues are a real highlight. He gets good support from the likes of Jeffrey Combs (in a role that is far too small and insignificant!) and Brad Dourif. Kip Pardue makes for a good lead also. Overall, this may not be great modern film-making; but it's very decent for a remake and is at least worth a look.

I haven't seen the original HG Lewis film this is based on, but his reputation as a PT Barnum of basement-bargain schlock could not prepare me for this. It is actually a clever self-referential movie about horror, and I reckon we haven't had one that cuts as incisively in what it means to want to see beyond the pale since Peeping Tom.

It's a simple idea, very smart; a magician who every night stages a different horror movie, but always the one we paid to see. He purports to offer us a glimpse of our insides, quite literally so, but of course we can wave it away as a trick of smoke and mirrors. The gruesome event is framed, thus obscured, reversed, in a smoke mirror.

His victims, always females, he seems to select from a nearby stripping joint. The girls are again stripped naked for a paying audience. So the fantasy about the naked flesh is transferred from one place inside another, except now as meant to dispel the safety of illusions.

All of this is being investigated by a guy who dresses up like a reporter or private dick from the 40's, he's into it for the scoop. He assembles together the plot that we see, doing the detective work for us like in a Philip Marlow film.

It should have been really good by all accounts, the material is at least right. What appears the incomprehensible rumblings of a feverish mind - our reporter is under the grip of a powerful hallucinogen - makes sense if we understand what side of the mirror we're looking from.

So of course the magician is the trick, the stage of illusions supplied by the mind. It vindicates the destructive impulses that we come to know he harbors in reality, allowing the unspeakable to be articulated as a show. However madly. It's all an essay on the machinations that take place inside from our position as horror viewers.

What lets it down for me is first the haphazard technique, a lot of dutch angles for no reason - but which of course the filmmaker would justify as reflecting a skewed state of mind -, I can look past this, and second the desire to pursue clues right to the end in an effort to piece together for us 'what really happened'. Sooner or later this type of fictions must probe into the nature of abstractions, the film has its work already laid out with the stageshow, it's a perfect allusion to what we are watching from our end, the trick with smoke and mirrors, yet goes on to dangle a piece of string in our faces.

So, in 20 words or less: imagine Naked Lunch re-assembled as a lengthy Masters of Horror episode - the murky colors, the hard lights and DV look - by a filmmaker with aspirations to articulate in feverish weirdness a little of what he has seen from Lynch or Greenaway.

It may not look that way, but it's actually one of the more interesting straight-out horror films of the last 10 years.

The idea of remaking the classic 1970 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie "The Wizard of Gore" did have potential. But in its actual execution, this remake fails in just about every way you can think of. True, Crispin Glover does add a little life into his scenes, and the movie does boast some okay gore sequences. Other than those things, I can't think of anything positive to say about the movie. It's terribly shot, looking like it was photographed with a camcorder and with extremely bad lighting. (And just about every shot of the movie has the camera at an odd tilt.) The lead character is annoying and unsympathetic. And the story moves at a crawl, and often doesn't make that much sense. The movie is so bad at times that one could almost swear that the filmmakers were trying to do as bad a job as possible. Like when it comes to most remakes, stick with the original.