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.

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.

Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis) owns a wig shop in a little town in Florida, but she is a demented woman who lives with her mentally disabled son, Rodney (Chris Martell), in a home where she rents rooms to young co-eds attending the local university.

"Gruesome Twosome" was developed in part because exhibitors were telling H. G. Lewis that his films did not have enough blood, leading him to make this gory film. This request is ironic in that "Blood Feast" (1963) was seen as too bloody just a few years before. He went from pioneering the gore movement to being seen as too light! This film corrected that.

Although I have been a fan of Lewis for many years, even publishing an article on his "Gore Gore Girls", I had not seen this film until Arrow Video put it out as part of their "Feast" collection. I can only imagine how rough previous copies are, because even with their painstaking efforts, the sound and picture are pretty rough. The physical film must have been rotting away, fading and getting holes.

Some have praised the film, but I find it to be one of his weaker entries. The introduction was made later to pad the picture, and it shows. But much of the film seems like padding. The dance scene, the long trailing by Kathy Baker (Gretchen Wells in her only role) of the college janitor... the film could easily have been better paced at under an hour.

Other filler includes some shots of Ray Sager ("Wizard of Gore") eating potato chips for no reason. Reflecting years later, Lewis admits he spent too much time on "the periphery" with things "not germane to the plot", but Lewis feels this had the unintended effect of giving audiences a recovery period between gore shots. He may be right, but it would have been nice if the time was filled with plot and not filler.

The strength comes in the gore. While the effects are in some ways pretty awful, such as the clear use of wigs for the victims being scalped, the actual blood and guts is very much ahead of its time and of course became Lewis' hallmark. Sure, a "dead" girl may be seen blinking her eyes, but at least the audiences were grossed out.

The Blu-ray from Arrow Video is pretty good. The picture and sound, as noted above, is far from perfect, but it is probably the best version released to date. The audio commentary is full of wonderful stories, including great asides about the "Blood Shed Theater" in Chicago. Some of the other features are unusual... an interview with filmmaker Peaches Christ seems out of place. A short piece on low budget films that came from Florida is really good, but not nearly long enough. A segment with an interview of Lewis on "censors" turns into more of a rant on his views of Facebook, which is a bit obscure.

Gruesome Twosome, The (1967)

** (out of 4)

An elderly woman and her deranged son kill young women so that they can scalp them in order to put their hair in a wig shop. As is normally the case with a Lewis film, this one here is very short on plot but as an early splatter film goes, the gore does come off is fun red style. This is certainly a poorly made film with awful performances, bad dialogue and questionable direction but that doesn't really matter as what the film delivers is nostalgic fun. The film, as bad as it is, is a lot of fun because of how cheaply made it is and how much fun the director has with the gore. The gore effects are so obviously done but they remain fun just because of how fresh and at times original they are. One must remember that Lewis didn't have anything to copy off of so he was pretty much coming up with this stuff as he went along. If one is looking for a horror film to shock and scare them then this certainly isn't your movie but if you want a classic example of drive-in trash then this film remains fun.