The Wizard of Gore

1970 horror movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: The titular magician has a gratuitously violent stage show in which he dismembers, decapitates, and disembowels female volunteers from the audience before magically putting them together again. It's really stupid. Later that night, the volunteer's wounds reappear which is even stupider. And the fact that nobody can put the pieces together and figure out what's going on? That would be stupidest. A writer--a female one, of course--is intrigued enough to investigate.

If Herschell Gordon Lewis was more well known (read: more infamous) outside B-movie/gore circles, this is the movie that would have given him his nickname. He could have gone down in cinematic history as the Wizard of (Cheap and Gratuitous) Gore. It's easy to see that Lewis had absolutely no budget at all to work, and all the funds he did have (fifty bucks?) was used to purchase meat and tomato juice. The stage show violence is so over the top that it crosses the border between Scaryland and the Continent of Goofy and then continues all the way around the world like a squelchy perverse Magellan so that it can scoot over the border another time. The goofiest thing about these scenes is that they're shown multiple times. So you'll see the saw going through a woman's abdomen, then a shot of the audience looking rather bored, then Montag digging around in the woman's viscera, then another shot of the audience, then a shot of the woman's abdomen without any injury at all, then a shot of Montag's face, then a shot of her being sawed again. It's awkwardly edited. It's the same with the spike-in-the-noggin scene and a scene featuring a guillotine. Movies with guillotines, by the way? Automatically more awesome. Orson Welles wishes he had some guillotine action in Citizen Kane, and according to an unauthorized biography I imagined and then pretended to read, that was his biggest regret. Montag is played by Ray Sager, a guy with an arguably respectable career. Here, he's predictably terrible, but straight from the get-go, it's almost like he's lost his faith in the words he's been given. It's hard to say, "And you were expecting a mere handsaw!" in a way that makes you look like a real person. At one point, he mispronounces his own name. He's such a talky magician, going on and on and on about. . .well, magic, I guess. The audience doesn't know how to act during these scenes, so they just randomly gesture. I didn't take the time to verify, but I'm willing to bet the same extras were used for the audience members. Sager's bad, but the auxiliary actors might be worse. There's one guy who discovers his wife dead in bed and shows off what might be the worst acting ability ever. And the delivery of the line "Craig, Craig! Look at your hand! Your hand is bleeding!" is pure classic B-movie bliss, a line that I would have quoted endlessly with my brother if we had seen this as kids right along with "Give me back my hand!" or "Oh no! A bimbo with a gun!" Screenwriter Allen Kahn, whose only other writing credit is the Lewis-directed The Year of the Yahoo, throws a Shamalamadingdong-esque twist into the climax which, on the surface at least, seemed kind of cool until I thought about it a little more and realized I didn't even understand what happened. And maybe that's my fault, but I'm just not ready to take the blame.

Two more notes: 1) I really liked how there was plastic on the floor of a restaurant where the sawed-in-two lady falls apart. "Yes, you can use our restaurant for your stupid movie, but we're putting plastic on the floor so that you don't mess up our carpet." 2) "The guy's no magician. He's just a hell of a technician." It's 1970, and some white dude invents rap music in The Wizard of Gore. Little known piece of trivia there.