Wizard of Gore, The (1970)

reviewed by
Richard Scheib


The Wizard of Gore

USA. 1970. Director/Producer - Herschell Gordon Lewis, Screenplay - Allen Kahn, Photography - Alex Ameri & Daniel Krogh, Music - Larry Wellington, Special Effects - Herschell Gordon Lewis, Allison Louise Downe, Robert Lewis & Vickie Miles. Production Company - Mayflower Pictures. Ray Sager (Montag the Magnificent), Judy Cler (Sherry Carson), Wayne Ratay (Jack Ward)

Plot: The stage magician Montag the Magnificent gains attention with his stage act which involves the gory impalement and dismemberment of hypnotzied women -before each act of slaughter is revealed to the audience to all be an illusion. A reporter and his tv critic girlfriend investigate when they find that Montag's stage volunteers are each dying after the performance in exactly the same way as Montag pretends to dismember them on stage.

Beginning with `Blood Feast' in 1963, director Herschell Gordon Lewis created the splatter film. Lewis's films are really like porn films. But where porn films are staged around providing a set variety of procreational activities in great detail every few minutes, Lewis's films fixate around the body of a particular individual, usually a woman, who in great detail is dismembered or torn apart every few minutes. `The Wizard of Gore' features some really heavy-duty gore - in a variant on the old sawing a woman in half trick, a magician chainsaws a woman in half; swords are impaled down throats; holes punched through bodies with drill presses; and in the most perverse of all effects - a spike pounded into a woman's head and then her brains pulled out, the magician even reaching in with considerable glee to pop out one of her eyeballs. The lack of conviction to the effects - an appallingly unconvincing dummy head that the spike is pounded into head, the swords down the throat being seen to bend - do not in any way undermine the full-on shock value that Lewis's gore has.

Lewis's films are the sort that leave you constantly wondering what possible socially redeeming values they have. Indeed `The Golden Turkey Awards' nominated Lewis for the lifetime achievement as worst director of all time - only to be beaten out by Edward D. Wood Jr. `Wizard' is filled with all sorts of bad movie-making fascination. Lewis develops this bizarrely heavy-handed style every time he wants to achieve directorial effect - cuts to closeups of Ray Sager's eyebrows and hat filling the whole screen every time the audience are supposed to be being hypnotized or else bizarrely abrupt (and unintentionally funny) cuts in the music to signal the change between illusion and a return to reality. Ray Sager gives an amazingly bad performance with eyes wide open and enunciating everything in virtual upper case.

`Wizard' is usually regarded as the best of Lewis's films because it has a playful double-structure that flips back and forward between reality and illusion and at the end even starts to toy with the illusion of the film itself - something which has given the film a certain academic legitimacy. This play of illusion proves undeniably fascinating and never more so than the bizarre ending where the heroine and her boyfriend start making out and he turns back into the dead magician and then, in a moment of solipsistic ingenuity, she decides he is really an illusion and thinks him out of existence. Finally the magician turns directly to the camera to taunt the audience, telling them to make sure that this might not all be an illusion that what they have been watching is a film. Between its sheer shoddiness of production values, its gut-churning but somehow not offensive extremes, and weirdly fascinating and equally pretentious play of film, illusion and reality, `Wizard' proves an undeniably appealing.

Screening at the Christchurch 1998 Incredibly Strange Film Festival Reviewed by Richard Scheib


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