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Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Screenplay: Allison Louise Downe
Cast: Elizabeth Davis as Mrs.
Pringle; Gretchen Wells as Kathy Baker; Chris Martell as Rodney Pringle; Rodney
Bedell as Dave Hall; Ronnie Cass as Nancy Harris; Karl Stoeber as Mr. Spinsen; Dianne
Wilhite as Janet; Andrea Barr as Susan
A Night of a Thousand Horror
(Films) #145
Synopsis: Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth
Davis), with her mentally disabled son Rodney (Chris Martell) and a stuffed cat named Napoleon, run a lucrative
wig shop where their products are made from real human hair. Freshly scalped
from young women who take interest of the rented room sign they also have up in
the window.
Before we get on with this, let's
not forget Herschell Gordon Lewis
thought himself a businessman first, not a filmmaker with artistic
inspirations. He had a personality, which is why in spite of this fact and the
technical flaws of his film he could have only made these films as they were.
The businessman in him however must've been aware that, if not careful, his
success with gore films would've gone the way of all the nudie-cuties he made
before, slowly losing their financial worth due to repetition if he didn't get
bored first. Having switched to splatter films, he made a trilogy of gore films
- Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and Color Me
Blood Red (1965) - which have a cult legacy. After that, he did make A Taste of Blood (1967), but also two children's'
films, other exploitation movies, and the paranormal weirdness that is Something Weird (1967), so perfectly
titled a legendary cult movie preservation and distribution company took their
name from it to aspire to collect films as weird as it. Within this is The Gruesome Twosome, where he'd have
to be nastier in the gore but it becomes apparent that his personality, his
eccentric sense of humour and willingness to be absurd, would have to take over
to keep it afresh. Ironically this is his claim to auteurism even if he'd have
found that an absurd sentence and laughed his arse off at the notion.
Kitsch is self aware here.
There's no denying he made the films with deliberate humour as well as being
repulsive in the gore. The man who made the first splatter movie also pastiche
the subgenre not long afterwards before others did. The Gruesome Twosome's infamous moment is at the beginning and
immediately alerts you to how Lewis
isn't taking the material seriously without losing the sense of ghoulish fun,
without becoming smug but instead retaining its unpredictability. A prologue
with two wigged polystyrene heads talking. Meant to pad out time to make the
film feature length, nonetheless playful and bizarre. No one expects inanimate
objects to speak even in cinema. Objects having life is immediately surreal
because it undermines the binaries between what is alive and what shouldn't,
especially as mannequin heads are vaguely human looking. The cartoonish facial
features added, big paper eyes and lips like Miss Potato Heads, is on the joke
and the fact they talk as casually as they do is even absurder. They set up the
premise and put the tone perfectly in place.
Story wise, it's as minimal as
you can get, minimalism in exploitation an extreme its practically a Michael Snow work. The "off"
nature surrounding its threadbare plot, is where things become interesting and
what a young John Waters would've
gotten off from in terms of inspiration. If Elizabeth Davis as Miss Pringle
didn't act so broadly, as flamboyantly, as she does than her role would become
tedious, a nonentity which gains life because she's as over-the-top as she is
and clearly enjoying herself. That her relationship with her son, despite being
killers, is so perversely wholesome in the few scenes they have, reading him
bedtime stories and giving him a new electric carving knife as a gift. Talking to
Napoleon, a stuffed animal, as a living creature with thought, not a stuffed
taxidermy, enough that the final shot of the film for impact is the cat itself
and its wide eyed frozen expression.
Helping on the opposite side of
the law is that our plucky heroine Kathy Baker (Gretchen Wells) is as unconventional. Imagine a young female sleuth
from a children's series mixed with the cast of Scooby Doo and you get Kathy, so infectiously obsessed with the world
around her in a wholesome way it's strange for me to write that, for a
character in a splatter film, I'd want to hug her and stay within her energy
cloud of personality. Energetic and sweet, obsessed with trying to solve the
spate of killings of women, even jumping to conclusions that her college's
caretaker is the culprit (with a Swedish accent so broad even the Swedish Chef
from the Muppets is subdued). She's a lot more rewarding and positive than most
heroines in serious horror films still to this day, a terrible thing to
realise, but Lewis' sixties films
always have these chirpy, twee figures who emigrated from the older type of
horror films to these nastier, animal organ filled orgies of gore. The contrast
is inherently startling but it also means you actually care about the
characters; not because they're well written or acted, but that they actually
stand out, something that anyone whose suffered through straight-to-video/DVD
horror nowadays will be very aware of.
Repetitions of women being
scalped take place, gore shots meant to be distasteful but in a playful way. All
done with a gristliness that still gross you out to this day particularly in
the bright sixties colours and for how blunt they are. Over and over until our
heroine is on the right track to investigate the murders. Lewis leaves the seventy minute film to go on lengthy tangents
rather than a plot that stretches from the first minutes. Filler in any other
film, personality here and he manages somehow to get away with it if you are in
-tuned to the pleasure of the non-plot moments in cinema in extremes. Viewing these
scenes, you react realising time has stopped but for those in the right frame
of mind they can start to pick up a camp to the material as it continues. Her decision
to follow the Swedish caretaker back to his home feels like it takes ten
minutes for an obvious red herring, hypnotic in how long it felt for me. And for
another weird moment that takes the cake, intercut between Kathy hanging out
with her blockhead boyfriend and her friends at a drive-in, you constantly go
to an unknown heterosexual couple. Faces never seen, extreme close up of the
hands only as a table takes up the shots. Huge bowl of crisps (potato chips). Huge
bowl of fruit which the hairy male hands usually molests and squashes in as
lurid detail as the gore shots. Beer opened and poured in glasses. The female
wanting to be romantic, the male thinking with his stomach. It would be
avant-garde in another film, here a silly "men are from Mars, women from
Venus" gender farce that takes up considerable length and Lewis included on purpose.
Those who not appreciate these
tangents find them irritating, expecting films to progress or to not be this
intentionally silly. Fans of psychotronic films can detach themselves from
continuity in plots, there for these off moments of strange drama and character
interaction. The worst moments in genre cinema are when they are merely
perfunctory. Nothing that stands out is actually worse than bad acting, as
there is no emotional effect. Weird character moments for faceless figures
never seen again will always get a reaction out of people even if it could be
negative. Not merely a kitsch but humour in these snapshots of weird events. Adding
to this is the aesthetic. Does it sound bad that modern genre cinema can have
no sense of taste, even bad taste? No, because as history informs people, even
bad taste has an aesthetic, still carried symbolic weight of the times. Eventually
the 2010s will have an aesthetic defined I'll look back on with pleasure once
the artificial dullness is removed. And actually, with sixties cinema, low or
high art, you do see a lot of great taste too even if the fashion is so alien
to now. The surprise viewing these schlocky films is that a lot of their
aesthetic is based on things now critically evaluated as good art. The lounge
jazz in particular is something you never get now in even splatter, usually orchestral
or retro synth for horror nowadays, but this stock jazz music was common in
American exploitation. It's cool jazz, a nice contrast alongside the sudden
stop mid-film, as sixties college girls in negligee munch on KFC chicken, for a
surf rock/pop rock song dance-along. The colour and vibrancy of sixties cinema,
even in the grottiest of preserved prints, is amazing even in terms of what is middle
road Americana. Kitsch maybe, but it still possesses human emotion to it, given
emotional connection when given human life and especially with the awful fake
realism of modern horror that's artificially grey and brown we suffer through
in modern times, not even the real 2010s culture but subdued in extremis.
Personal Opinion:
Not as iconic as Blood Feast, but those initiated in Herschell Gordon Lewis will be aware of
the quirks of his cinema and appreciated this film. For myself, I realise how
technically rudimentary his cinema is, how broad the performances are, and that
he slapped these movies together for business, but he stands out from so many
tedious gore films made within these same standards because he was clearly
enjoying himself. A showman aware to bring his odd humour, knowledge that it
was deliberate that succeeds.
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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