The Wizard of Gore (1970)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Allen Kahn

Cast: Ray Sager as Montag the Magnificent; Judy Cler as Sherry Carson; Wayne Ratay as Jack; Phil Laurenson as Greg; Jim Rau as Steve; Don Alexander as Det. Kramer; John Elliot as Det. Harlan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) Re-Review

 

You're the one who wants to see pictures of human ravioli for dessert.

The Wizard of Gore is an iconic film from Herschell Gordon Lewis's career, a return to the splatter film after three years from The Gruesome Twosome (1967), which in context to his career was a long time as someone who made more than one film each year many times. It also feels the effects of his sojourn away from the horror subgenre, of odd films like Something Weird (1967), which has left a lasting effect in terms of turning his early Gore trilogy into later stranger films. Also of context is that, in the late sixties, Lewis did attempt to step out into a cinema with live Grand-Guignol performances with a theatre called the Blood Shed in Chicago¹, which did not last long but clearly left its influence here. That the titular figure is Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager), a magician who stages gruesome scenes of death, using female audience members, under the presumption that the acts are merely illusions. After the shows, however, they are always found after the show mutilated with no one in the vicinity to have carried anything out.

One factor about the film you need to adapt to is that it has a very repetitious structure. A female host of a "Housewives' coffee break" daytime talk show, Sherry Carson (Judy Cler), is trying to get Montag onto her show, she and her sportswriter fiancée Jack (Wayne Ratay) seeing his performances over three or so nights in the chronology as they both slowly realise something is amiss. We see consecutive three nights of Montag's performances, boiled down into the murder scenes with incident and aftermath in-between, modernised versions of tricks like sawing a woman in half known with tools like a chainsaw taking the old props place ("Today, magicians are mechanised too..."). As a result, much of the film is these gore scenes, which are seemingly illusions, full of weird editing to-and-fro in time in the maniacal bloodbaths with lots of real animal guts (and even animal eyes) in scenes both prolonged but also gross, these real pieces of animal in mannequins fingered over minutes in scenes at a time. For some viewers this will be incredibly dull. For other, it will produce a nauseous effect, including crude if completely real gore and lingering over it in such a way to taunt the viewer.

The film is not without the charm of other Lewis films though, as he thankfully has not lost his eccentricities. The atmosphere has become far grottier as the gore has become more gross, which is distinct, but even the aesthetic going into the seventies has changed. One where, after his previous dalliances with KFC (even the elderly Colonel Sanders having a cameo in Blast-Off Girls (1967)), you have a scene in a place called Chicken Unlimited, which is clearly a real fast food restaurant inside, and is a franchise. With its mostly white and text only sign, such locations are not the kitsch white suburban sixties kitsch of The Gruesome Twosome but a more working class, ordinary world as Lewis briefly made in the seventies.

Montag is also another virtue. According to Ray Sager himself, originally the older male actor they had originally, only for him to replace, was a former mental patient who started to act erratically. To Herschell's testimony, this actor and the producer of the film got into an argument that led to a quick change of actor¹. What can be confirmed is that, Sager was originally meant to be the assistant editor on this film until the offer for the lead came his way. Having had roles onscreen in Lewis films before from The Gruesome Twosome and after, as well as worked in the productions behind the camera, his involvement as a performer here was a good thing as he is memorable. Hair painted grey and spouting arch performed dialogue as a grotesque psychopath hidden in a showman, Sager by himself is a huge factor into The Wizard of Gore being entertaining.

That, and when in the final act this film gets weird, and that it without mentioning a subplot which is never explained and concluded, that Montag steals the bodies back of his female victims, usually shot in red and including raising a casket from the soil in a graveyard. The film has already had odd aspects, such as the editing of the murders, and hinted at two themes. One about the distinction between real and fictional violence, the film being sly in its comments on itself as part of the splatter genre Lewis created, something a couple of years before causing censors to bite at his ankles, of being merely fictional. The other is what is illusionary, as Montag says to his audiences, which pushes itself further by the end. By the final act, where Montag gets a TV show to control, brainwashing everyone watching in their living rooms with his mesmerism, it is improving after the repetition of before, but for the final scene The Wizard of Gore literally has its reality eat itself, getting instantly peculiar for an ending which, impossible to spoil, is probably a Möbius strip if you think about it hard enough. It does, definitely, help a film which could have easily been weak from the director by gleefully throwing itself in madness for the hell of it.

 

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1) As referred too HERE.

2) The first is documented in the Arrow Video produced interview with Sager. The later is from Arrow Video produced analysis of the film by writer/commentator Stephen Thrower, both on the same release of The Wizard of Gore first created in 2016 and re-released twice by them in single or box set form.