The Gore-Gore Girls (1972)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Alan J. Dachman

Cast: Frank Kress as Abraham Gentry; Amy Farrell as Nancy Weston; Hedda Lubin as Marlene; Henny Youngman as Marzdone Mobilie; Russ Badger as Lt. Anderson; Ray Sager as Grout; Nora Alexis as Lola Prize

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Lt. Anderson, one of my friends seems to have run into a bit of trouble... and lost her face.

Thinking he was ending on this film in terms of his film directing career, Herschell Gordon Lewis felt he wanted to go out with a bang, with more production value and shock as he was closing the door on his exploitation film career. Starting with the image of a woman, Suzie Cream Puff, "being creamed" by having her face hit through a mirror, he wanted to deliver on that premise. Here I will say, as one of the first Lewis films I had seen, I hated this film once. Hated it to the point it was actually held as one of the worst films I had ever seen. What changed in all the time that passed?

The immediate thing is this film embraces its sense of humour. Introducing our detective lead, Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress), stroking a pet cat in his lounge only to insert it into a cupboard when someone knocks outside, he is lured by a female reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) to investigate a series of gristly go-go dancer murders. The Gore-Gore Girls is a scuzzy and nasty little production, clearly influenced by the Italian giallo from the period as the unseen killer is even wearing black gloves for the job, but it is also a film so proudly with its tongue in its cheek it has pierced through the flesh. Gentry, as played by Kress, is immediately a stand-out even in terms of characters and acting performances in a Lewis film, playing a sarcastic dick but delightfully so, apt for the tone of the production with his many quips to people who irritate him during his work. He eventually even comes to like Nancy, despite their stand-off nature at first and questionable decisions nowadays; though he does nothing and makes sure she gets safely home, getting her drunk off her face on zombie cocktails repeatedly is not something we would consider heroic nowadays even if the joke back in the early seventies.

The film is a procedural where he investigates who the killer could be. Is it Grout (Ray Sager), the man at the Go-Go club bar who draws faces on vegetables and fruits, crushing them in a mania started on corpses in his Vietnam war service, or the leader of a feminist group, whose group storms a Go-Go club halfway through? Lewis even touching upon the Italian giallo genre by accident is a curious nod to this era Lewis would bow out OF, as horror cinema changed in the seventies and diversified further. This is including the fact he might have not been able to match the gore and splatter becoming more acceptable even in mainstream cinema from the period, such as The Omen (1976) having a full decapitation by way of pane of glass shown at multiple angles. Some of this film has aged and is of the era, as Gentry has no time for any woman, even when he is condescending to everyone, and eventually going to bond and have a romance with Nancy. Coming off as a chauvinist, there are many moments, before that romance too, Gentry feels like he is clearly not interested in women at all and could be read as gay.

Thankfully, a bit has aged well. Even with the feminists involved, the film never takes pot-shots with them even when their leader is a possible suspect, their huge storming scene more of a scuffle between actors then anything that comes off as offensive. It feels like Lewis, and his screenwriter Alan J. Dachman, who has a brief scene as a young male bystander asked where a suspect is, just took notice of the world around them and put in a touch for more interest. Gentry is also inclined to screwing with the male police lieutenant, hiding info and telling him the killer is a religious fanatic stealing the victims' Bibles, which is a legitimately funny running joke especially when the cast playing the fellow officers, who Gentry likes more, play it with their senior looking like an idiot.

One of the other aspects of the film was also one of the huge reasons I hated it originally, because I was offended by it, were the gore scenes, not used to the type of films Lewis made and the splatter genre. That they all involve female victims is going to be an issue for many, though Lewis was happy to have violence against men and women; the issue is entirely that, with the plot choice, some will find this uncomfortable whilst for Lewis, wishing to leave his career at this point as the inventor of the splatter genre, he decided to leave as gruesomely as possible. This is as extreme as Lewis could get, even next to Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat (2002), with openly absurd shock value and violent about it, where one person dies to a wooden meat tenderizer to the buttocks followed by salt and pepper being added the wounds. A lot of handling organ meat is involved, and the one scene that is the most infamous was also the one which really shocked me back in the day, still out-there in Lewis' filmography when a female victim has her nipples cut off, one producing milk and the other producing chocolate milk, among the other things that already happened. These scenes, even if played for the bleakest of humour, are going to shock and make people uncomfortable, especially because the targets are all women, which was the aspect which caught me off-guard when I first saw the film back in the day and also could not see the intentional absurdity in its grossness. Details of the film do feel of their time, like this or Gentry getting Nancy drunk continually, but what is also felt is that Lewis is not taking anything serious and being mischievous at the same time. Particularly with the look of the film, shot in Chicago, The Gore-Gore Girls was a shock for me back in the day for feeling rancid let alone looking it, and that I did not appreciate this type of cinema at all, especially when it came to its very twisted sense of humour.

It has a clear witty, very dark humoured tone, which helps the film so much in the modern day, but in hindsight this film should probably be a later work for a newcomer to watch from Lewis, just in case the content leaves a bad taste in the mouth without seeing Lewis' sense of humour in context. Nonetheless I have changed my tune considerably to the film, and if this had been his last film, it would have been a good one to have closed the curtains of his career on, with all his quirks, all his divisive content, and a fitting final image. One breaking the forth wall, the screen being closed by a character as a literal curtain closer, feeling closer to a touch from a forties screwball comedy than a splatter film conclusion. That was not the end, as he would return to cinema in the 2000s after a very successful career in advertising, but for the original era, this was an apt closure.

When it comes into asking why he even decided to end his career at this point as he did, some of it is the fact he was struggling to make these films and felt he could have less stress in his life, especially as his advertising career for decades after made him a very well off man. Interviewed on The Incredibly Strange Film Show, a 1988-9 Channel 4 series by Jonathan Ross where he tackled "psychotronic" or B movie figures, the episode entirely devoted to Lewis had him absolute at bliss, happy to look back on his career with mirth but also, playing tennis and well off, a man who did well as a lucrative writer and speaker on the subject of advertising, his film career a well kept secret. He came back to cinema, which was a happy thing, but there was in itself a happy end there just as well. Lewis, in spite of his notorious gore films, has something sweet to his life in that he managed to have happy conclusions to his life and career in cinema twice. It is an odd thing to consider, as his career was devoted to make the audience throw up and throwing entrails around, but he would have found that hilarious.

Two Thousand Maniacs (1964)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cast: Connie Mason as Terry Adams; William Kerwin as Tom White; Jeffrey Allen as Mayor Buckman; Shelby Livingston as Bea Miller; Ben Moore as Lester MacDonald; Jerome Eden as John Miller; Gary Bakeman as Rufus 'Rufe' Tate; Stanley Dyrector as Harper Alexander

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Following on from Blood Feast (1963), the most telling thing about his follow-up in the eventual gore trilogy is that Two Thousand Maniacs is how much of a step up in production this turned out to be. Set up as a group of six Northerners welcomed into a Southern town called Pleasant Valley, four in one car and a hitchhiker played by Blood Feast star William Kerwin with a female driver in another, you can tell from the get-go the budget and production of the film, even if still lower budget, was improved, taking the splatter film template Lewis created a year before and placing it within a full narrative.

The immediate thing to talk about is its theme song. Outside of its original context, it is a difficult song to digest, as its lyrics are from the perspective of Southerners threatening that "the South will rise again", an issue in the same way as a Confederate flag is because of how, to express Southern culture, unfortunately this has involved using the symbolism of the Confederates who practiced slavery. As an earworm, sung by Herschell Gordon Lewis himself as well as written by him, this makes this a guiltier issue to deal with, because it is a damn good song in terms of being stuck in the brain. In context though, it is perfect, as even if this is a splatter film first, the choice of its subject, and looking at both stereotypes of the South, and the uneasy relationship in culture between the Northern states and the South since the Civil War, is prominent and deliberate even as an exploitation film. Set in 1965 at the bicentennial of the end of the Civil War, the film is still meant to be a splatter film for entertainment at heart, but it is distinct touch from Herschell Gordon Lewis to tackle the conflicting emotions of the North and the South post-Civil War even within this film's playful tone, [Plot Spoilers] how the Pleasant Valley town is full of literal ghosts out for revenge for what Northern soldiers did to them when alive during the conflict [Spoilers End].

This is still a very goofy film, openly so with a sense of humour, for how many films has one such murder among its string of them being a game of hitting a tiny target to drop a giant rock onto someone? That or the sequence involving a very dangerous version of a barrel roll, played for sick humour as with Blood Feast and the director's other films? It still presents moments that, in context, are pretty nasty, as this feels like the cousin of Blood Feast with someone getting an arm axed off, but as with that film, it managed to be almost charming in spite of this. Unlike Blood Feast, the humour here is far less unintentional but deliberate, part of many tonal changes which transpire in just a year from the previous production. A considerable change of emphasis onto a plot, with dialogue scenes and more fleshed out characters, is found here even over some later films. The plot too, imaging the ghosts of the Confederate deciding to get their revenge on the Northern Yankees a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, is also tantalising even if this still, as an early Herschell film, a string of gore scenes first as priority. It is a loaded one, and how this bothers to even have an epilogue, where the ghosts leave to where they go to, is definitely something distinct from the director's filmography.

Out of a lot of Lewis' films, this is conventional and well put together, in that it is a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end which even people likely to be put off by his productions would appreciate. It also establishes many of his best virtues being how, when possible, he could pull resources when needed. It may seem odd not to immediately talk about the gore, but instead the music turns out to be the film's best virtue, where this is indeed a film where the virtues of the soundtrack are to be found. With talented musicians hired in the cast, playing members of the town who play jovial songs even over victims' remains being ritually barbecued, you do not expect a splatter film to be memorable for its traditional folk songs. Two Thousand Maniacs however has a ribald energy just from this music alone.

Arguably this tone could be unintentionally darker due to, unfortunately, a more complex question with depiction the South, entirely because the history of the American South and its idealised past. It is poignant here, in the slow burn ending, where the dead literally came back to haunt the modern day, which cannot be dampened even in the film of over-the-top performances and humour. Most of the cast have the right type of pulpy energy that one would like and, even if the film's structure means some not-surprising predictability in the pace, this is a film that became one of Herschell Gordon Lewis' most well regarded for a good reason. Hell, I think the knowledge of what this inspired says a lot of how well regarded the film is, that this not only inspired a 2005 remake but also the least likely band to take their name from them, 10,000 Maniacs an alternative rock band capable of very poetic songs on the likes of the In My Tribe album but still naming themselves proudly after the two thousand maniacs here. I like other, weirder films from later in the director-producer's filmography, but I see the virtues with Herschell's film here as clear as day even if there is fake blood over the skyline.

Monster A-Go Go (1965)

 

Director: Bill Rebane (with Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Screenplay: Bill Rebane, Jeff Smith and Dok Stanford

Cast: Philip Morton as Col. Steve Connors; June Travis as Ruth Logan; George Perry as Dr. Brent; Lois Brooks as Nora Kramer; Rork Stevens as Tom Logan; Peter M. Thompson as Dr. Chris Manning; Robert Simons as Henry Schwartz; Barry Hopkins as Frank Logan; Henry Hite as Frank Douglas / the Monster; Herschell Gordon Lewis as the Radio Announcer Voice; Bill Rebane a  theBoyfriend at Dance / the Narrator

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Candidate

 

What you are about to see may not even be possible, within the narrow limits of human understanding.

 

A surf guitar song set over the still shot of the cosmos is probably befitting Monster A-Go Go. Christened one of the worst films ever made, including a stint on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, its infamy in genre cinema is well known. The story of why this film ends up as peculiar as it can be is simple, yet asks so much of how precarious filmmaking actually is on any level. Bill Rebane, a figure who would go on in Wisconsin making genre films, shot the film in sections as he kept running out of money¹. The film was eventually unfinished, and it was Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man who I admire but was always a businessman as much as a favour for splatter flicks, who bought the unfinished material wishing to have a secondary film to play with one of his own. Lewis finished the original with all the issues, such as not being able to hire the original actors, which could come about as a result of this.

A fallen space spaceship and the astronaut named Frank meant to be within it are found crashed in a field. The astronaut is nowhere to be seen, but there is a dead helicopter pilot, which immediately raises concerns. Also be aware, as a viewer, the voice over narrator, to pad over of the loose ends, such as a still conversation to the wife of the astronaut, is going to be the MVP here whether you wish to bequeath the title to him or not. Played by original director Bill Rebane himself, that deserves applause because never was there pontification in a sci-fi narration with such heady tones, Criswell only beating him as no one could match Criswell in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

As someone more sympathetic to these films, punching down on Monster A-Go-Go was not something I did throughout viewing this film. Someone else would punch down on little Jimmy, nephew of the astronaut Frank, who is the kind of kid put in front to act who hesitates on camera, who also looks like a stereotype of a fifties Americana young boy, who asks whether Jimmy was as common a name in North America as it inexplicitly has always felt like for myself. Others would punch down on long scenes of actors talking in fields. Far more an issue, whilst a compelling oddity, is that this film is incredibly dry and languid, with the monster normally not seen and just talked of. It can cut to go-go dancing in the most abrupt of inclusions, but unintentionally this is like if James Benning or an avant-garde artist decided to make a parody of a sixties sci-fi b-flick and deliberately wished to antagonise the conventional viewer of such films.

The use of the narrator to explain content, and the minimalist score alone, feels like we have accidentally made an avant-garde film at times, especially as for a low budget film mocked as terrible, when seen in a restored form, this is a monochrome independent production that, honestly, looks a higher budget than many modern no-budget films shot on digital. That is entirely because celluloid and even 16 millimetre film has a distinct touch to it, a layer of aesthetic which is striking, especially as for a Chicago shot film, this has moments which are atmospheric even if most of it is still scenes of a lot of exposition. When the monster is actually revealed, it is then you realise these experiments in obfuscation are really just a film that needed to be patched together, with the stranger caveat that the monster is not an alien, or a rug acquired because the original costume was lost, nor an Incredible Melting Man designed by Rick Baker, but Henry Hite, who is a distinct looking man, which cannot be denied, but you feel sympathy for in how awkwardly he is used. Born Henry Marion Mullens, Hite was promoted as "the world's tallest man" at 8 ft 2 in, even if his actual height was 7 ft 6¾ in², part of a Vaudeville act called the “Lowe, Hite and Stanley” show³. Monster A-Go Go was his only film, most of his career for various food promotions like Wilson Certified Meats³. Hite here, sadly, does not have a lot of time onscreen, unable to emphasis his height over everyone else and thus, usually in a shot separate, instead looking like a balding man in a mucky silver jump suit and burn makeup. With the added aspect that it is a film with almost all the monster attacks worked around off-screen, even if using his height for monstrousness can be argued to be distasteful, he is a distinct figure to include in any film which is not appreciated enough by the film itself.

It truly does feel like a minimalist take on a sci-fi monster film, including all the aspects not intended, as with a Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) which would cause the likes of Mystery Science Theatre to urinate on it. It is, even for a film over just an hour, a film so languid that my younger self, not used to these extremes, would have despised it. Now, adapting to these types of films, there is something delightfully perverse in a lengthy scene of a man, wandering a film holding a burnt stick, set to clearly audible sound of the film reel in the preserved Arrow Film restoration, and bird calls. Lengthy scenes of exposition, around a narrative where the monster is abruptly kept at one point by a scientist only to escape again, have a theatre-like pace with sets, even a tangent that leads to no build up or anyone being quickly killed. It involves a trucking "Lancelot" helping a woman with a broken down car, with a kiss as a reward. Those characters do not return, no monster appears, and whilst I liked it, other viewers would be dumbfounded. This is not even taking in the casting of June Travis, in a tradition of hiring older actors based on their history, Travis an actress from the Hollywood studio system who whose career was mostly in thirties films with Monster A-Go Go her last. Her role, barring a possible romance with one of the men trying to find Frank, despite already being with Frank, is barely here as well and just adds to the strange jumble of pieces that made the film.

Bill Rebane, the director of the likes of The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), is someone I want to get into. He would not make another film for nine years after this¹, staying in short and industrial filmmaking until Invasion from Inner Earth (1974). Truthfully, Invasion from Inner Earth managed to be even more languid, a far more difficult film to sit through if still fascinating. Monster A-Go Go is undeniably a potential struggle for anyone getting into these films, but it is such a bizarre end result of when films are left unfinished and are attempted to be finished years later that I appreciated. It is as much a film meaningful for me as a huge Herschell Gordon Lewis fan, someone who would have openly admitted, as a businessman first, he made films with little and on the seat of his pants. By himself, he could make a film as strange as Something Weird (1967), which lived up to that title and even founded the company of the same name, by the late Mike Vraney and now held by his widow Lisa Petrucci, who would release Monster A-Go Go on unsuspecting viewers in a new age. This film is no different in the slightest to the fifties sci-fi from Hollywood, all as capable of being as rewarding as they are kitschy, all with a fixation on the dangers of radiation be it nuke or from space flight, with the only difference is that this is the anti-sci-fi film in structure. It also has as big an anti-climax transpiring as I have ever seen in these films, which was a surprise to see, in hindsight hilarious if the kind that would cement this film's infamy fully.  For those prepared for a film like Monster A-Go Go, the stomach for it, it is fascinating to witness as this anti-climatic, anti-genre mishap, especially with the delight that, thankfully, Bill Rebane kept making films and a cult name for himself from the seventies onwards, and Herschell Gordon Lewis made a lot of films at this time in a variety of genres, and became a cult legend with this a weird footnote for him.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) This is discussed by Rebane himself on part one of the Straight Shooter interviews, included with Arrow Video's Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection

2) Taken from "Tall Man Henry Hite Dead At 63", published in The Evening Independent on May 29th 1978.

3) Taken from Strange But True: When the 'World's Tallest Man' came to Clinton, written by Terrance Ingano for Telegran & Gazette, included on the site for July 11th 2021.

She Devils on Wheels (1968)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Louise Downe

Cast: Betty Connell as Queen; Nancy Lee Noble as Honey Pot; Christie Wagner as Karen; Rodney Bedell as Ted; Pat Poston as Whitey; Jody Pennock as Terry; John Weymer as Joe-Boy

Canon Fodder

 

Sex, blood, guts, and all men are muthas.

In response to all his films where usually women were victims, Herschell Gordon Lewis made a female biker film, where the women are tough and can beat up men. He also specifically hired people who could actually ride motorbikes, which for me is the more progressive aspect to one of his non-splatter tangents, as he cared for more verisimilitude than faking shots with the female cast. This was likely as much to avoid time and budget wasting with people who could not ride the motorbikes in the film, but it is something to admire. Also with mind to Louise Downe, a neglected figure of importance in his career, having written the script you have a sense of this further.

Like many of these tangents in his career, Herschell's films are less about the plots, where this is a very low budget genre film where that plot is vague, than his personality. In this case a female biker gang who ride bikes, defy the law, and have competitive races where the winner and the people in order of who got to the finish line first gets to choose from the male Johns to sleep with. Their one taboo is "steady meat", where you cannot have a boyfriend, something which the female stand-in for the audience, a young woman who joins the group, has to learn a lesson from when she has to drag a potential boyfriend behind her bike on concrete to show her loyalty.

This film is a difficult one to elaborate on in terms of a review as, with the pleasure of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film, plot is not the biggest aspect to even his splatter films. This film's main trajectory, baring the female lead's divided schism between the gang and an old male flame, is that a rival male gang becomes hostile the women, known as the Man-Eaters, being on their turf and take a very nasty decision on threatening them. Instead, it is the tone of his work which intrigues many of his fans, as beyond his trademarks of flood light lit static scenes and garish coloured costumes, Lewis' films are populated with likably eccentric figures. Even if they are meant to be a vicious girl gang, the Man-Eaters even act like fifties cartoonish bullies, terrorising the locals and even stealing a soda from a young girl. Even the police are mocked, despite the irony of thanking the real local police force in the end credits, when a larger powerhouse member of the group tells one he has a tiny penis in verse.

Is She Devils on Wheels actually feminist? To debate, but undeniably these are likably rogue, free figures and even how the final drama for the female lead takes a decision which is more progressive than it could have been. ([Spoiler] I.e. that female sisterhood in the gang is more important to her than a boyfriend [Spoilers End]). And even if the ending has seemingly a conservative ending, the film plays a trick by having the end credits finish only to include a coda that says they are not that easy to get rid off, through the police or otherwise. When they do have to fight, with chains and even razor wire strung across a road, they fight hard. They will even piss on their male enemies when they beat them up, which is merely implied but clearly shown when Lewis has the scene.

Plus in one of Lewis' best virtues, he always cast actors you never heard of, from this independent era of non-union actors in genre filmmaking, who make up for any crudeness of their performances with charisma, and alongside casting women who could actually ride motorcycles, he also cast women who were all charismatic. It is to his credit that, even in mind that the habit of casting female victims in his splatter films could have merely been the unfortunate habit over storytelling of usually having women in peril in horror and suspense films, he embraced the idea of a strong female biker film by having women who do not act like damsels in distress at all.

His films from this time, including his attempt at creating the destruction-sploitation genre with Just for the Hell of It (1968), where a group of young adults decided to destroy and smash everything up in a nihilistic frenzy, even put a baby in a bin at one point, do come in mind of deliberately moving away from his splatter films. They are fascinating films even in mind that, if he had never even gotten the title of the creator of the splatter film genre, or his preferred moniker of creating the "gore film", he would have likely still gained a cult reputation for how quirky his regional genre movies were, even if it took longer to be appreciated. They are as much films of their era too, so if he had stayed in filmmaking throughout the seventies he would have had to have adapted or perished.

In fact, in many ways his cinema, whilst we might have loved him to continue into that decade, may have lost something. It is odd to say this, but the charm even to The Gore-Gore Girls (1972) for all its nasty gore may have been compromised if he tried to catch up with the more lurid and nihilistic films of that decade. Even a film like She Devils on Wheels, with its violence and a dark turn when a Man-Eater member is brutalised, never becomes anything else by a playful romp with its female leads. Watching this film again, alongside the pleasures it brought, made me appreciate the virtue of Lewis even bowing out of film industry for a long period of time too.

Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: W. Boyd Ford

Cast: J.P. Delahoussaye as Fuad Ramses III; John McConnell as Detective Dave Loomis; Mark McLachlan as Detective Mike Myers; Melissa Morgan as Mrs. Lampley; Toni Wynne as Tiffani Lampley; Chris Mauer as Mr. Lampley; Christy Brown as Bambi Deere; Christina Cuenca as Misti Morning; Michelle Miller as Laci Hundees; Kristi Polit as Trixi Treater

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #211 / An Abstract Film Re-Review

 

Decades after the events of Blood Feast (1963), in which his grandfather slaughtered women to create the titular feast for the goddess Ishtar, grandson Fuad Ramses III (J.P. Delahoussaye) inherits the old catering store he owned, finding the original Ishtar statue in the back, now less a gold painted mannequin but more of a stone idol. Immediately brainwashing him, it commands him towards the desire to recreate the blood feast again for the wedding celebration of Tiffani Lampley (Toni Wynne) and Detective Mike Myers (Mark McLachlan). In real life, Herschell Gordon Lewis did not make another film after 1972 beforehand, fully committing himself to the world of advertising where he made a huge success in his work. In this time, his films started to develop success for cult movie followers. We even got the unofficial sequel, Blood Diner (1987), where two brothers inherited their uncle's goal to create a feast of blood in her name.

There is an irony to be had that Herschell Gordon Lewis, never one to stay modest, confessed his contempt (in light heartedness mind) to the idea of art minded cinema, He nonetheless left a lasting mark on cinema through Blood Feast. Even if they were made just for money, the idiosyncrasies to how he made his films and his sense of humour to making them are one of his best virtues and are part of his DNA. This is more so the case as, when the long awaited sequel to Blood Feast came about, his most well known film, he would afterwards claim that it was never really his own project despite directing it and collaborating with his old producer colleague David F. Friedman. Yet my experience with some of his odder tangents beyond his gore films, the likes of How to Make a Doll (1968), suggest his fingerprints are still here. Symbolically this is perfect, as upon returning to film making, there had been enough time alongside his cult status for this to be put together with an entirely different mentality, drawn from the subterranean fringe culture that embraced his films in the first place.

It is definitely an interesting film for him, less a sequel than a remake set in the same world, one between the psychobilly music by Southern Culture on the Skids, and its jokey (and frankly weird) tone of his later work, which becomes a cultural signpost of alt-culture of the time of psychotronic cinema, rockabilly revival and early 2000s softcore titillation. It also means Blood Feast 2 is a tangent fest, the original film's premise replayed longer and with irony, liable to be off-putting unless you relent and accept those tangents are more interesting than the plot. One however not that different from his late sixties work and, ironically, is more focused than his own original gore films of yore.

And the type of ironic dithering here that came in low budget cinema from the 2000s onwards has grown on me, and especially in this case is far less an issue. I will openly admit here, to draw the curtain back that, I saw this film the first time in 2019, than revisited it only two years later in 2021, and what a difference two years makes. When you uncover the films of Lewis' career or even people working on the film like Joe Castro, the special effects creator on the production who made low budget films in this era from the shadow of the legend's career, it sheds a new light on the production in terms of how to digest it. This film also feels considerably wackier than wanting to come off as so-bad-its-good, which is close to Lewis' own career. This is the kind of film, to keep you on your toes, where one of the police detectives, the older veteran obsessed with food, suddenly breaks out into a weather report in front of a map just for one moment. It is never brought up again and such odd turns are numerous.

The plot is simplistic enough that this can get away with these weird moments of humour, closer to the camp mentality an overt parody from this period like Psycho Beach Party (2000) had, all whilst still between playing the plot straight as possible in spite of this tone. It helps the broad characters, one note, are at least fleshed out in terms of joke characters, and arguably in some cases a lot better in performances than Lewis' original films. Our food obsessed cop, sceptic about Ramses III being the culprit, and his younger partner, obsessed to bag Ramses III for the sudden string of murders taking place, are kept alive by these actors making them stand out as is the joke when they switch sides. That this older cop is quite good at his job, except eating over the corpses, adds to the humour in a positive way, or that their female secretary in the office turns out to be the smartest and most confident person in the room between them. The bride's mother, who is an overt stereotype for mother-in-law jokes, or even legendary film maker John Waters in a cameo as a Catholic priest, a life's goal as a fan of Lewis' work, playing as tasteless a joke in the role he would have been game for and visibly relishes.

And then there is J.P. Delahoussaye as Ramses III, who at first is actually given a great performance in context, at least a better performance over Mal Arnold as the original Ramses from the first Blood Feast, a "special" performance in itself in how arch it was. Normally I do not like including obscurer pop culture references without explaining them, so I apologise in having to draw from this one, but the exact comparison to what Delahoussaye's performance style becomes soon into the film, grandiose and almost nearing an accent, is when in the mid 2010s a veteran of American professional wrestling named Matt Hardy created an idiosyncratic persona from his previous one. An ageless mad entity obsessed with riding lawnmowers and shooting fireworks at his own brother, all to do something fresh, a "broken" character for a company called Impact Wrestling with a Cruella De Vil white streak in his grown out hair, and among the many other deliberately weird things using a manner of speech that can be described as Shakespearian wall chewing, gravitas of the hammiest sort Delahoussaye a decade earlier uses in Blood Feast 2 for humorous bombast.

All of this fits the film, one which saddles itself between this intentional humour and splatter, the raison d'être of Lewis' film. The original Blood Feast, despite its quirky kitsch, is important because it created the splatter genre of horror, back when on a limited budget Lewis had to use a cow's tongue and fake blood for the initial gore sequence. Decades later, and on the cusp of the new century, splatter and gooey special effects became more over the top and available in lowest budgeted productions. This is seen metaphorically here in how the main practical effects designer is Joe Castro, the director of the low budget series of Terror Toons films which started the same year as Blood Feast II, the third one of the last works Lewis did before his death playing himself as the narrator of gristly reinterpretations of fairy tales. The gore in Lewis' older films, even as sleazy as in a later work like The Gore Gore Girls (1972), was crude and deliberately silly even if utterly revolting, especially as he eventually started lingering on real animal offal as it was, for a lack of a better word, being fingered, to relish the exclamation point.

The same is the case here where, despite how gruesome it is, there are overtly farcical details like Ramses III using kitchen implements, even using oven gloves to hide his fingerprints, or the infamous scene of someone's face being peeled off, the skull underneath still looking around like a perverse animatronic. The gore is most accomplished here, keeping the sense of ickiness to it even when Delahoussaye is chewing the walls too. Even in mind Castro, to the detriment of some of his own films, can be too grim in some of how realistic his content looks, he was the right person to have when, despite Blood Feast's reputation, most of Lewis' films from the late sixties on became more deliberately grottier whilst being ridiculous

The softcore nature of the film is a distinction from before too as, even whilst Lewis made nudie cuties before he made gore films, and at least one porn film he denied making, Blood Feast II at times feels like it was a 2000s softcore film meshed in DNA with a splatter film which is distinct. Lewis' films do have the issue, which cannot be ignored, that he usually had female victims most of the time, one of the few exceptions Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), but the softcore nudity is a caveat in itself and comes off instead as more ridiculous. There is an absurdity at points too when you have lead Tiffani and her friends have a lingerie shower party, of putting on and taking off negligee, which comes off as absurd.

The specific type of softcore here is I can pin point to the early 2000s straight-to-DVD film, like Jim Wynorski's Busty Cops (2004), which became common on the lower shelves of even British DVD rental stores and those I admit freely I have seen a few of, like the aforementioned one above¹. Films which are on the verge of porn and are very statically shot even before they get to the nudity; films, from the few I have seen, that the likes of Misty Mundae (real name Erin Brown) starred in, which were low budget and in many cases strange. It is the same here, where nude scenes are paraded in their own separate space, where a woman wanders a house very naked to Devil's Stompin' Ground by Southern Culture..., or when the lingerie party happens and, for two of the people participating, the film is nearly looking to turn into a softcore sex sequence until Ramses III stumbles in.  

Eventually the film's strangeness becomes compelling. One of the strangest running gags compels this opinion from me - in which a minor character dies, the mother-in-law's husband, and his body inexplicably starts popping up in future scenes, even at the wedding reception at the end of the film. There is a sense of the film being self aware of itself and trying to top what it did previously in how genuinely eccentric it can be, even having a character correct the mistake from the original film that Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess, not an Egyptian one. Even one of those nude scenes, for the police secretary, is played as a bizarre dream for a police officer where her breasts become two iced deserts and for her, when he wakes, to chastise him. What in any other case would be a sloppy early 2000s production, a predecessor to Neo-Grindhouse in being too ironic and not taking itself seriously, instead in this case is camper than a boy scout conventional and genuine in its weirdness. My growing admiration for ultra low budget films too, this one with a lot more production value too, helps considerably as is the fact Lewis made a lot of low budget, weird films. Knowing he himself worked on the likes of Something Weird (1967), living up to that title among other grab bags of eccentricity, really argues that this film is more closely linked to the others, in lurid content for the sake of luridness,and weird characters. Characters in his old work, as here, would have not batted an eye either at the catering Ramses does even when having visible human fingers in rolls to snack on.

An outlier in the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis's filmography it may seem, it does not feel that much of one despite the claims of this. Tragically as well, probably for this reason, this film has be made obscurer and even lost when, in context, it was insanely entertaining whilst in very bad taste and ridiculous. One that, due to one of its songs having been played on the trailer for Arrow Video's promo reel in their early days, has grown on me considerably with fondness. Blood Feast II does feel like a feast, a vast contrast to the quick and sudden shocks of luridness of the director's first film of the two, but a long and peculiar thing for me to delight in.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Camp/Eccentric/Grotesque/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) And that particularly example, still irredeemable, did show how bizarre these films could get, with random nude egg breaking in a group shower and a talking lama as a police chief. Those scenes still linger with me despite being a long time ago.

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.

How to Make a Doll (1968)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis (as Sheldon Seymour) and Bert Ray

Cast: Robert Wood as Percy Corley; Bobbi West as Agnes Turnbull / Dream Girl; Jim Vance as Dr. Hamilcar West; Elizabeth Davis as Mrs. Corley; Brett Jason Merriman as Mr. Turnbull; Geraldine Young as Mrs. Turnbull; Margie Lester as Dr. West's Dream Girl

An Abstract List Candidate

 

 I never take a hammer in the tub. It rusts you know.

Written by Herschell Gordon Lewis under a pseudonym, as "Sheldon Seymour", (who also did the "Special Computer Sound Effects"), How to Make a Doll is a very obscure film from him and an incredibly weird one to boot. It is a sex comedy from in the late sixties, with no nudity even compared to his early sixties output, and a very peculiar premise that has not aged well. One you could yet imagine Jerry Lewis reimagining at this period, but instead by the director if Blood Feast (1963) with imaginable curious results.

We introduce Professor Percy Corley (Robert Wood), our protagonist, his world one where at a university campus students are necking and heavy petting even in his class, to a rapturous crowd of peers ignoring his teacher writing at the board lecturing. Even he does not notice himself until he trips over the couple on the floor, a very clumsy man with a bad habit of catching his tie in his own front door, not even bothering to re-open the door afterwards but having scissors always on him to cut himself free. Percy is also someone able to succeed in his knowledge about X and Y, but not of "Gs and Bs", and love in general ("Could it be girls are better than text books?"). He is the sole single person on the campus, where he even finds a couple making out in his own three wheeled red pod of a car.

A 32 year old virgin living with his mother, thankfully Percy is more self loathing than an angry white man, instead Herschell doing a film with no gore, post the likes of The Nutty Professor (1963) on a low budget. I was always here for his eccentricities and odd characters, so I am the target viewer for this film even if it was a disaster, but his film of building a supercomputer just to create women is strange, particularly as the humour is odd, with a lot of peculiar dialogue strung together like stream-of-consciousness ("cucumber pie"?), and is a film not of plot, but a lot of prolonged and protracted scenes. Making women with a computer is sexist, and with one unfortunate gay joke, when the first attempt at a higher life form is a man, and one voice from the computer clearly meant to be "Asian", this is a film from an obsolete era. But this predates Weird Science (1985) too, so Herschell was ahead of his time.

What this also shows was that, when presented with little, he will goof about as, from the moment we get to the pop art and multi-colour science laboratory where the computer is found, he both has the theme (decades before) of downloading one's consciousness into machinery, whilst also providing the noises of said computer, including gibbering, laughing and almost sounding like a mule, creating effectively a farce that in not meant to be taken serious. Or that, to simulate sex, screws and plugs (in stop motion) demonstrate it in the most blatant of ways. This, like Something Weird (1967) shows Lewis could be creative but also bizarre.

Unlike Something Weird, How To Make a Doll is a film entirely of padding, tangents and repetition, which makes this arguably one of the most difficult films to recommend from him unless you are a hardcore fan or like true cinematic oddities to watch. By the halfway mark, nothing actually progresses once the computer is introduced. Plot wise, this technically does have an event transpire, that Percy is forced into nearly being sexed to death (or wooed to boredom) on the whims of the computer, wishing to have him be a lady's mind so the experiences can be downloaded into the machine's mind. It repeats for so long however that it enters negative time when this happens, where the film progresses through its neither run time nor feels long, just drifting off into a cinematic fugue that might appeal to some, may not appeal to others.

Far weirder is that the film's main plot ends, only for an extended epilogue to take place of Percy meeting and dating a woman which takes up a considerable chunk of the film. One with an extended joke of him having broken glasses, and a lengthy piece of meeting the parents, all lasting a long time and entirely for a final joke involving a bunny swimming costume, breaking the reality and causing one to wonder what was real originally. The resulting film is beguiling in being a mass of random, disconnected pieces, pieces of Percy being obsessed with bunny rabbits from never having pets as a child to the homemade machine that can materialise anything. That the professor behind the machine, who becomes one with it, has an extended gag of him trying to explain his work, only to go on tangents which lasts a considerable time and has enough strange dialogue within it meant to be funn.y It is fittingly part of Lewis' career, as his career once you dig through it is full of films you would never get in the modern day like this. It is however, even if finding it entertaining, a peculiar creation that, surprisingly, managed to get on the list of the 2016 Arrow Video blu ray restorations of Lewis' work. Bless them for this as this is usually the kind of weirdo production that will baffle people.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalistic/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Something Weird (1967)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: James F. Hurley

Cast: Tony McCabe as Cronin 'Mitch' Mitchell; Elizabeth Lee as Ellen Parker; William Brooker as Dr. Alex Jordan; Mudite Arums as The Hag; Ted Heil as Det. Maddox; Lawrence J. Aberwood as Chief Vinton; Larry Wellington as Rev. Ammond

An Abstract Candidate

Including a bonus review of A Hot Night at the Go Go Lounge (1966)

 

Levitation may occur.

This is where, reviewing the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, I rub my hands together with glee. This film, a tangent in a career usually known for the splatter films, is famously where the company Something Weird Video got their name from, founded by the late Mike Vraney who (with his wife and widow Lisa Petruccirunning the company after him) decided to preserve weird American productions like this alongside the rest of Lewis' filmography. This was also one of the only original Something Weird Video release I did own, rather than distributed by a different company, importing the DVD which was worthy to preserve even after Arrow Video released a Blu Ray restoration because of the extras. The company's reputation was as much to make their releases a trick or treat bag of curiosities and delights, making others blush in shame by offering short films and odd content more interesting for someone myself to watch than even behind the scenes documents. Even a clip of Psyched by the 4D Witch (1973) appeared on this film's disc, another of these bizarre American exploitation films from the era which hopped onto the LSD and New Age cultural trends.

Something Weird lives up to the title, its origins coming from a period where Lewis deviated from his gore films in the later sixties. Some of this was the censors snapping at his heels, but I suspect as much of this was that, as an exploitation/independent filmmaker, he hoped onto new trends or wanted to expand his forte. I will use this as an excuse to cram a tiny little review here of a short film supposedly directed by him from the time, A Hot Night at the Go Go Lounge (1966), suiting the film originally talked about by having even its own review go on a tangent.  Starting with dancing, cutting to feet dancing and shimmering women, the short however is mostly about female erotic dancing, two female topless dancers the central focus, one in a red skirt with tassels and black stockings, the other in white jeans. This is a foot back into older exploitation films, the burlesque productions like Varietease (1954) from the late fifties, but this short is worth mentioned in a Something Weird review as you see the eventual transition to weird films of the late sixties. Of the psychedelic era, the proto psychedelic garage rock and the attempt at matching the era, be it red and purple backgrounds to jump cuts to make the dancers appear and disappear. It is a mere curiosity, but you see Lewis, if he directed this, both able to show style and moving along with trends, be they relevant or out of touch. It almost feels apt the last shot is a jukebox, a fifties piece of iconography before Lewis made a film like Something Weird a year later.

Adding to the strange film is knowing that its screenwriter James F. Hurley was obsessed with ESP, writing a film that would pass on his beliefs on the subject only for this film to be created, hating the final result so much he directed his own film called The Psychic (1968) with Lewis himself as the cinematographer. From the get-go the score by Edward J. Petan is trippy for an introduction to the film, jazz with synth and even an xylophone later on, apt for a film where the opening credits has a random murder of a woman by a psychopath, a random scene in a dojo linking to the growing interest in the West of martial arts, and an abrupt cut to a man falling off a roof, electrocuted, and the real lead Mitch (Tony McCabe) getting his face burnt by the severed cable that falls down too trying to help that man. He gains psychic powers as a result of the electrocution, but also a permanently scared face, psychologically distorting him to the point of being initially very unlikable, berating a female nurse in hospital, not helped by what has happened to him psychologically what has transpired. Then a witch enters his life, and the film lives up to the title and tenfold.

Wandering off in pure randomness, there is a point here, completely accurate with his gift and getting by as a veiled psychic, Mitch is offered a tempting deal. That if he becomes her lover, the witch will restore his face; said witch, who is your typical exaggerated crone, does however disguise herself as a beautiful woman when the deal is sealed, which tempts him further. Dialogue heavy, Something Weird is yet a curious beast, one which juggles so many unexpected plot jaunts. There is, as mentioned, someone killing women which evokes Lewis' splatter films, even one murder with a blow torch being used. This plot, which becomes one of the main two, looks like it will turn into a prototype of The Dead Zone, be it the Stephen King novel and the 1983 David Cronenberg film, where in the location of Jefferson in Wisconsin (where the film was also shot for authenticity) Mitch is asked to be involved with using his powers to find the killer. Not before however a random ghost exorcism in a church, a séance with superimposition, and psychosexual tension where the main crime investigator sent to Jefferson falls in love with the Witch in her disguised form, being attacked by his own bed sheets in the process.

Then the LSD is brought in the room, literally from a pocket, at a time when it was still considered a curiosity, and leading to a trip scene entirely in red hue and pushing Lewis in expressing such content in idiosyncratic ways.  As a filmmaker as well, in mind to such examples, Lewis took a step on this film in terms of his more creative side showing itself, another example the electrocution scene, causing Mitch's disfigurement, which is cut to in a quick edit from a scene before of a couple romantically entangled which pitches an ironic piece of dialogue before the accident. Whilst this still follows his habit of calmly paced and long scenes of dialogue, the moments of his having to show unconventionality and flourish to make this film stand out are enticing. This also undercuts the notion that he did not take his work with any interest beyond financial success at all, as he was starting to include these types of flourishes among these films onwards, and did not need have to as many genre and exploitation films before and afterwards in the seventies could far more crudely minimalistic. Here particularly, in its glory living up to the title tenfold, you see this, the film I had grown the fondest of from Lewis, and still gleefully bonkers to witness.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychedelic/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Color Me Blood Red (1965)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cast: Gordon Oas-Heim as Adam Sorg; Candi Conder as April Carter; Elyn Warner as Gigi; Pat Finn-Lee as Sydney (as Patricia Lee); Jerome Eden as Rolf; Scott H. Hall as Farnsworth; Jim Jaekel as Jack; Iris Marshall as Mrs. Carter; William Harris as Gregorovich; Cathy Collins as Mitzi

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #209

 

Pigments pal. Not haemoglobin!

When I first saw Color Me Blood Red a long time ago, I hated the film, not at a place to appreciate Herschell Gordon Lewis at all an era ago, getting into cult films in the late 2000s but a completely different person in my tastes. This was back when Tartan Films, with Something Weird Video, distributed Lewis' films on DVD in the United Kingdom under their Tartan Grindhouse sub label; that company no longer exists, which tells you how long ago that first viewing was. The different in time and where the final of his unofficial "Blood Trilogy" ends (with Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) is that he fully embraced his clear love for humour and winking to the audience. Whilst not a parody, which is for the better.

This is also not the first nor the last time a film has dealt with a mad artist who kills for their art - say hello A Bucket of Blood (1959) - but this particular one of Adam Sorg (Gordon Oas-Heim), a frustrated artist who finds his creative spark again in using human blood, still shows a huge jump into more deliberate comedy and whit among the luridness. There is even a joke about Adam hanging an abstract painting sideways in a gallery to see if any one notices, so that even if this does not feel like a film remotely interested in parodying the art world, they have the wherewithal to at least mock it time to time.

Before anyone asks, there have been artists who have used human blood in real life, one Vincent Castiglia eerily, to the point of clenching my arm in pain researching his work, turning this from a shock value concept to legitimate art with incredible preciseness, not merely drenching scenes from a surreal magazine or a cool horror novel cover as Adam does here in raspberry jam. Here, with Adam turning his pop art into blood baths, you see how arduous (and gruesome) it would be to try to use one's blood like a mad man, as he tries his own for a large canvas. Already on the edge, Gordon Oas-Heim the MVP with his unhinged manner, his relationship with his girlfriend turns sour, and his need to impress an art critic, one who criticised his work, pushes him over the edge.

Two Thousand Maniacs was good; it was a transition to more structured storytelling with a still-striking theme of the ghosts of the American South against the North. Here however is where my appreciation of Lewis will kick in onwards. His work is kitsch but the greater factor is his ability to wrung out entertainment to of a good sort, his eccentric filmography with films like this full of little touches of wryness and weirdness that improve vastly over Blood Feast. As much as I love that film's minimalist score, the jazz score here is exceptional, and whilst the delirium in his cinema would grow further from her, the humour thankfully makes itself welcome.

Such as with those water bikes that are abruptly in Adam's possession. Literally, bicycles custom made to float on the water and travel along when peddled. They were the only thing I remember from that first viewing, but it is apt as, whether something the production had access to or flung onto the creators, they are an example of the idiosyncrasies you find in Lewis' films which add life to them, which will grow in his productions from here on. They are even used for a murder scene, of someone on one against Adam in a speedboat, so Lewis thankfully took advantage of these ridiculous props, which is a good sign for the future. Then there are the heterosexual couple, friends of the female lead April (Candi Conder), who dress as each other, a lovably whimsical duo who are never traumatised (baring by accidentally finding a corpse in the beach sand) and are among the many strange figures that have appeared in Lewis' filmgraphy who stand out.

Color Me Blood Red does drag in the final half, mainly when it tries to be a conventional horror film, which clashes against Lewis' common trope of a very low budget and only a few locations to work with, emphasising dialogue scenes as a result which do not work when he is trying to be traditionally story driven. He is more interesting when, if there is a reliance on script, on skewered pulp tropes, zingers in the dialogue and eccentric characters, and thankfully, when this is in the right headspace Color Me Blood Red feels proudly camp, a kitsch production but with a sense of not being mockable, instead with its tongue firmly pressed in its cheek. And this is a time, soon after, when Herschell Gordon Lewis would become stranger. Making Jimmy, The Boy Wonder (1966), one of his two children's films, and Something Weird (1967), which lives up to that title tenfold. Lewis would return to gore films, and make them gorier, but naturally, they got stranger as he went along too. So, for me, Color Me Blood Red was a delight to return to, not bored as I was expecting a conventionally slick horror film as that first time, but a deliberately goofy film which improved tenfold. That, and with the added virtue that, as a stepping stone, this film's best virtues would appear magnified soon after as Something Weird was only two years after and so forth.