The Wizard of Gore (1970)
I’ll openly admit to not being the biggest fan of Herschell Gordon Lewis in general but in his oeuvre, The Wizard of Gore is barely even a movie. Ray Sager stars as Montag the Magnificent, a bombastic magician with very obviously fake grey hair. The movie is primarily a series of Montag’s tricks where he brings a hypnotized woman onstage and brutally murders them then reveals that it was a trick, later the woman dies of the same thing she died of onstage. A TV personality becomes enamored with Montag’s work and sets about trying to find the secret to his show.
The acting is bad across the board but nobody gives a more stagey fake performance than Sager himself. The gore scenes basically just consist of laying actual meat covered in fake blood on the various victims and them screaming as Sager fiddles about with it for a few minutes. The ending is incomprehensible nonsense. This movie feels like a student film and even by Herschell Gordon Lewis’ standards this is a bad movie.
The Wizard of Gore (2007)
The 2007 remake of Wizard of Gore stars Crispin Glover as Montag the Magnificent, more of a hard-core post-punk version of the character than the traditional stage magician of the original. Glover appears to be doing about 60% of a Buddy Cole impersonation, adopting a weird effete stage persona. In truth he’s barely in this.
Our actual hero is Kip Pardue as Edmund Bigelow, a reporter (I think?) who dresses like Clark Kent in the Richard Donner Superman movies. Bigelow is invesitagting Montag and runs into a conspiracy involving blowfish toxin, a sketchy LA escort company, and all kinds of shady underworld dealings.
Is it a good remake?
I honestly can’t say. Yes? It’s certainly smart to flesh out the plot from the no explanation followed by pseudo-philosophical bullshit the original pulled and the conspiracy plot doesn’t not work. Crispin Glover should add a little production value but this is one of his worst performances. Joshua Miller and Brad Dourif do give this movie a little something to hold onto and a nigh-unrecognizable Jeffrey Combs makes you think wistfully of what could have been.
Does it stand on its own?
Not at all. Before anything else the movie is shot on that awful mid-2000s digital video where they hadn’t quite figured out how not to make the picture look blurry and cheap looking and there is not one single frame of this movie that’s not shot at a Dutch angle.
I feel it’s worth noting that this movie is partially a vehicle for The Suicide Girls. I’m not entirely certain which branch of the Suicide Girls organization was involved but needless to say the movie jumps at the excuse to show female nudity, it’s dense with pierced nipples and has a weirdly misogynist bent that it both faintly acknowledges and heavily embraces.
The movie seems to be trying to say something about misogyny and the press and violence and men but it could not be a more muddled mush of heady concepts handled clumsily. I suppose the fact that this movie had any ambitions beyond showcasing the Suicide Girls and letting Cripsin Glover be weird is admirable but this is not a good movie.
Watch, toss, or buy?
Toss it.