The Wizard of Gore (1970)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) As someone who loathes gore movies, it makes no sense to watch something like The Wizard of Gore… except for historical interest, as the film often shows up as a minor reference in the history of splatter horror and remains one of writer-director Herschell Gordon Lewis’ better-known work. Like it or not (I don’t!), the increasingly gory nature of horror films throughout the 1970s owes a lot to Lewis’ taboo-breaking work throughout the 1960s. He was nowhere near mainstream moviemaking: his films are patched together using amateurish acting, threadbare production values and blunt narratives more concerned with shock than refinements. The Wizard of Gore is as low-budget as it’s possible to get. The gore effects are laughably, thankfully fake, taking the edge of a mean-spirited intent that seeks to gorily kill as many young women as possible. The stomach-churning nature of Lewis’ grand-guignol work, even half a century later, is made barely bearable by the stiff non-acting, visible cuts from human to puppet, and poor audiovisual quality. (I’d say that a modern, fully photorealistic equivalent to this would be unbearable, and the 2007 remake of the film partially proves me right, in that many of the more gruesome moments are deliberately obscured to make the film fit within an R rating.)  An incoherent, low-budget, exploitative production allows for some weird moments, though: you won’t be able to convince me that the deliriously weird final moments of the film are anything but patching up a production without the means to be conventionally good, but it’s still remarkably strange. I don’t like The Wizard of Gore, but I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would. On the other hand, I’m not volunteering to see any more of Lewis’ work for a long while.