Herschell Gordon Lewis

(On Cable TV, March 2022) The job of a full-time film enthusiast is to watch everything, no matter personal preferences—after all, what if there’s something magical in an unpromising title? But there are times when this omnivorous drive becomes self-punishment, and Blood Feast certainly feels like a masochistic experience. An early work by the “godfather of gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis, it’s widely considered to be the first splatter horror film (i.e.: the first to show so much gore) and I’m not sure that’s a milestone worth recording in the grand book of human creativity. It’s a hard film to watch on many levels: never mind the brutal, blood-splattered murders and psychopathic protagonist: the film was made on a very low budget and every shortcut shows. Amateurish only begins to describe the slap-dash cinematography, special effects and acting talent on display here: Blood Feast is profoundly ugly, and that also applies to the contrived plotting in which the serial killer (and writer-director) feels compelled to butcher several people to assemble their organs for a ritual sacrifice. There’s some degree of bizarre comfort in the film being so low-budget that nothing feels real, but the ugliness lingers on despite the unconvincing visuals. Blood Feast is far more significant than good—it was the first horror movie to be this explicit, bridging the gap that would take cinema in a few years, from the artful shocks of 1950s horror to the cheap ultraviolence of 1970s slashers. It’s a milestone, but I’m glad I’ll never have to see it again.

(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.