Short Review: 'The Wizard of Gore' (2007)

As an exploitation emperor, Herschell Gordon Lewis undoubtedly reigns higher than most. In a time when low budget filmmakers working out of Florida were churning out product as often as they cashed their cheques the now effectively retired guerilla filmmaker along with trusty producing partner David F. Friedman fought tooth and nail to bring us some of the most gleefully gruesome flesh and bone masterpieces ever depicted (eg, Color Me Blood Red, The Gruesome Twosome, The Gore Gore Girls, ect), all the while infusing each one with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor as a counterbalance to the copious carnage.

With this in mind, director Jeremy Kasten’s decision to remake the former’s 1970 macabre showcase The Wizard of Gore could have been seen as either a smart move or an innately doomed venture. Unfortunately, the resulting product reflects not one but both outcomes in more or less equal measure.

Montag the Magnificent (Crispin Glover) is a master illusionist; a purveyor of the most grotesque yet breathtaking acts of human endurance ever to be witnessed by a live audience at an underground venue. After attending one of the flamboyant trickster’s live shows, private investigator Edmund (Kip Pardue) is convinced there’s more to the torture acts than meets the eye and begins his own inquiry into the magician’s mystifying lifestyle. When a number of Montag’s young nubile volunteer’s wind up dead the cocky P.I soon discovers that he may in fact be the key ingredient to the swindler’s greatest deception of all.

This 2007 revamp marks the second official retelling of a Lewis film (Tim Sullivan’s 2001 Maniacs being the first) and unlike the clear-cut direction of the original, Kasten and screenwriter Zach Chassler have taken the material into an unusually dense an ultimately unnecessarily convoluted realm that not only disrupts the otherwise enjoyable grand guignol spectacle but also negates any audience identification with the protagonist’s spiraling dilemma. Without giving too much away the script introduces a subplot early on regarding a specific hallucinogenic drug of which Montag employs unknowingly upon his audience as they enter his famed auditorium, the effect of which alters one’s perception of reality and, more specifically, Edmund’s unwilling involvement in the magician’s grand master plan. From this point in the story right through to the end nothing is ever really clear as we become subject to endless bewildering dialogue, photographic misdirection, ambiguous supporting characters and an overall frustratingly vague sense of narrative direction that one can’t help but allow their attention to wander off almost completely.

The confusing nature of the plot is a real shame because there’s a lot to like about The Wizard of Gore’s more baroque aspects. Crispin Glover is uniformly brilliant as the crazed showman, delivering an arguably quirkier embodiment of controlled insanity than Ray Sager’s somewhat stiff approach in the original and leading man Pardue does a surprisingly good job considering the fact his character’s constant neck twitching takes up ninety-percent of the film’s sound design. The level of production value achieved is also admirable and can be seen through the slick cinematography, plentiful costume design and top-notch FX work (bar a few cringe-worthy CG implementations), all of which serve the movie’s joyful sense of twisted extravagance.

Regrettably though, the few positive attributes that do occasionally assist The Wizard of Gore toward its cause are not nearly prominent enough to patch up the unwavering disorder of its story and it is precisely this fatal flaw that prevents it from being the 40’s noir/carnival freak show homage it so clearly wants to be. One can only wonder why the filmmakers opted for such an unnecessarily meandering method of delivery, especially when taking into account the comparably simplistic setup of the original. If anything, such a misconception only highlights the falsehood of the otherwise entertaining magic on display.



Dir: Jeremy Kasten
Writer: Zach Chassler
Cast: Kip Pardue, Bijou Phillips, Crispin Glover, Brad Dourif, Jeffery Combs
Country: USA
Run Time: 94mins
Rating: R18+