You finally reach the edge of town. Cobbled streets give way to trodden dirt and ahead, a wall of green, a forest, with an opening like a gothic archway of viridian leads into darkness.
At the edge of the wood, there has been a massacre. The stumps of trees fill the space, like islands in a sea of muddy ground. You look closer, the earth has been trampled by the coming and going of many feet and the stumps themselves appear worn and smooth on top, smooth except for numbers carved into each one. The ground slopes down to the west and there beyond the rows of stumps, is a stone dais…this is an amphitheatre
A stout wooden table sits in the centre of the dais, dark wood with dark stains.
Looking down, a sheet of paper flaps against your foot. Picking it up you see it’s a flyer for some event.
Mittwoch the Magnificent!
Magic and Mayhem.
You won’t believe your eyes, if you still have them!
A magic show then, but promising something more than just the usual mundane tricks. The flyer has no date but looks fairly new, perhaps the show is still on, if not here then somewhere else on the island…is there anywhere else on the island? People weren’t clear on that.
You fold the flyer and slip it into your pocket with Steven’s map.
Taking one last look at the dais, you turn and stride towards the trees.
Today’s film is a bit more of an obscure one, at least outside of Horror fan circles. I love Horror, but I’d never heard of this film, perhaps shame on me, until I heard it mentioned on Cinemassacre. The Monster Madness series introduced me to many of the lesser known films in my collection and I’ll forever be grateful for that, even when it’s a film like this. Ominous? Perhaps.
The Wizard of Gore is a 1970 film, directed by, The Godfather of Gore, or at least one of them, Herschell Gordon Lewis. This is one of the later films in his initial run between 1961 and 1972 and follows the exploits of a rather intense Magician named Montag the Magnificent. Montag has an unusual show, it has the old clichés like sawing a woman in half, but he takes it up a notch and uses a chainsaw!
Like the film, the spoiler free section of this review will probably be somewhat confusing as I’ll mostly be wanting to type ‘But what the fuck was actually happening when…’ or ‘I don’t understand! I thought…’ etc… Basically the film is all sorts of weird and despite having watched it twice in the space of a month it didn’t really answer my questions.
Let’s get on to what we can talk about. The film is gory, very gory. Real animal offal is used in the gruesome death scenes and performances, though despite the use of real gore, I’d be lying if I said it looked real…does that make sense? It looks like what it is, people with animal guts on them, there are some fun prosthetics and fake body parts used in close ups, though again they’re obviously fake. So despite all of the blood and guts this, probably, isn’t going to make you cringe or look away in the way the Saw or Hostel films might do, I mostly found myself laughing at it, though maybe that’s just me.
Because we’re still in the spoiler free section I can’t go into too much detail regarding the plot but essentially Montag is doing his shows and selecting ‘volunteers’ and these same people are turning up dead shortly afterwards and it’s really a bit of a who done it mystery, which I actually found pretty compelling, at least until the end sequence. I really did wonder what was really going on behind the mysterious deaths, as I hinted earlier this really doesn’t pay off in the end, if you’re looking for a film which pays off in the end, this will disappoint.
On the theme of disappointing, the acting is awful, though hilariously so. The film’s main protagonist, talk show host Sherry Carson, played by Judy Cler puts in probably the best performance though it’s Ray Sager as Montag who steals the show. He’s so over the top and dramatic, which kind of works for a Magician, but he’s always at 200% even when off stage. Oh, special mention goes to the mortuary owner…just wait.
So it’s a badly acted, over the top gore film with a somewhat compelling plot but a disappointing ending, but is it worth watching? Well, I’m going to give this film the lowest score I’ve given any film so far, 2 bloody hands out of 5. It’s campy, it’s silly, but ultimately it isn’t fun, and a film like this really needs to be. If you do decide to watch it, do so with friends, it’s a film that requires lively debate and incredulity. It succeeds as a talking point where it fails as a film.
**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**
Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.
So my main question with this film is WTF IS HAPPENING?? We see Montag performing his magic tricks, such as chainsawing a girl in half and we keep cutting between a calm scene where he’s going about his business, everybody is watching intently and there’s little going on it seems, and super gory shots of guts everywhere and blood, and screaming, and then back to the calm shot again, and repeat. It seems clear that the audience aren’t seeing all of the viscera or hearing the screaming and are only seeing the ‘trick’ being performed. Are the bloody bits in Montag’s head, is he using magic to hide this part from the viewers?
Later we see the volunteer/victim seemingly succumb to the wounds they received in the show and now everybody can see it. The cast start to think a copycat killer is following the volunteers after the show and killing them in the same way as the tricks that were performed.
We know…do we? I’m honestly not sure. That it’s Montag who is killing these women with magic, or perhaps some form of mass hypnosis (That works on people who weren’t there? And keeps people alive who should be dead?). Honestly this is why I said it was compelling, I found myself really wanting to know how it worked, what was the trick? At the end it seems like perhaps this was all in Montag’s mind, the entire film, this makes the most sense I guess but the ending is equally strange and there’s even a false ending to confuse things further. Montag is killed and our two main protagonists enjoy a well deserved drink. But wait! Jack peels off his face to reveal that he is actually Montag! He goes to kill Sherry but then she laughs and tells him that everything that happened was actually HER illusion! She tells him he’ll have to start again and we go back to the start of the film.
So okay you say, Sherry explains it, it was an illusion of her making, but you know what, that’s bullshit! That’s a case of not knowing how to end the film, it’s similar to the classic ‘It was all a dream’ ending, and those are never satisfying! I was hoping for something clever, but then that was wishful thinking with a film like this. Ultimately it left me unsatisfied.
Moving away from the plot there were a few moments in the film which I did enjoy. I liked the creepy scenes in a graveyard where Montag retrieves the (Suddenly far less grisly) corpses of the victims and starts placing them one by one into a mausoleum, some creepy music plays and there’s a red filter over everything and the whole section plays out like an old gothic horror and is really the cinematographic highlight of the film, in fact if taken on its own the first of these scenes in particular would be a great creepy little short.
Speaking of the graveyard, I mentioned him earlier but the mortuary owner is hilarious. Apparently he’s the actual owner of the graveyard used in the film and he wanted to be in the film. There’s a scene where he’s in the morgue and Montag freezes him with his stare and he stands there with one arm in the air supposedly frozen but he’s swaying about and to be fair to him he’s kept in shot for a very long time for somebody trying to stand still, maybe his direction was to sway about, that’s entirely possible, I could be being too harsh on him, but it’s amusing none the less.
Other than that there’s little else I really want to mention. If you’re looking for a gore fest and you like some 70’s exploitation then you might enjoy it. I myself didn’t hate it, I gave it a 2 out of 5 but it maybe creeps towards so bad it’s good, but doesn’t quite make it. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s slightly later The Gore Gore Girls was a more enjoyable one for me because it wasn’t trying to be serious, the only humour in this feels unintentional.
Now, go back to the beginning…
Summerisle 