The Wizard Of Gore

They say that if you don't know history that you're doomed to repeat it and if that's true I think there needs to be a campaign to send the 1970 movie, The Wizard Of Gore to as many current day film-makers as we can! We certainly don't want this repeated.

Now, I'm sure to take a ton of heat about this, because The Wizard Of Gore is beloved as a classic gore movie by horror buffs the world over and, in a way, it should be. This Herschell Gordon Lewis movie is one of the very first gore movies ever made! Here's the plot, there's a magician, Montag, who's a bit of a hack, but in every performance he features some way of horrifically disemboweling a woman. After the trick, the woman appears fine only to turn up dead later that night from injuries that seem strangely like the injuries from Montag's illusion! This scenario is repeated a number of times, so that we get to see women killed in a multitude of ways (which is kind of the point of the whole movie). There's a loose plot here that has a TV reporter and her boyfriend trying to find the killer, which ultimately leads them to Montag and an unusual twist ending.

As a movie, this is pure exploitation, as a piece of movie history it's a bit more important. You see, in 1970 it really was unusual for gore to be on screen, and this has gore galore! Even if the blood is a bit too red and the effects are pretty primitive by today's standards, you can see that this probably shocked the pants off of audiences when it was released. You can, sort of, compare it to The Planet Of The Apes, to sci fi geeks this is a great movie, but when today's kids watch it, it seems archaic, The Wizard Of Gore is like that, archaic by today's standards, but without it, there probably wouldn't be a Jason or a Freddy!



So, I give this movie two and a half fully lit cigars, for historic value only, because if you haven't seen it, gird your loins, my friend, it's gonna be a long movie! So, until next we meet, when I'll call on all of you to boycott any Tom Cruise movies, at least until he frees Katie Holmes from her brain-washing, remember that the best movies are bad movies.