Movie Review: The Wizard of Gore (1970)

Michele, meet Herschell Gordon Lewis. Hersch, meet Michele. I think we'll be seeing each other again very soon. However, if you were planning to shock or unsettle me with The Wizard of Gore, you kinda failed a little bit, dude. I had an absolute  ball watching this movie, because while eyeball-squishing and other things of that nature in a movie would usually make me squirm and freak me out, this one had me laughing my ass off at pretty much every scene.

Montag the Magnificent is a great magician who is able to saw girls in half and shove swords down their throats and never harm them in the least. That is, until the volunteers leave the theater and suddenly drop dead in the same method as the trick they were involved in. A local television host and her boyfriend catch on to what is happening after Montag's shows and try to put a stop to it all.

As is so often with the case with low-budget horror movies, The Wizard of Gore is one where you really can't spend all your time watching it nitpicking about how shitty it is. Because it is shitty. I'm just going to be honest: The Wizard of Gore is in many ways technically a really bad movie. But I'm well used to that kind of thing by now so I didn't care and I just went with it. So glad I did, too, because it made it so easy to enjoy the hell out of this thing.

So it's a little confusing trying to figure out what is going on with Montag's tricks at the beginning. The first trick he does is sawing a woman in half with a chain saw. There's no box or anything over her, he just saws right through her stomach. The weird thing is when how the scene keeps cutting from her being all bloody with her guts hanging out to her being perfectly fine. Once I realized, though, that the audience was not completely freaking out like they should have been at seeing Montag play around with her intestines, I figured out that what they were seeing was the bloodless version of the act. Montag hypnotizes the volunteers and the rest of the audience so that don't see what he's actually doing up there. I guess the bloody version that we get to see is just Montag having his fun.

The only big thing that there really is to talk about with this movie is the gore. Don't get your hopes up too much about the acting because you will be very, very disappointed in that regard. The only real passable actor that I found here was the woman playing Sherry, and the worst out of the whole bunch was her boyfriend Jack, who has more than a few moments of downright douchebaggery with his horrible line deliveries. But I digress. The name of the game here is of course gore, as the title tells us, and with all the things I'd been hearing about Lewis's famous gore over the years, I was excited to see what he had to offer me.

Like I said before, though the gore and violence is very over-the-top and bloody and has eyeballs being squished and brains pulled out of heads, it's all really hilarious shit. Should I have been disturbed by some of the stuff I was seeing? Probably. But when you watch somebody stick their fingers into the eye sockets of something that is VERY obviously a doll head, how can you take that even remotely seriously? The only really well done effect I saw out of the whole movie was the girl who was impaled in the stomach by the punch press. Lots of bright red blood and slimy guts were there for sure, but the way she was squirming around with the thing in her stomach was actually pretty awesome. 

The funniest part is probably when Montag is about to perform his biggest trick to date on Sherry's daytime TV show. He's going to light them all on fire and apparently nobody has any problem with either him doing that or doing it in the middle of a TV studio. Anyway. Montag's also hypnotized everybody in the studio and everybody watching at home, but Jack manages to avoid this and goes to the studio to rescue his girlfriend. Montag ends up in the fire himself and we get to see his head get burnt to a crisp. Everybody standing around, again, doesn't seem to have any problem with this. "His power must have died with him. Hm." There is a freaking corpse burning in a fire. Must just be the same old shit with these people or something.

The ending also had me laughing at the silliness of it all but I still didn't care by then. Sherry was also an "illusionist" of some kind and now she's fucking with Montag? Sure! I'm with you. The Wizard of Gore is without a doubt a fun splatter movie that is kind of exploitation, minus the boobs. The gore makes for some excellent gags that are probably not supposed to be as funny as I found them, but that's just how I am sometimes. The acting and directing quality is... below par, to be nice, however it's something that is easy to overlook when you're dealing with all the other ridiculousness.