Jon Peters Reviews: “The Wizard of Gore”

The ‘Wizard of Gore’ is just an odd, off-beat, horror film. It mixes a sense of film noir with gore, a blend that makes the film watchable, if only to see what will come next. I can’t say it’s an under-rated gem that the studios didn’t know what to do with, but I feel like it plays better on DVD than it would have in the theaters.

The story has an underground reporter (Kip Pardue) leading an investigation on a wildly popular secret magic show in which participants is seemingly murdered on stage. This is, of course, a remake of Herschel Gordon Lewis semi-classic 1970 film (remember what Juno was watching with Jason Bateman?). The film is told in narration (one film noir aspect) and shown in flashback. Lewis’ film never had the plot to carry its neat idea and here I say they used too much plot. The basic premise is his investigation in what is Montag the Magician’s secret. Is he really killing these girls? Is it staged? How does he know what people are thinking?

Whenever the film explores this, it succeeds. Casting the weird Crispin Glover is nearly ideal. He steals each scene he is involved with; he could be hamming it up, but there’s just something explosive in his deliver of lines and the way he forces your attention on him. It’s a small role as he probably only has 20 minutes worth of screen time and I think his character was explained to ambiguously. I have always enjoyed Glover from his great work in the wildly unseen ‘Willard’ to of course, stuff like ‘Wild at Heart’, ‘Back to the Future’, and ‘Friday the 13th: Part IV’ and here I can add another standout performance. He’s a great oddball villain, perhaps the best reason to at least give the film a rent.

The story mostly focuses on Edmund, the reporter and his relationship with Dr. Chong (Brad Dourif). Dr. Chong is an acupuncturist whom treats Edmund, despite warnings on Montag. After seeing Montag a few times, Edmund is unable to distinguish reality from what he thinks is reality. The film plays this with some visual gusto, displacing the girls Montag uses from his stage show to a possible ‘Are they really dead?’ scenario. The film gets overly complicated with this and unable to actually state what’s going on. It doesn’t help that the film is shot in very low light and in soft focus. While it starts to have the feeling that it’s a dream, it never gels together. Visually exploring madness is a hard concept to do and I give credit to director Jeremy Kasten for trying-hard. These scenes do slow the pacing down, but he knows when to give the film some energy, because Montag pops up just in time. The death scenes are wildly fun and gory and having the Suicide Girls as Montag’s muses is added eye candy.

For its low key demeanor, the film didn’t get a wide release theatrically but that’s really okay. The film probably plays better at home. For the reasons of over-plotting, it never really gelled together, but I still enjoyed the film a lot. It had some neat ideas, gore, and Crispin Glover and that is a-okay with me.