Jeremy Kasten is a promising filmmaker whose genre flicks to date, while not without their own flaws, have stood out amidst the cornucopia of crap that dominates the DVD horror market. THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS and, in particular, last year’s bloody revisionist vampire movie THIRST displayed an intelligence and level of thematic depth to match Kasten’s strong sense of visual style. His remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ gore-fest THE WIZARD OF GORE takes the barebones of Lewis’ premise and fashions something completely different and considerably more interesting.
This redux is narrated in flashback in a noir-ish fashion by a nicely low key Kip Pardue, as a L.A. journalist who ventures with girlfriend Bijou Philips to see “Montag The Magnificent” (Crispin Glover) in a seedy back-street club. Pardue is stunned at Montag’s elaborate gruesome trick of appearing to rip open a girl’s chest live on stage and yank out her guts in an enthusiastic manner. Philips just thinks the guy is a misogynist creep. Repeat visits to Montag’s ever-more-grisly shenanigans appear to warp Pardue’s mind and bend his sense of reality, while the girls sacrificed on stage (who always appear alive and well after the trick) start showing up dead for real.
It’s refreshing to see a remake that takes a fresh and inventive slant on an existing property rather than merely being content, in this case, to reprise Lewis’ episodic splatter structure. Kasten’s take on WIZARD uses the Wizard of Gore character as a kind of catalytic backdrop for Pardue’s own descent into madness, turning the film into a riveting mindfuck with a disorientating, clever visual style to match the character’s psychological decline. Skewed camera angles, suitably gaudy set design and imaginative use of color add a cinematic dimension light years away from Lewis’ simplistic technique and helps create a hallucinatory feel. Added to this are a bunch of surrealistic dream set pieces, including a bloody cannibalistic sex scene featuring Pardue, his girlfriend and one of Montag’s female performers.
In contrast to Lewis’ lip smacking, close-up approach to on-screen splatter, this is startlingly sadistic rather than goofily gory. The graphic violence is judiciously shot for maximum impact rather than lingered on to a laughable degree : the first (disemboweling) sequence is partially obscured by stage smoke and odd angles, while a brief but harrowing shot of a barely alive female burn victim provides a genuine jolt. Only occasionally does the movie opt for in your face gore FX : a bravura animal trap beheading and a squishy climactic head crush are enjoyably OTT in a way that the rest of the grim, cleverly conveyed deaths are not.
In addition to lashings of the red stuff, this new WIZARD has plenty of solemn eye candy in the form of the “Suicide Girls”, a popular online community here cast as Montag’s doomed female assistants, who show off their tattooed, pierced naked bodies at various intervals. Also in the impressive cast are a relishably nutty Brad Dourif as an acupuncturist and a near-silent, not immediately recognizable Jeffrey Combs as a very hairy geek who introduces Montag’s acts by eating maggots and biting the heads off live rats.
Following eye-catching lead roles in recent horror outings like WILLARD (still underrated) and SIMON SAYS (made watchable entirely thanks to his presence), Crispin Glover does typically scene stealing work in a role once occupied by Ray Sager. Glover cuts a striking figure : sporting a permanently smarmy facial expression, 50’s hair, spotless beige suits, enormous cod pieces, a condescending attitude to his own audience (“cattle that will never escape from the herd”) and a tendency for loooooong vowels during his simultaneously camp and morbid monologues. His screen time is restricted, but whenever Glover is centre stage, this compelling revamp really hit’s the bulls eye.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
