The Wizard of Gore (2007)

Director:

Jeremy Kasten

Writer:

Zach Chassler (writer)

Genre:

Horror | Mystery

Tagline:

What are you afraid of?

Plot:

Montag the Magnificent (Glover) is a master illusionist who performs at underground venues, selecting female volunteers from his rave-like audiences...

Plot Keywords:

Stage | Disembowelment | Nudity | Female Nudity | Magician

Cast

  (Credited cast)

Kip Pardue	...	Edmund Bigelow
Bijou Phillips	...	Maggie
Crispin Glover	...	Montag the Magnificent
Jeffrey Combs	...	The Geek
Brad Dourif	...	Dr. Chong
Joshua John Miller	...	Jinky (as Joshua Miller)
Garz Chan	...	Annie
Tim Chiou	...	Chinese Mickey
Evan Seinfeld	...	Frank
Flux Suicide	...	Dell
Amina Munster	...	Cecelia
Cricket Suicide	...	Cayenne (as Cricket DeManuel)
Nixon Suicide	...	Rexina
Kenneth Moskow	...	Detective Packard
Shannon Hart Cleary	...	News Reporter (as Shannon Egem)

MPAA:

Rated R for bloody violence, sexuality/nudity and language.

Runtime:

94 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

USA:R | UK:18 | Singapore:M18 | Germany:18 | Australia:MA (2009)

Filming Locations:

Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Open Sky Entertainment

Quotes:

Montag the Magnificent: Ling Chi: Death by a thousand cuts. I will cut you piece by piece. I will open you up, then you can see I am not the magician. I am the trick. Like you, I am a prop to be used for this final trick. I will let out what the magician added to you, and once you are truly opened up, you can put the pieces together. In this world, there are two kinds of people: fools and visionaries. The fool sees the solution, the magician intends him to see. Which one are you? The fool or the visionary?
Edmund Bigelow: The visionary. Escaped visionary. Go ahead. Cut me more, because the more you cut, the more I bleed, and the more I bleed, the more you lose your hold on me.
[...]

Movie Connections:

References The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)

Abra-abracadabra, I wanna reach out and grab ya.

Remaking a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie should be a licence to have fun, fun, fun but it seems that nobody told director Jeremy Kasten that as he takes the elements of Lewis (known to his fans as "the godfather of gore") and does absolutely nothing that entertaining with them.

The story starts off simply enough; Kip Pardue plays a character who becomes obsessed by the performances of Montag The Magnificent (played with usual panache by Crispin Glover) but becomes more and more puzzled when corpses of young females start turning up sporting the same injuries they apparently escaped harmlessly from onstage during the gory magic shows.

Providing a mix of mild nudity and blood 'n' guts, this film doesn't work largely because it quickly falls into some strange navel-gazing mode when it should just let the insanity unfold with gleeful menace. I have sadly yet to see the original movie but cannot envision Lewis making such a ponderous film that tries to inject itself with pretension it simply does not have. Kasten may have succeeded with this blend of style/content when he made The Attic Expeditions but he doesn't get it right this time around.

Luckily, a decent cast helps things along immensely. Pardue is a bit blank, to be honest, but a barely-recognisable Jeffrey Coombs is fun, the afore-mentioned Mr Glover is fantastic, Brad Dourif is always welcome in a genre movie and The Suicide Girls have their fans out there. If you want to see how an H.G. Lewis should be remade then see the daft fun of 2001 Maniacs, not this one.

See this if you like: The Attic Expeditions AKA Horror In The Attic, Lord Of Illusions, The Wizard Of Gore.