Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema.

A guy I hadn’t yet covered at all to this point is Herschell Gordon Lewis. That’s a little bit of a surprise, isn’t it? This is B-Movie Enema. I’ve covered everything from Batman and Robin to a number of Russ Meyer films to freakin’ Bloodsucking Freaks. It would seem as though Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather of Gore, would have shown up here before now. But, no, this week’s review, 1970’s The Wizard of Gore is his first go around here on the site.

If I am being kind of honest, I’m not entirely sure where I would have entered into the Lewis filmography. Sure, there are several of his movies that are known for his distinctive style (or lack of typical cinematic ability). Naturally, this movie is probably his crowning achievement as being one of the quintessential independent horror films that gave rise to the horror exploitation era of the 70s. Beyond that, there are other movies that are well known for being directed by Lewis like 1963’s Blood Feast and 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs! While both of those films would have been good choices, they get talked about a lot. I suppose The Wizard of Gore has been too, but… eh. I had to choose something and this fit the criteria for this month of being women-in-peril and a 70s film. The last movie he made before a 30-year break from making films was 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls which was definitely in consideration for a review too.

So we’re going to get into The Wizard of Gore momentarily, but first, we should talk about Herschell Gordon Lewis. Lewis was born in Pittsburgh to Jewish parents. His father died when he was young and his mother remained unmarried for the rest of her life. Most of his formative years were spent in Chicago where he would eventually attend Northwestern University to get degrees in Journalism. However, he was drawn to entertainment and media in other ways. First, he went to Racine, Wisconsin to take a managerial job at WRJN radio. Later, he became a director for Oklahoma City television station WKY-TV (which is now KFOR-TV). In the 50s, Lewis began directing commercials.

By the end of the decade, he was producing films. The first film he was ever involved in was 1959’s The Prime Time. Get this… The year is 1959. That film was produced and shot in Chicago. Seems pretty common right? It sure as hell would be over the better part of the last 50 years, but in 1959 it was the first time a film was made in Chicago since the silent era… The late 1910s to be exact. From that point forward, Lewis would direct pretty much everything he ever did with film. Early on, he worked a lot in the nudie cuties subgenre of semi-documentary or sex comedy films.

Shortly after the nudies started to become slightly less popular, he pivoted to horror with his friend and co-producer, David F. Friedman. That’s when he made Blood Feast. This opened Lewis and Friedman up to securing screens at drive-in theaters and Lewis would go on to exploitation superstardom. Lewis would continue to mostly make horror films, but he also started making a few films here and there about other topics that appealed to the drive-in audiences. This included juvenile delinquency, wife swapping, and a movie about a music group.

Lewis was able to make all of his films thanks to being an extremely good businessman. He remained in advertising the whole time. He had a very successful firm in Chicago. He always kept budgets low and often worked with most of the same behind-the-scenes people and the same amateur actors. He’d even purchase the scraps of unfinished films and finish them himself to crank out another movie to sell to drive-ins to make a little extra cash. But after making The Gore Gore Girls, he decided to retire from filmmaking and focus on his marketing career and had a whole new career in the 80s as an author of books about copywriting and direct marketing and became known to insiders in the industry as one of the very best.

He came back for a few more movies in the 2000s before dying in 2016 at the ripe old age of 90 after a lifetime of success and notoriety in multiple fields.

The Wizard of Gore is the tale of Montag the Magnificent. Montag is a stage magician of sorts. He says he’s more of a “Master of Illusions” of sorts. He talks of stage magicians as tricksters who dazzle people and shatter their perception of what’s possible. He says that you see a magician, you wonder at his tricks, and then you go home, talk a little more about how cool it was, and finally go to bed to fall asleep and awaken once again in the real world.

He then questions his audience if what they are doing is real. Perhaps they are asleep in their beds dreaming of being at this auditorium and seeing his show. He ponders how people can’t say for certain they ever wake up. What if waking up is only the beginning of one long dream. Now, Montag does his first trick. He puts his head on the literal chopping block in a guillotine. He pulls the cord and the blade comes down, and his head rolls into the basket below it. People see the bloody neck stub ooze blood, but his arm reaches for the basket to have his head roll out onto the stage floor. He’s fine after all.

He continues performing various illusions for the audience. He begins talking about how torture and terror have always fascinated people. He says that television now gives people the opportunity to see violence and gore from afar. But tonight, on this stage, Montag will be sawing a woman in half… for real.

Oh sure, maybe this is something have seen too often in other magic shows. Perhaps this is old hat. But if it’s such a silly trick, why not have someone from the audience come up and volunteer? A woman comes on stage from the audience and is placed into a hypnotic trance. She’s then shackled to a table where Montag uses a chainsaw to saw her in half. He tells the audience this is no mere hand saw and cheap wooden box like the days of old. Nothing will be concealed from their view. His stagehands even bring out a piece of wood for him to demonstrate that his chainsaw is, indeed, real.

In front of the audience, he lowers the chainsaw onto the volunteer. She screams as blood and guts go everywhere. The audience does not seem to react at all, buying in totally that he is just showing them some sort of elaborate illusion. The girl’s face is covered in blood and Montag plays with her guts, but to the audience, she’s perfectly fine. He unshackles the girl and helps her off the table where she’s awoken from her trance, perfectly fine and unharmed. The crowd goes wild and Montag bows and concludes his show.

Later, the woman who volunteered and was both seemingly sawed in half and not goes to a restaurant. She is acting weird as the host asks how many will be dining before showing her to a table. She is looking over the menu when suddenly another woman in the restaurant begins screaming. Why is she screaming? Because the volunteer girl is now slumping toward the floor with her guts all hanging out as if she’s been chainsawed in half.

Two of the audience members, Jack and Sherry debate the entertainment they saw. Sherry was thoroughly entertained by the show. Jack thinks it’s all smoke and mirrors. Sherry doesn’t disagree. What they saw was a trick. It’s the point of going to see an illusionist. It’s just that she hadn’t seen tricks like he did before. As they continue to debate, they walk near the entrance of the restaurant where the girl died earlier to see all the commotion but they don’t realize the woman being taken away is the girl they saw being sawed in half.

Sherry is a TV hostess of an entertainment show. She presents a story about Montag. She plans to invite him onto her show in hopes of learning some of the secrets of his show. Sherry goes to Montag’s dressing room where he refuses to give interviews. She tries to sweeten the deal to have him on her show by saying that not only will he sell tickets for months with a little exposure, but she could probably even get him a spot on the evening show on the network if he played nice. He flatly refuses any interview or TV show appearance. He’s rather rude and contentious about it too. He more or less tells her to get lost.

Something somewhat interesting and clever happens here. The night before, when Jack and Sherry tried to get a view of what happened at the restaurant, the woman’s bloodied hand brushed against Sherry which sickened her (until Jack offered to take her home, make her a martini, and then I think basically ravish her body to his liking). The next morning, on her show, she likened what she experienced while watching Montag’s show to what it was like watching The Wolf Man in her hometown theater in Kansas City. When she is leaving Montag’s dressing room after basically being tossed out, he takes her hand and looks at it and sees the blood appear on her hand. That’s like the old legend of the werewolf being able to see the pentagram on his future victims’ hands marking them for death.

While this movie is very poorly shot, written, and acted, it’s not without some cleverness showing that there is some appreciation for the horrors of old.

Seeing the bloody smear, Montag changes his mind. He says he’s been too hasty. He says maybe she’s been too hasty about her original assessment of his show. So, he invites her to return to tonight’s show where a NEW illusion will be performed. He tells her he will leave tickets at the box office for her and a companion and escorts her to the door of his dressing room telling her that he is very much looking forward to seeing her tonight.

Later, in a nightmarish vision, Montag levitates a casket out of its grave. Inside, we find the same woman who died at the restaurant. He carries her body away from the cemetery. Elsewhere, Sherry tries to convince Jack to go with her to the show to see the new illusion. This scene is kind of insane. The guy playing Jack, Wayne Ratay, constantly yells and kind of talks down to Sherry about her fascination with Montag. He does NOT want to go to the show after what he saw the night before. He’s uninterested in all this. But he’s so negative and the way he talks to Sherry is pretty shitty all things considered. They barely agree on anything that we’ve seen to this point. He, like Ray Sager playing Montag, never says anything in a normal tone. They both YELL EVERYTHING! Jack finally agrees to accompany Sherry to the show but he does so in a way that comes across as begrudging and really put out to do so.

This movie is insanely poorly made. But, here’s the thing… The movie is also fascinating to watch. I’d go so far as to say this movie is made and acted worse than some of the infamous Ed Wood movies of the 50s and 60s, but I’ll be goddamned if this movie isn’t incredibly watchable. It’s likely due to two things… First, the movie is so wildly bonkers in the performances and the dialogue and, second, there’s a lot of great, surreal imagery in this movie. Montag’s whole performance is kind of wild with how he’s literally cutting someone up, but no one sees it and everything seems to be fine until the victim leaves. The sequence in which he raises the coffin out of its grave is shot with this red filter that comes off nightmarish. It’s interesting in the crazy edits and the visuals. That’s why this movie is, and should continue to be, celebrated.

Much of Montag’s show is the same, much to Jack’s angry dismay (seriously Jack and Sherry should break up immediately). However, when Montag gets to the big finale of his show, he goes through the whole schtick about watching violence and butchery, but this time he will drive a spike through the brain of a female audience member. He asks for a volunteer, but it takes a bit to convince someone to come onto the stage, but Montag gestures out into the audience and a man jumps to his feet, and pulls the girl next to him to her feet where she then is caught in Montag’s spell and she goes on stage to get her head spiked by the illusionist.

He then asks a man to come onto the stage to inspect the metal rail spike. Jack volunteers to inspect it and agrees it is solid and clearly the real deal. He then is asked to pound the spike into a piece of wood with a hammer to prove it is metal. Satisfied, the audience watches as Montag pounds the spike into the woman’s head. She screams, spits blood out of her mouth and he pulls her brain out of her skull. But it also looks like the spike is going into her head to the audience but without all the blood and gore.

If pounding a spike into the girl’s head isn’t enough, nor the blood coming out of her mouth, nor the pulling her brain out and playing with it, Herschell Gordon Lewis goes after Lucio Fulci’s heart by having him yank the girl’s eyeballs out of her head. But, alas, he pulls the spike out of her head, frees the girl and she goes back to the audience to much uproarious applause from the audience. The girl is still acting strange like… she just had a spike driven into her head. She walks away in a trance with the rest of the audience while Sherry and Jack visit Montag backstage.

Montag talks about how what they saw was merely a trick that harmed no one at all. That’s when Jack lays the heavy shit on everyone that he read the paper just before going to pick Sherry up for tonight’s performance. The girl from last night’s show was found dead in a restaurant where she was sawed in half. Maybe the show isn’t hurting anyone, Jack thinks, but certainly, someone might be taking notes from Montag’s grotesque ideas and performing them for real after following the volunteers after his shows conclude. Sherry sticks up for Montag saying that he could have been watching a movie at home and decided to go kill someone. Montag says he would feel quite guilty if what Jack said is true. Jack relents and says she’s right… It’s not like Montag’s show can really convince anyone to do anything like that.

Montag tells Sherry that he’s reconsidered her offer, but still refuses an interview. Instead, he says he would like to perform a special illusion for her show as long as he has the proper space and technical assistance. She agrees. He invites the couple back for the following performance the next night. Jack drives Sherry home and bemoans another Montag performance. He flat refuses to go but Sherry says if they don’t go to his show, he won’t do her show. She outsmarts Jack when he wants to “talk it over more” upstairs at her place. She says not tonight and that tomorrow, he can come all up in there after the show. Jack’s desire to get his dick wet wins out and he agrees to go to another show.

The next day, the news hits that a second brutal killing in the city has happened. Jack, who works for the paper that broke the story, calls the guy who wrote the story. He finds out the pictures weren’t usable for the paper, but he’ll let Jack take a look. The girl’s head was pierced through the ears and it was certainly a bloody mess. Montag goes to the morgue to find the girl and, with his mind powers, makes the morgue’s attendant’s nose bleed as he stands frozen. Montag retrieves the girl’s body and returns to the cemetery where he places the girl into a mausoleum like he did with the other victim.

Jack continues investigating the second murder. He tells his writer buddy that the first girl was killed the same way Montag did his trick. There’s a psycho who gets off on the tricks Montag does and follows them to commit the same act of violence portrayed on stage. He can’t tell if this is the same girl from the second show until he can get a better picture from the paper.

At the following show, a similar scenario happens as the night before. No one agrees to volunteer to have their body pierced by a punch press. But he finds someone in the audience that he hypnotizes to pull his girlfriend out of her seat. Once standing, the girl is caught in a trance and goes on stage. This time, we see the boyfriend come to his senses and try to figure out what happened.

The interesting thing about this movie is that it’s incredibly repetitious. Montag has a show where he has a super gory trick that deals with some sort of awful thing that will happen to an audience member. He asks for a volunteer, gets one, hypnotizes her, then asks a guy in the audience or his stagehands to test the instrument of the girl’s ultimate demise, plays with the girl’s guts, and finally retrieves her body to dump her into some strange mausoleum. Rinse, repeat, do it again. It’s not just that stuff is repeated in the movie, but it’s painstakingly repeated. We see every single moment of each step of the process. This includes the girl being placed on the slab and restrained. The only thing that ever changes is the method the final grotesque trick will use. It’s actually kind of wild how the movie continues to be watchable as the movie continues to do the same thing over and over.

I have a series of theories as to why that has been the case. First, the movie is so amateurishly made that you kind of want to see how someone will overact their lines or say something completely and totally incongruous with how they should react or speak. Second, the practical effects of the gory illusions are really kind of neat. It’s so over the top with how messy and gross it is from guts spilling out, eyeballs being yanked out, etc. It’s not especially gross, but it’s effective to give you a little tickle. You chuckle to yourself a bit that it’s clear they just bought a bunch of chicken breasts at the store and put it into a plaster cast of a woman’s very shapely midsection to have our lead character play around with. (In truth it was animal guts, mortician’s wax, and condoms filled with blood but still…)

Thirdly, though… This movie cooks. The repetition doesn’t get boring. The movie never drags. This is a movie that, somehow, comes in at roughly 95 minutes in an era where a movie like this shouldn’t be longer than 80. Yet because we find ourselves invested in the practical effects or the bad acting, the movie just plows through that time at a really nice clip.

Jack and Sherry talk about the victims. She doesn’t think it’s Montag himself because the first girl was being killed at the same time Montag was taking his bows on stage and they were with Montag when the second girl was being discovered. Plus, this time, who is going to chase a girl around the streets while trying to lug around a punch press to kill her? Anyway, that night, the third girl is found in her bed with her guts ripped open.

Jack’s friend calls him while he and Sherry are getting their sex on to learn a third girl was found with similar wounds as the volunteer. He and Sherry go and talk to the cops to identify the women as being the ones who Montag had on stage. The cops say they want to keep this quiet. They will go and watch a performance, then follow the featured volunteer, and see if they can find themselves a killer. It’s about all they can do. There’s been no murder weapon found on the scene nor anything other than the bodies in the states they are in when discovered. It’s proving to be a difficult crime to solve.

In a break from tradition for this movie, we come into Montag’s next performance with not only two volunteers, but we didn’t see them get selected nor do we really know what it is that they are tied up to do. After checking the girls’ binds, he reveals the girls will be swallowing swords. He says the only danger that will be faced in swallowing swords is the swallower mustn’t wiggle about or it will disturb their digestive tract. Sure enough, Montag crams the swords down the women’s throats. We see them get pretty good and bloody while the audience sees a normal ol’ sword-swallowing act. Even the detectives working the murder cases don’t see anything out of the ordinary.

The show ends, and the detectives follow the two girls. One girl walks home while the other drives home. The cops follow but eventually find the girls have died from internal injuries. It would be impossible for anyone to have also followed and killed them. The cops come up with an idea… Montag is scheduled to appear on Sherry’s show the following day. She would be the natural volunteer for whatever illusion he is planning. The cops are going to be there the whole time. Jack is concerned but Sherry says she’ll be fine and trust her. What could possibly go wrong?

On Sherry’s show, Montag talks about volunteers and how often people think they are planted stooges of the performer. He looks directly into the camera and says everyone will be volunteers and participate in the trick. He says, first, they must link their minds. He tells everyone watching to concentrate on placing their beings into his mind and he’ll place his mind into their beings. Everyone watching is suddenly hypnotized by Montag and all of them have blood on their hands.

The only person watching not hypnotized? Jack. He wasn’t watching the TV when Montag was speaking. With everyone watching the TV and at the studio under his spell, he begins his trick. Jack, realizing something is pretty wrong, decides he needs to get to the studio to put a stop to all this before everyone watching dies. That whole blood on the hand thing from earlier? It’s now appearing on everyone watching the show. I’m not entirely sure what the hell that is exactly other than as a way to link everyone together or mark people for death.

Anyway, at the studio, Montag has Sherry and the two detectives there to protect her to link hands with him and follow him to where his trick will now be performed. Basically, he’s going to burn all three of them alive. At the last moment, Jack rushes in and pushes Montag into the flames instead and he burns alive, breaking his link to everyone and saving Sherry’s life.

If you think this is the end of the movie, there’s one last weirdo thing that happens. After the hubbub, Sherry asked how Jack didn’t get hypnotized. He says that he always knew something strange happened at each show they went to. No one ever volunteered until he stared out into the audience. He asked Sherry if she ever felt weird whenever he did that. She says she did and he said that was his clue to not look at the TV when he was looking into the camera. While trying to figure out what exactly happened, Jack begins peeling his face off to reveal it was Montag in disguise. He says she’s been living in one long dream, as he said at the opening of the first show we saw at the beginning of the movie.

But wait! There’s more! He attacks Sherry and begins disembowling her. Thinking she’s been killed, she begins to laugh and say to him that he’s the one living in a dream world and that nothing he is perceiving is what it seems. She bids him to look into her eyes to see the past, the future, and she is just as powerful as he is at casting illusions. In fact, he is an illusion of hers.

As he begins to ponder what in the holy fuck she is saying to him, we go back to the opening monologue from Montag about illusions and dreams and Sherry leans over to Jack and tells him she thinks he’s nothing but a phony.

The Wizard of Gore is a curious movie. On one hand, it’s an incredibly poorly made movie. The acting is god awful. The framing is amateurish at best with a lot of headroom often given to the frame when it is not necessary. The dialog is about as bad as you can imagine.

Yet, as I said earlier, this movie is exceptionally watchable. While Lewis was disappointed with a lot of the practical gore effects, I think it’s effective and does the job for 1970. The poor quality of the movie’s production and actors makes it a fun movie to watch and probably should be on some people’s “bad movie night” lists to show to friends. None of the characters are particularly likable, especially Jack and Sherry, but Montag, for all his blustery line delivery, is fun to watch and to see how he’s gonna make a bloody mess out of some sexy lady.

While the movie is very poorly made and often framed horrifically with so much headroom you wouldn’t believe it, wouldn’t you know it? There’s not a single goddamn boom mic made visible by mistake at the top of any frame that I could see. That’s kind of amazing. But considering how everyone was acting as if they were playing to the back of every room on the planet, maybe they didn’t have overhead boom mics for this production. Eh… Either way, that’s one thing I can say positively about the production side of things.

Alright, it’s time to pack things up here. Tomorrow, the season finale of B-Movie Enema: The Series ends with this year’s Halloween special. Join me, Geoff Bob Buckle, and Nurse D the Mail Girl as we pour through the classic TV movie about a real-life tragedy, The Ghost of Flight 401. As we send one season off into the sunset and take a break before we move onto season six, we’ll help everyone remember that the enema will never die.

But that’s not the only celebration of Halloween that will be happening here. Oh no… We got a tradition to make good on. While The Wizard of Gore was the last regularly scheduled article for October, we need to do our Halloween Special review! Come back here on THURSDAY, October 31, 2024, for this year’s Halloween special – The Vampires Night Orgy. It’s early 70s Spanish horror goodness for our tricks and treats this year. Then, on the very next day, Friday, November 1, 2024, we go back to our regularly scheduled reviews with the 1985 drama Mesmerized starring Jodie Foster and John Lithgow!

I wonder if Montag the Magnificent has anything to do with the shenanigans in next week’s movie?