The Wizard of Gore

This might have been an excellent short. And it works wonderfully as a fetish movie if seeing young women getting tied up and mutilated is your cup of tea. As a feature movie it's just dire.

Unusually for a horror movie, it features a young professional woman in one of the leading roles -- and she doesn't even get raped and mutilated in the first five minutes for being a harlot! She investigates a magician who performs gory tricks in his show, with the same girls he performed his tricks on later dieing accordingly. This repeats itself no less than four times (if I counted correctly), each scene lasting maybe ten minutes and being as linear as train tracks in a desert, until her boyfriend muses: "All those girls who went on stage in the show died in the same manner later in the evening. Maybe there's a connection?". His girlfriend is so impressed by his cleverness that she proceeds to fornicate him out of gratitude -- and rightly so. It was the most intelligent moment of the entire movie.

I'm not asking for too much, am I, here? I just want to be entertained. For that, I'm willing to forfeit good taste, intelligent plot, competent acting at the door. In the Wizard Of Gore, though, Herschell Gordon Lewis reveals himself as a gore fetishist. The premise of blurring reality and imagination may be interesting, but it's never developed into a story. Fail!