The Screengrab : herschell gordon lewis

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964)

In John Waters’ book Shock Value, Herschell Gordon Lewis explains that he became the Godfather of Gore somewhat by accident after ordering too much stage blood for a movie called Living Venus. By spilling most of his surplus in 1963’s exploitation classic Blood Feast, Lewis was responsible for the birth of the splatter/torture porn genre: “It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement,” he admits to Waters, “but we were the first with that kind of nonsense.” Yet while Blood Feast is, in its way, historic, I don’t remember too much about it beyond Mal Arnold’s spooky performance as Fuad Ramses, the world’s worst caterer. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a de-tonguing at some point. I saw Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs around the same number of years ago, but for some reason the latter movie's vengeful but otherwise good-natured redneck killers are still vivid in my thoughts, partly because the movie’s theme song is so durn catchy, but mostly because its Down Home Brigadoon plot about ghostly Confederate citizens returning to life every hundred years to slaughter luckless Yankees haunts my thoughts every time my Northern ass crosses South of the Mason-Dixon Line (and, indeed, I’ve got my strategy all worked out if undead hillbillies ever stick me in their iron maiden-esque nail barrel and roll me down a hill)...though I’m still not entirely sure how Natalie Merchant figures into the equation.

TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (1971)

The Italian horror director Mario Bava is associated with the atmospheric diabolism and haunted crypts of such films as Black Sunday (1960), but with this contemporary murder mystery he, too, helped to create the slasher genre. This in itself is not the kind of accomplishment that gets you a Congressional Medal of Honor, but Bava's film (which is also known under the title Bay of Blood, among many others) shows just how stylish and entertaining a body count movie can be. It also demonstrates how impossibly convoluted the plot of a gory carny ride can get. But the sick joke ending is worth all the confusion experienced on the way there.

DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

Movies are a collaborative art. That's worth keeping in mind even with regard to movies that don't often get mentioned in the same breath as the "A"-word, such as this Roger Corman production, a cheeky, low-budget variation on the violent-sports-as-metaphor-for-a-disintegrating-society idea that was treated with bloated solemnity in the big-budget Rollerball. Much of the cheekiness comes from the director Paul Bartel, whose other films (Eating Raoul, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) showed him to be a man with an eccentric, campy wit. They also showed that he had a tendency to concentrate more on keeping himself amused on the set than delivering a movie that could actually hold someone's attention from beginning to end. Bartel thought that Corman ruined this sci-fi satire, about a futuristic, government-sponsored auto race in which the contestants rack up points for the number of people they run over, by filling it with reshot bloody inserts to make it more violent, but Corman apparently thought that Bartel's cut was too toothlessly whimsical for its intended audience. Given the track records of both men, Corman's viewpoint must be respected, but the fact is that Bartel's goofy sense of humor helps to account for this movie's standing as one of the more enduringly enjoyable products ever to roll off the Corman assembly line. It also captures David Carradine, who plays the star racer Frankenstein, in his charismatic B-movie star prime, and Sylvester Stallone, as his thuggish, clam sauce-smeared rival, in the closest thing he ever had to a prime.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

One of the most persistent fictions about grade-Z exploitation cheapies like this deranged Phil Tucker anti-classic is that they’re exciting. Sure, they may not be artsy like some fancy-pants European auteur crap, goes the argument, but at least they give you a lot of bang for your buck. Well, if you were foolish enough to pay a buck for Robot Monster, you would find it entirely bangless. For a story that involves a sinister alien menace – well, okay, a lumbering extra in a diving helmet and an ape suit – eradicating the entire human race except for one family, the movie contains exactly zero thrills and chills. Ro-Man spends around 43 minutes blundering around the San Fernando Valley chasing after a handful of people who don’t seem all that concerned with having to rebuild the human race, and puts the lie to the notion that these movies could at least do action right. So who cares? Well, you will, sort of. Robot Monster is one of those movies that manages to rise below its incompetence, coming across as so much worse than it has any right to be, even with its fifty-dollar budget: it clearly would have been awful with ten million to spend. Like the oeuvre of Ed Wood, its appeal comes not from being good on any level, but from being so bad that you can’t believe it was actually made. Once Ro-Man starts blabbering about the existential crisis he’s having for no particular reason after having killed three billion people, asking at what point on the graph must and cannot meet, you just shrug and let yourself go along for the ride. You sure as hell aren’t in the presence of greatness, but you’re in the presence of a sort of transcendent badness, and, well, that’s something.

PSYCHO (1960)

Psycho might seem to be an odd fit for a list like this, what with its being an acknowledged classic by a major Hollywood director. Obviously, it's very different from the run of exploitation films. Except that it's conceived as a choice specimen of the form, right down to its toes. Hitchcock was just coming off the lavish production North by Northwest, and the idea of doing a quick, down-and-dirty low budget movie must have appealed to him on a number of levels. But he had also been reading Variety and examining the box office returns of the new independent thriller producers such as William Castle and Roger Corman, and some perverse streak of vanity in him might have compelled him to show that, even though he'd become rich and world famous, he could still grab an audience by the short hairs as well as any punk with a Bolex. After he began to explore the idea of adapting Robert Bloch's novel about a killer based on Ed Gein, his studio, Paramount, helped point him in the right direction by refusing to make the movie because it judged the material to be "repulsive." So Hitchcock funded it through his own company and made it on the Universal lot using the regular crew from his TV series. Hitchcock had also used his TV show to develop a public image as a poker-faced ghoulish comedian, and when the movie was ready for market, he extended that role into a performance as a Castle-like showman, which enabled him to signal to his audience what kind of movie to expect while mostly avoiding spelling out plot points that would have killed the movie's surprises. The movie itself features details, such as the opening scene with Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging around their motel room in their underwear, that for audiences marked it as part of the exploitation genre, which served the dual purpose of making it seem more "modern" that Hitchcock's lavish, color, big-studio implausibilities and making viewers feel that they knew where they were, the better for Hitchcock to pull the rug out from under them. For Hitchcock, making his version of a cutthroat horror film on the (relative) cheap must have been a kind of intellectual experiment, like making a movie within the confines of a lifeboat or filming Rope in a series of continuous ten-minute shots. Hitchcock would later toy with the idea of making a movie in the streets with hand-held cameras, in imitation of the French New Wave, but instead, for the rest of his career he kept to his big-studio, big-budget methods, with mostly diminishing returns.

SEE! the psychedelic frenzy of Part One! FEEL! the erotic madness of Part Two! TOUCH! the tantalizing terror of Part Three! TASTE! the demonic broth of Part Four! SMELL! the far-out funk of Part Five!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Set Your DVR!: October 27 - November 3, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Halloween week means more vintage horror! TCM in particular is even exceeding their own high standards this week, shoehorning in a night of Billy Wilder on Tuesday (nothing is recommended because everything is fairly well-known) and a few film noir classics on Wednesday before cranking up the scary on Thursday. As always, let me know in comments if you see something I shouldn’t have missed!

Mon, Oct 27:

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. As I said last week, it’s not a great movie, but it has a few iconic scenes.

Tues, Oct 28:

5/6 am: The Invisible Man on AMC. Based on Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of race in America... whoops, that’s not right. No one’s ever made that movie. This is James Whale’s classic horror film starring Claude Rains.

6:45/7:45 am: Bride of Frankenstein on AMC. And this is James Whale’s frankenlady movie.

7/8 am: The Desperate Hours on TCM. Neat little thriller about convicts on the lam starring Humphrey Bogart.

11 pm/12 am: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Wed, Oct 29:

1/2 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat. Last time I’m going to mention it, in fact.

7/8 pm: Murder, My Sweet on TCM. Killer adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

10:45/11:45 pm: Out of the Past on TCM. Film noir classic with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also made three of the Val Lewton-produced no-budget horror films we’re recommending this week.

Thurs, Oct 30:

12:30/1:30 am: They Live By Night on TCM. Earlier movie based on the same source material as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, which is one of his most underappreciated movies.

3/4 am: House of Wax on CHILLER. Vincent Price’s classic. Note: You will not see Paris Hilton in this movie.

3:45/4:45 am: The Thing From Another World on TCM. Howard Hawks directing an early sci-fi/horror movie. The John Carpenter movie The Thing was a remake.

6:30/7:30 am: The Beast with Five Fingers on TCM. FIVE WHOLE FINGERS! YAAAAAARGH!

7:30/8:30 am: 8 Women on LOGO. Francois Ozon assembles every major French actress of our time for a half-musical/half-murder mystery.

8/9 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Jacques Tourneur doing horror on a Val Lewton production.

9:15/10:15 am: Curse of the Demon on TCM. Recut version of the horror film Night of the Demon. Directed by Jacques Tourneur applying what he has learned from doing horror on Val Lewton productions.

10:45/11:45 am: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 4/5 pm and on 11/31 at 4:10/5:10 am). I just keep recommending it!

5:30/6:30 pm: House of Usher on TCM. Roger Corman! Vincent Price! Edgar Allan Poe! You might be surprised to learn that this is a tender romantic comedy.

7/8 pm: Dead of Night on TCM. Creepy little horror anthology from Ealing Studios. And no Sir Alec Guinness to be found!

Fri, Oct 31:

A quick note: TCM owns Halloween programming. You can’t go wrong with anything they’re showing all day.

1/2 am: Kwaidan on TCM. A beloved Japanese horror anthology.

3:45/4:45: Spirits of the Dead on TCM. A triptych of short films from Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini (which of these names is not like the others?). I’ve never seen it, but the cast of Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp, and Alain Delon sounds promising.

6:30/7:30 am: Cat People on TCM. More Lewton & Tourneur!

7/8 am: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC. Still brilliant, still vile.

8/9 am: Freaks on TCM.

8:30/9:30 am: Halloween on AMC. Halloween? Hasn’t everyone seen this? I suspect that some people have forgotten how effective it is with almost no budget and no special effects.

9:15/10:15 am: The Devil Doll on TCM. How many ways can I say “creepy”? This one’s directed by the creator of Freaks, Tod Browning.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Body Snatcher on TCM. More Val Lewton! With Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi!

4/5 pm: Bedlam on TCM. And even more Val Lewton! This one’s with just Karloff.

7/8 pm: The Host on G4. Korean horror movie with great special effects and a cruel sense of humor.

Sat, Nov 1:

1/2 am: The Host on G4 (repeats at 11/12 am).

1:30/2:30 am: Blood Feast on TCM. Things start getting ugly overnight at TCM. This is a challenger to Plan 9 From Outer Space for the coveted Worst Movie Ever award. Highly recommended! Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, whom you can read more about in our very own Scott Von Doviak’s excellent book Hick Flicks, which is a perfect stocking-stuffer for the film geek in your family.

2:45/3:45 am: 2,000 Maniacs on TCM. A follow-up to Blood Feast. I understand that the name is misleading, as Lewis only had to budget for 1,986 maniacs.

3/4 am: The Blob on CHILLER (Repeat at 6:00 am/7:00 am). Steve McQueen in the no-budget flick that might just be a parable about the insidious effects of CREEPING COMMUNISM! BOOGA BOOGA! Starring Barack Obama’s tax policies as The Blob and Sarah Palin as the small-town mayor who knows how to stop it. If only the people will listen!

5:15/6:15 am: Forbidden Planet on TCM. Ah, the horror is starting to subside. What better way to recover than a movie that puts Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space?

7/8 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. One of the finest classic Westerns of all time. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, this is a standard issue wuxia film in terms of plot and progression, but with Kurosawa’s unerring eye behind the lens, there’s moments of stunning beauty to be found. Unreleased on DVD, and a must for Kurosawa fanatics.

9:30/10:30 am: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat at 2:45/3:45 pm). Richard Chamberlain’s most shocking role (in which discernible acting can be detected!) about apocalyptic aboriginal weirdness in Australia. Directed by Peter Weir.

Sun, Nov 2:

Happy birthday to my mom and my brother-in-law Jeff!

7/8 am: Solaris on IFC. This is the Tarkovsky original, not the Soderbergh remake. A deeply sad, meditative movie about love and self and Otherness. I’m being purposely vague, but this review is only two sentences, and this movie deserves much more than that.

8:30/9:30 am: Macbeth on TCM. Orson Welles’s Macbeth with the bad accents and great filmmaking.

5:35/6:35 pm: The New World on IFC. Terrence Malick’s film about how struggle defines all human relationships, despite the transcendental indifference of nature. Did I just write that? This is easily one of the best films of the last decade, so just watch it.

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat on 11/3 at 1:15/2:15 am). John Hillcoat’s Aussie Western written by Nick Cave. It wants to be a Peckinpah movie, but it’s not even a Boetticher. That’s not to say it’s worthless, but it bites off more than it can chew. Hillcoat’s the director of the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I hope is better than this.

9:45/10:45 pm: The Year of Living Dangerously on TCM. Remember when Mel Gibson could act? Good times. Oh, ok. This is most definitely not a good time. Directed by Peter Weir.

11 pm/12 am (11/3): True Stories on VH1CL (repeat on 11/3 at 7/8 pm). It’s not a good movie, but it’s fun. This is David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures. The Talking Heads songs aren’t their best, but they’re pretty good, and pretty good looks good from here.

Mon, Nov 3:

3/4 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER. Another Val Lewton production! Why is it on after Halloween? Apparently CHILLER has started the Halloween 2009 season early.

5:05/6:05 am: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music on IFC (repeat at 12:30/1:30 pm). Delightful documentary about the man with the golden ear who flawlessly recorded some of the greats of 20th century music.

10:05/11:05 am: The New World on IFC. Repeat.

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of quirk, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

Reviews by Request: The Wizard of Gore (1970, Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Peter Smith — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

[This piece is by Paul Clark, but his computer's down, so I'm posting it for him. — ed.]

Special thanks to reader Steve for requesting this week’s review. If you’d like to recommend a movie for the next installment of Reviews by Request, please read the procedures at the bottom of this review.

Unlike many film lovers I know, my cinematic education began fairly late. Sure, I’ve been watching them all my life, but I didn’t really get serious until I turned 17, and since I started reading movie reviews around the same time, I mostly tended to seek out the acknowledged classics. Throughout my college years, I would watch as many canonical titles as I could, and since then I’ve been working on trying to plug up the major gaps in my viewing- major titles by lesser-known filmmakers, lesser-known titles by major filmmakers, recommendations by friends and Screengrab readers, etc. Because of this, I’m pretty well versed in “quality” films, but much less so when it comes to exploitation favorites. I suppose this is as good an explanation as any of why The Wizard of Gore is my first Herschell Gordon Lewis film.

Now, all of you Lewis aficionados who are reading this (especially sleaze hound extraordinaire Steve, who requested this review) are probably wondering if I liked the movie. But while I did enjoy the film, it’s difficult for me to explain why, since The Wizard of Gore isn’t remotely good by any of the typical critical yardsticks. It doesn’t work as suspense, the plot is a non-starter, and Lewis isn’t director enough for it to be an effective horror movie. Heck, it doesn’t even have the saving grace of good performances or solid production values.

So the movie’s only remaining opportunity to work is to be schlock, and on those grounds it’s pretty successful. Practically the entire purpose of The Wizard of Gore is to gross out the audience with creative killings, and Lewis delivers on this front. The film’s title magician Montag the Magnificent (played by Ray Sager) is seen subjecting his onstage volunteers/victims to all sorts of depraved acts in the name of showmanship (especially twisted is the punch-press machine), which allows Lewis to show the resulting grue in loving close-up. By today’s standards, the gore isn’t remotely realistic- the blood’s too bright and the makeup effects are very latex-y looking. But I thought the lack of realism in the gore added to the old-fashioned entertainment value- Lewis is out less to horrify the audience than to disgust them, and it is pretty darn disgusting, but entertainingly so, especially when Montag leers at the camera while gleefully running his fingers through the crimson-colored entrails.

Another old-school aspect Lewis brings to the movie is his use of a narrative backbone that’s both bizarre and almost arbitrary to bridge the gaps between the gross-out scenes. In most movies of this sort nowadays, the filmmakers place a great deal of weight on their stories, expecting audiences to really care the characters and their personal dramas and demons. And while I respect any movie that actually pulls this off, most of the time this tactic backfires. Consequently, I find the half-assed filler material has a kind of charm. The story’s pretty much a meat-and-potatoes murder mystery, light on the potatoes, giving the movie a repetitive structure that would make formalists drool in ecstasy- gory magic show, aftermath, death, Montag stealing the bodies, investigation, lather, rinse, repeat. The perfunctory nature of these scenes feels like Lewis acknowledging that they’re primarily there to make the audience wait for the good stuff.

Then there’s the movie’s final reveal- obviously foreshadowed by Montag’s opening “is it all a dream?” monologue- which is brilliant in its sheer idiocy. Whereas most twist endings (even some of the bad ones) give audiences a chance to piece together how it all works, Lewis just drops this one on us and almost immediately ends the movie. Like most of The Wizard of Gore, it doesn’t really work in any conventional sense, but it’s sort of irresistible on its own terms. And while the film doesn’t reach the awful-awesome heights of Juan Piquer-Simon’s Pieces (for me, still the benchmark for blissfully bad schlock), it’s still a good time, and a worthwhile introduction for me to the now-intriguing career of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Want to recommend a movie for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Be the first to submit (via the comments section below) the name of a movie that meets all of the follow criteria: (1) it must be something I’ve never seen before, and (2) it must be available via Netflix. The first person to submit a title that meets these criteria will have his or her chosen movie reviewed two weeks from today. Please- only one recommendation per person. See you in two weeks!

Reviews by Request: The Wizard of Gore (1970, Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Peter Smith — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:26:00 GMT

Something Weird Video: "The End of an Era"

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Mike Vraney started Something Weird Video back in the late 1980s as a tiny videocassette concern devoted to keeping such grindhouse artifacts as Herschell Gordon Lewis's gore movies and "Chesty Morgan" vehicles alive for movie freaks, pop culture addicts, and other perverts. When DVD marginalized even the mainstream VHS market, Vraney had the choice of going to the trouble of transferring his then-vast back catalog to the new format or getting a new hobby. To his credit, Something Weird jumped in with both feet, embracing the digital age by making a redoubled effort to find the best available source materials and then jam-packing their home-video versions of such obscurities as The Girl from Rio with interviews, archival materials and other special features, as well as unearthing such neglected finds as Brian De Palma's first no-budget feature, Murder a la Mod, which was assumed to have been lost even by the director himself. If all this effort means that Something Weird became, in the words of Pop Matters blogger Bill Gibron, "the Criterion of Crap," well, just because the compliment may be a little back-handed doesn't mean it's not a compliment. If these films are going to be preserved and made available, here's to SWV for doing it with a level of inventiveness, passion and panache that the majors would do well to emulate. Unfortunately, Something Weird has now ended its association with the DVD distributor Image Entertainment. It's the latest setback for a company that had other problems, such as seeing the licensers of some of its prize titles capitalizing on the attention that SWV had won for them by lighting out for greener pastures, and if the company isn't dead yet, Gibron thinks it's "the end of an era." His full, heartfelt tribute to SWV's achievement can be read here. — Phil Nugent