merklekranz Being a fan of character actors Crispin Glover, Brad Dourif, and Jeffrey Combs, I sought out "Wizard of Gore". What a disappointment. All three are wasted as one dimensional characters in this cartoon-like boring, redundant, and ultimately pointless movie. The whole film is like a drug induced nightmare that makes no sense. Eventually things spiral out of control so badly, that you are only hoping the thing will end. This is not a pleasant viewing experience, and with Glover, Dourif, and Combs, wasted so badly, I can only recommend avoiding "The Wizard of Gore". You have been warned. Proceed at your own peril. - MERK

Wizard-8 The idea of remaking the classic 1970 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie "The Wizard of Gore" did have potential. But in its actual execution, this remake fails in just about every way you can think of. True, Crispin Glover does add a little life into his scenes, and the movie does boast some okay gore sequences. Other than those things, I can't think of anything positive to say about the movie. It's terribly shot, looking like it was photographed with a camcorder and with extremely bad lighting. (And just about every shot of the movie has the camera at an odd tilt.) The lead character is annoying and unsympathetic. And the story moves at a crawl, and often doesn't make that much sense. The movie is so bad at times that one could almost swear that the filmmakers were trying to do as bad a job as possible. Like when it comes to most remakes, stick with the original.

chaos-rampant I haven't seen the original HG Lewis film this is based on, but his reputation as a PT Barnum of basement-bargain schlock could not prepare me for this. It is actually a clever self-referential movie about horror, and I reckon we haven't had one that cuts as incisively in what it means to want to see beyond the pale since Peeping Tom.It's a simple idea, very smart; a magician who every night stages a different horror movie, but always the one we paid to see. He purports to offer us a glimpse of our insides, quite literally so, but of course we can wave it away as a trick of smoke and mirrors. The gruesome event is framed, thus obscured, reversed, in a smoke mirror.His victims, always females, he seems to select from a nearby stripping joint. The girls are again stripped naked for a paying audience. So the fantasy about the naked flesh is transferred from one place inside another, except now as meant to dispel the safety of illusions.All of this is being investigated by a guy who dresses up like a reporter or private dick from the 40's, he's into it for the scoop. He assembles together the plot that we see, doing the detective work for us like in a Philip Marlow film.It should have been really good by all accounts, the material is at least right. What appears the incomprehensible rumblings of a feverish mind - our reporter is under the grip of a powerful hallucinogen - makes sense if we understand what side of the mirror we're looking from.So of course the magician is the trick, the stage of illusions supplied by the mind. It vindicates the destructive impulses that we come to know he harbors in reality, allowing the unspeakable to be articulated as a show. However madly. It's all an essay on the machinations that take place inside from our position as horror viewers.What lets it down for me is first the haphazard technique, a lot of dutch angles for no reason - but which of course the filmmaker would justify as reflecting a skewed state of mind -, I can look past this, and second the desire to pursue clues right to the end in an effort to piece together for us 'what really happened'. Sooner or later this type of fictions must probe into the nature of abstractions, the film has its work already laid out with the stageshow, it's a perfect allusion to what we are watching from our end, the trick with smoke and mirrors, yet goes on to dangle a piece of string in our faces.So, in 20 words or less: imagine Naked Lunch re-assembled as a lengthy Masters of Horror episode - the murky colors, the hard lights and DV look - by a filmmaker with aspirations to articulate in feverish weirdness a little of what he has seen from Lynch or Greenaway.It may not look that way, but it's actually one of the more interesting straight-out horror films of the last 10 years.

Rodrigo Amaro "The Wizard of Gore" is a horror film with something like a film noir style but it has many gallons of fake blood, gore, violent scenes and a strange mystery. Here Kip Pardue plays Edmund Bigelow, a underground journalist thrilled for freaky and horrific things. One day he goes to the show of a strange and sinister magician called Montag the Magnificent (played by Crispin Glover). On stage performing to people of similar tastes like Edmund he presents the most frightening tricks ever played by a magician by selecting strippers to appear in disgusting, freaky and deadly numbers such as being sliced in parts, or being "cooked" in a strange stove and things like that. The audience is surprised with that, shocked but in the end Montag reveals that everything was a illusion. The show is a success but later Edmund discovers that all those girls were really killed with similar injuries to those performed in the illusionary show and here it starts his investigation on all those deaths and to find out who Montag really is.Since I've never heard that this was a remake of a film of the 1970's I think that it was a original plot, very surprising and thrilling most of the times. The mix between horror and film noir was interesting. Some of the investigation parts was confusing in some points much because the director wanted to recreate something closer to what films noir were (notice the look of the journalist, his voice over and of course the plot twist) but it was mixed with some strange visual effects (Pardue's delusional scenes). In terms of horror it was okay, incredible makeup effects but despite the blood and all the gore I didn't find it a scary movie (perhaps I'm too insensible or I didn't care much for the characters). Nothing was so shocking but for some viewers some of the things performed by Montag will be very haunting and disgusting. Crispin Glover was magnificent (no jokes with his character here), Pardue was okay and the movie delivers the good performances of Brad Dourif ("Child's Play"), Jeffrey Combs ("Re-Animator") and Bijou Phillips. Horror die-hard fans might find it boring or find nothing special about it but for those who enjoy different propositions and something more original in terms of story it's a great film to see. 8/10