37 years ago (there's a Kevin Smith joke in there somewhere...) H.G. Lewis brought bad movie fans and gore whores the explicit exploits of the mustachioed stage perpetrator of pulp-tacular prestidigitation known as Montag the Magnificent. Even if you're not a Lewis aficionado, Montag was still a great twisted little character in the annals of the exploitation realm. Right around the turn of the century, Jeremy Kasten brought bad movie lovers his own little slice of Heaven with The Attic Expeditions. In my review for Attic, I sang Kasten's praises that the man could manufacture something better than 80% of the other horror offerings of the time on a fraction of their budgets. I thought the man deserved more work and I couldn't wait to see what he'd bring us next. Since then he's offered up a pair of horror flicks, All Souls Day and The Thirst. Despite my prior claims of eagerly anticipating his follow-ups to Attic, I haven't bothered to see either... I'm just really fucking busy with this website shit and haven't had a chance to watch 'em yet... though sadly I've been told that I'm not missing out on much... Oh well, whatever the case we now finally have The Wizard of Gore! I've been waiting since as long as I can remember to finally get my hands on this flick! Keep in mind though that I have a disorder like that guy in Memento and my short-term memory is shot like one of Dick Cheney's hunting buddies.

Trust fund hipster Edmund “Scoop” Bigelow (Kip Pardue) is the publisher of an underground newspaper known as the Cacophony Gazette. I would likely buy copies of said paper, not because I'm into underground newspapers, but because I like the words “cacophony” and “gazette”. Scoop's also tricked out his apartment with nothing but old fashioned '50s technology, packed his wardrobe with old fashioned suits, and yet is into alternative healing methods, relying on an old white biker looking guy named Dr. Chong (Brad Renfro) to give him acupuncture and leech treatments... it'll make sense later. Eddie's latest big story starts a week before our movie does, as Mr. Big and his lady friend Maggie (Bijou Phillips) try to amuse themselves by killing some time at a Halloween party being held at one of those cozy two-story 'U' shaped motor lodges you always find in the west coast. Though each room at the motel holds 69 flavors of perversion that Baskin Robbins could never compete with, Ed and Mags find themselves bemused in one of those “the world is so pedestrian to people such as ourselves” yuppie a-hole attitudes. That is until someone dressed like a vagrant (or someone who is a vagrant) breaks up the monotony by giving them an invite to see a magic show starring some guy named Montag the Magnificent (Crispin Glover). Seeing as how the address for the venue is just around the corner, why not? Oh, you'll find out why not in the next 90 minutes or so...

The vagrant (Jeffrey Combs dressed up like Rob Zombie in his “Hellbilly Deluxe” days) is also Montag's opening act. Not one for comedy bits or song and dance, the guy's actually a Geek, meaning he's one of those guys who does the “Fear Factor” gross-out shtick for fun and profit. Tonight's meal? A handful of maggots and a live rat's head... “live” until he bites it off of course. Once Geeky's dinner theater is done and the crowd's been warmed up (by the stomach contents they just repainted their shoes with), that's the cue for the main attraction: Montag! Especially sweaty and decked out in the finest white suit you can find in the back of any Salvation Army, Monty proceeds to disembowel a topless member of the audience (some Suicide Girl who looks like Victoria Jackson's daughter) from behind a weird screen of mist. As the audience starts to panic, the houselights go out before revealing that the girl is fine if not a little confused as to why she's topless and Crispin Glover's fingerprints are all over her boobage. 'Tag soaks up the applause and even eternal skeptic Edmund can't help but be impressed. Mags is still pretty skeeved by the whole thing though, and has a bad feeling about this puffy-hair weirdo with the big fake smile. I'm more skeeved by his “seizure thrash” dancing from Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter myself.

Oddly enough, despite the show Montag puts on, Ed and Mags are the only repeat customers when they go back for more gut wrenching magic. Also odd, Eddie notices that the girls 'Tag picks out of the audience are all nudie punker chicks who dance at a local strip club our hero frequents called Jumbo's Clown Room. And when Ed tries to set up an interview with 'Tag? The Magnificent One shoots back little more than snarky comments and utter contempt. Meanwhile, no movie is complete without romantic turmoil, so Maggie starts to resent Ed for his continued support of Montag's little tour-de-misogyny. Or, as Ed puts it, she's all about free speech so long as it agrees with her parameters of taste. Meanwhile, Scoops also starts having gory nightmares about 'Tag's growing number of stage victims intertwined with dreams of sexing up Maggie and taking bites out of her. Sadly, because Bijou won't whip out her titties (at least not on this budget), that means Eddie can't even fantasize about her without her boring K-Mart underwear on. Blah.

Sure enough, the girls from Monty's productions start to turn up mutilated in the same fashion as they were executed on stage. Not only butchered, the girls (or what's left of them) also have high doses of a psychotropic blowfish toxin in their blood that's know to make people highly susceptible to suggestion... and with that I think I just figured out exactly where this is going, but I won't spoil it. The more Ed goes to the shows the deeper he gets involved with the murders and the less any of this makes sense. Not a surprise given the sodomizing our brains went through during The Attic Expeditions. Even when he brings in his pal Jinky from the local Coroner's office and Mag brings in a hidden cam to video one of Monty's performance pieces, shit just starts to make less and less sense. Is it all a dream? A hallucination? A well planned misdirection of the audience much like Montag himself does on stage? Who's the real killer here? Is there a killer? Is anybody here really dead? Is anybody here really real!? What's going on at Jumbo's Clown Room strip club? What's Ed keep huffing in his little paper bag? Is Dr. Chong involved? Are Montag and Edmund one and the same? What the Hell did I just watch!? Argh!

As you might've guessed per that last statement, WoG opts for a completely different path than it's predecessor. Instead of being a shot-for-pennies gorefest, Kasten and Chassler instead play with your head the whole time, building to one massive “what the fuck!?” crescendo. If I didn't know better I'd think the guy at the sushi place slipped the wrong kind of fungus into my nori soup at lunch. I know I'm gonna draw some criticism from the purist out there for saying this, but Jeremy Kasten could be the new David Lynch if he sticks to trippy stuff like this. I applaud the redirection over a straight up remake. But, there's a reason that the movie didn't rate higher than it did, and I can't dish out a hot bowl of steaming praise without cooling it off with some ice cubes of criticism.

First, the gore wasn't flowing like Hi-C and the sluts weren't strutting around like Saigon turkey whores. The Suicide Girls provided the tits (and the occasional bush), but considering the stable of “talent” they have, they definitely could've picked some better cuts of beef to show off at this meat market. Sure they were there and they were naked (and some of them got felt up by either Glover or Pardue), but I didn't care. I want to see strip teasing and sexuality, not just hypnotized, dead-behind-the-eyes, and topless. Also, though I appreciate the change of theme, as far as the gore goes, in a movie that's remaking an H.G. Lewis flick it's kinda pointless not to give a little more focus to what was the only appeal of the originals: torn meat and viscera! Sure there's a disemboweling and Montag makes creative use of some beartraps in one scene, but using pixelized violence in a movie based on the works of the Godfather of Gore?! Blasphemy. I'm not even a big Lewis fan and even I know how wrong that is.

Speaking of artificial, a lot of the dialog in WoG feels awkward and unnatural. The fault isn't necessarily on the actors, but the writer who came up with such a wooden script for them to act through. Pardue works better when he's got flowing lines that just fall out of his mouth. Here it felt more like he was over annunciating things and he almost sounded like he was learning new vocabulary words at times. That's not to say that the actors aren't responsible for some of their own faults. For a man in his character's fucked up situation, Pardue had all the intensity of a hat rack in a lot of scenes. Bijou Phillips and her five-head gave us pretty much more of the same lackluster line-reading, while Josh Miller's not only one creepy dude to look at but he's also irritating to watch. Crispin Glover is okay. He's a bit less maniacal than what I was hoping for out of the new Montag though. I guess I understand toning down the insanity as far as trying to make the character's underlying sadism a little less apparent and a little more disarming when it comes out, but I was really hoping to see Crispin goin' all kinds of Joker crazy. Brad Dourif's character Dr. Chong was great, but again I think he could've been played much darker and more twisted. Unfortunately, if the outtakes on the DVD are any indicator, that's actually the fault of Kasten for asking Dourif to play up the cheese factor. As for Jeffrey Combs, though he plays a big part in the story, the man's lines could fill a cocktail napkin. It's almost a waste of Herbert West's talent. Shit, I would've loved seeing him crazy it up as Montag! But, Glover has much more mainstream cred, so I can see why he got the title role. Truth be told, I could've done with Crispy as Bigelow, Combs as Monty, and we could've dropped Pardue from the menu altogether. Oh well, it's done and what could have been will never be.

One last interesting note before I sign off on this, last week I had no idea who Kip Pardue was. For all I knew, he was just Kip Winger after marrying that Jim Perdue guy who's always fucking the chickens he sells. “Every Perdue product has a little bit of me inside it!”. Of course my theory was destroyed when I realized that the chicken guy's name is spelled differently and that Kip Winger is dead... or should be. Anyway, last week I watched Rules of Attraction for the first time and saw Pardue's brief stint as the pseudo-Euro trash hipster ass clown Victor. Sure enough, here he comes at me again as Bigelow not 6 days later. Pathways in my life make weird connections like that. Oh yeah, I also finally found out who Shannyn Sossamon was when I watched RoA last week too and sure enough Ragnarok does a Shortie review for Catacombs this week too. If James Van Der Beek or Ian Somerhalder turn up inexplicably in Tiger On the Beat when I review it this week, I'm eating hot coals and jumping in front of a subway train. Rock and roll.