Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Motompa Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Dalbert Pringle You know, if there ever was such a school as The College of Inept Film-Making, then I'd definitely say that the likes of Herschell Lewis (a real bargain-basement director) would certainly be its star pupil.With the exception of but a few priceless moments of unintentional hilarity, The Wizard of Gore was nothing but pure, cinematic ineptitude on all counts.From its laughably cheap gore, to a cast full of incompetent actors, to its completely throw-away story-line - This bottom-of-the-barrel horror movie (from 1970) was a real test of my patience.Like, Hello?... Was I really supposed to take this sh*t that director Lewis was dishing out to me seriously? Was I!?... 'Cause, believe me, with The Wizard of Gore, Lewis came across to me as being such a total buffoon-of-a-director that he made the likes of that bungling film-maker, Ed Wood, appear to be an absolute genius by comparison.

Mr_Ectoplasma "The Wizard of Gore," one of splatter pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis's later films, follows a local TV reporter and her boyfriend who become fascinated by a local magician, Montag the Magnificent, who horrifically mutilates women onstage; the magic is that his subjects inexplicably survive their ordeals, restored and unfettered. But when the women begin dying offstage, things get even weirder.Herschell Gordon Lewis is an acquired taste—his films have the late '60s aesthetic of a "Brady Bunch" episode, except they are excessively and elaborately gory. They are classic B-movies of a bygone era, one that is impossible to be recapture, and that is why fans still flock around films like "The Wizard of Gore" or "Two-Thousand Maniacs"—they are relics of the genre."The Wizard of Gore" has been touted as one of Lewis's most bizarre offerings, and it's understandable why people have said so. While there is a plot strung between the moments of grand guignol of blood spillage (rooted in hypnosis and journalism), what really is on display here is the elaborate, gross-out special effects. This in and of itself makes the film a bizarre viewing experience, as an audience mediated through an audience—the characters look on at the victims, and we look on at the victims while looking on through the characters. It's a strange dynamic, and the film plays with our tendencies toward fascination when it comes to freakshows, and moreover, violence.The effects themselves? They're at times disgusting, at others bizarrely edited, but the truth about them after all these years is that, in spite of their being aged in some respects, they're still visceral. It's hard not to wince as a woman is impaled by a steel pipe, and then is playfully eviscerated on a wooden slab in front of spectators. It is these gross-out moments that punctuate the film, and are what give it its singlehanded punch.Overall, "The Wizard of Gore" is a gory, macabre effort, and one of Lewis's more memorable films; it's also one of his most surreal. Some will dismiss it as cheap exploitation, which is fair, but it's also worth taking into consideration the film's phantasmagorical thematics and the ways it presents explicit violence to its audience. What are we watching? And why do we watch? 7/10.

Karl Self 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!

BA_Harrison A dreadfully repetitive script, coupled with an abysmal central performance from Ray Sager as the titular character (who delivers every last syllable of his many boring monologues in a drawn out manner guaranteed to irritate) make Herschell Gordon Lewis's The Wizard of Gore a real chore to sit through at times; however, several delightfully outrageous moments of cheesy Grand Guignol splatter and a jaw-droppingly daft ending thankfully prevent it from being a complete waste of time.Curvacious Judy Cler plays Sherry Carson, a TV talk show host who becomes intrigued by mysterious, mesmeric magician Montag the Magnificent (Sager), who uses his hypnotic powers to lure female volunteers to take part in incredible illusions in which they appear to be mutilated and killed on stage, but are finally revealed to be very much still alive.When these same volunteers are found murdered not long after the show is over, with wounds that match those inflicted by Montag during his act, Sherry's boyfriend, a sports reporter, becomes suspicious and alerts the authorities. But the police are unable to tie the grisly murders to the magician, and so Montag is free to continue his act, with his latest and deadliest performance to be broadcast live on Sherry's TV show...Montag's messy on stage antics—sawing a woman in half with a chainsaw, removing a girls brains after hammering a spike into her head, using a punch press to squish a lady, forcing swords into throats, and gouging out eyeballs—just about compensate for the terrible acting, poor editing, and a script that leaves so many unanswered questions that it even feels compelled to mention them all at the end. Unsurprisingly, Lewis is unable to deliver many satisfactory answers, and so opts instead for a WTF finalé that somehow transforms The Wizard of Gore from a gleeful slice of low-budget splatter into a totally whacked-out piece of existentialist horror cinema.Now that's what I call a trick!