Cast:
Gordon Oas-Heim (Adam Sorg), Candi Conder (April Carter), Iris Marshall (Mrs. Carter), Elyn Warner (Gigi), Scott H. Hall (Mr. Farnsworth), William Harris (Gregorovich), Jerome Eden (Rolf), Pat Finn-Lee (Sydney), and Jim Jaekel (Jack) Written and Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis (#752 - Blood Feast, #756 - Monster A-Go-Go, #2122 - Two Thousand Maniacs!)
Review:
“Oh, just wild imagination. We had no artistic master, maybe the Grand Guignol in Paris. The notion was simply something that we felt might outrage without being obscene. That’s a very narrow line to walk. Even today, try to think of something that will outrage without being obscene. It’s difficult. So, gore was the natural solution to that.”
If you remember correctly, Herschell Gordon Lewis had directed his first two horror films with Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) with plenty of splatter to go around. With this film, it represented a change in seasons. Up until this point, he had made films in collaboration with producer David F. Friedman for his first twelve films as a filmmaker. However, it would be their last together due to issues involving their business partnership (apparently, at some point in time they were in a deal with Sid Reich and Stan Kohlberg that resulted in acrimony involving money). Some have apparently labeled the aforementioned Feast and Maniacs as part of a trilogy when it comes to blood and gore and the Friedman-Lewis partnership, and it should be noted that inklings of doing another film of "super blood and gore" were scrapped on the grounds that it might oversaturate the market. Friedman would continue to produce with exploitation films (most notably Ilsa: She wolf of the SS [1975]) for many years; he died in 2011 at the age of 87. Lewis kept going in his own brand of aiming for whatever market he felt like doing, which could involve taking time to "finish" incomplete crap like Monster a Go-Go (1965), children's movies like Jimmy, the Boy Wonder (1966) and a handful of further horror films with A Taste of Blood (1967), Something Weird (1967), The Gruesome Twosome (1967), The Wizard of Gore (1970), and The Gore Gore Girls (1972) before his first retirement.
Really, just watch A Bucket of Blood (1959) when it comes to artist-infused murder. I did not have high hopes for this film, but even watching this ended up with very middling results. You get the same type of characteristics in watching a movie that looks and feels like something that came out of Florida in cheap and allegedly grimy aims that you did with Lewis and his last two movies. The body-count isn't nearly as considerable as one might expect (three, and only two blood paintings get 'done"), and it just isn't as amusing to watch even when one has that sinking feeling of being in a mediocre movie for 79 minutes. Oas-Heim apparently wasn't the most tolerable of actors to work with Lewis, who apparently was in just this and Moonshine Mountain. His attempt at the tortured artist is somehow the highlight when it comes to acting, probably because God only knows how one of us (you, the reader, or heaven help us, me) would do in acting. You might wonder how this ranks lower than his Maniacs film, a feature that had a song about the South rising again. Well, that movie actually had a strange chaotic element that felt in touch with actually making one interested in just what the hell was going to happen next in basically "hicksploitation". You don't really get that here, since even asking why one can't get the proper red for a canvas seems like trying to insult a baby for not shutting up. Hell, the movie sets up an art critic who sets the score of just what our lead character is in terms of bad art and decides, yes, maybe he really is just an artistic imposter that might as well go for selling out. The actual death scenes aren't even that good either, with one scene being on a paddle-boat because if you're going to shill something, shill the idea that folks will get killed with boats. You have to remember that Lewis was the kind of filmmaker that aimed to make do with his budget (so no rehearsals and shoot as much as possible), complete with seeing filmmaking as a business, not art. As such, what you get is a mishmash of stuff that could either have fit right in with home movies (just take a look at those fresh beach shots) or, well, stuff made fast. It doesn't even feel worth calling a piece of crap, really, because the movie is basically the equivalent of someone going up to you to show a dead animal. What does one even say to such a weird thing? Calling him a poor man's Roger Corman might as well be the case. As a whole, if you really like to see a middle of the road "blood movie" that happens to approach its 60th anniversary soon and you just need to scratch that itch, well, don't say I didn't warn you.
Overall, I give it 5 out of 10 stars.
