With The Wizard of Gore, cinematic raconteur Herschell Gordon Lewis created both his ideal interpreter and his own undertaker. The titular Wizard, Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager), is both a carnival barker of cinematic proportions, a canvas for Lewis to voice his own frustrations, and a self-destructive, film-killing force. He embodies cinema’s life-force – the illusion of reality presented for us – and its death-drive – its interest in peering back beyond the illusion, exposing itself before us.

Early on, when Montag cuts a woman’s head off in what is apparently an illusion, her head falls off, and in a dissolve, we see the bloody stump, before the camera starts spinning around like a washing machine, which becomes Montag himself, joining with and celebrating his whirlwind of spectatorial dismemberment. He then conjures a flower that kind of looks like the bloody stump, just for kicks. Cinema, scholars have long noted, is a magic trick, an art form that works to convince us of its own holism and to hide the seams that render it a singular, internally-bonded object rather than a collection of disparate footage. The problem of a filmed magic trick, of course, is that the filmmaker can edit the trick together, making it all too easy to convince the audience and, thus, all the more difficult.

And yet! Lewis still cannot get the job done. When Montag performs the trick, the film’s editing is simply not up to the task of “convincing us” that what we’re seeing is anything like real magic. At every stage, the film’s cut from prop to person, object to another object, is so glaringly obvious that the film’s credibility crumbles before us. Lewis’s film is awful, essentially incompetent anti-cinema, a true travesty of the contract that cinema makes with its audience, its promise of an authentic, self-same, cohesive entity presented before us as an unquestioned reality. The Wizard of Gore completely fails itself within the first scene.  

But what if it also transcends itself? The Wizard of Gore musters the absolute bare minimum of effort – making the film “about” magic basically makes it obvious for the audience – that it seems to ask us whether the legitimacy of the magic-film comparison can survive on sheer charisma. This film has absolutely no game. It is an entirely guileless object, a work that presents its ideas with the cunning of a five-year-old. But what, the film wonders, are other movies really doing that this one isn’t?

Three years after The Wizard of Gore, Orson Welles’s magisterial, mischievous F for Fake would delve into nearly every crevice of the film-magic comparison, and it remains the definitive experiment in exploring the limits of cinematic truth and exposing the art form’s brand of authenticity through productive inauthenticity. Herschell Gordon Lewis, who barely knew how to hold a camera let alone point it, is the antithesis of Welles, whose acumen seemed preternatural, but he was also his odd negative mirror image, a similarly aloof huckster and cinematic showman who refused to assent to the harmonies that governed the medium in its Hollywood variation. He had all of Welles’ chutzpah and none of the talent. His film is so sure of itself and so unable to defend itself from attack and critique that it cannot but ask us to burrow into the deepest recesses of what constitutes legitimate art, and whose terms this legitimacy is founded. His film is a kind of void, an abyssal nothingness that sucks all acceptable standards into a black hole. It is a tremor underneath the medium. His film can offer no more than this, but, it suggests, no less.

The Wizard of Gore is so lead-footed and obvious that it becomes paradoxically poetic in its bluntness. It is about cinema’s ability to engage in the “luxury of watching grisly dismemberments and deaths without anyone ever getting harmed,” as the film explicitly says. But more importantly, it is about what it means that I continued to watch even though the gore effects were extraordinarily unconvincing, and the editing so wholly unconvincing us of the legitimacy of anything on screen.

The first time we see Montag call forth a guest from his audience to dismember, we don’t even see the audience or the participant as she stands up to join him. Her response, and the timing of her expression of pain, in no way corresponds to the actual violence presumably being done to her. The film renders her less a human than an object, which is validated in the way the film allows her to “survive” Montag’s gruesome display by implying that she has been turned into a literal prop that will be broken apart later. This will be true for every subsequent “victim” in the film. Actors, the film suggests, are mere material for an objectifying lens, and audience members are little more than prey for an all-consuming mechanism churning human matter into the illusion of illusion. The Wizard of Gore proves “its” point insofar as it simply cannot be looked away from. Reader, for ninety minutes, I was Lewis’s prey, and he barely had to try.

There’s nothing new about this, really, nor is there anything especially sophisticated in the film’s version of its critique. The negotiation of cinema, magic, and performance are baked deep into the fabric of early cinema, even if they were only just becoming readily theorized as such when this film came out. What separates The Wizard of Gore is not theoretical acumen or technical proficiency or even creativity of imagination. The magic ingredient is Lewis’s own elan vital, an unclarifiably energetic force that is, like all authentic charisma, both essentially inestimable and ultimately unsourceable. He is simultaneously tapped into something about cinema’s essence, essentially helpless to depict it and, finally, more deeply connected to it because he is so unaware.

When Montag looks at the audience, he’s really, as these things usually go, looking at us. The angle is close enough that it nearly breaks the fourth wall. But it’s askew enough that the film again seems to fail at its task. Or maybe to hit it in a roundabout way, because it is looking neither at us nor at any character but into the cosmos. Montag seems to skitter around causation, cutting like some ludicrous cinematic monstrosity tapping into the fires of hell itself. He is a truly transcendental being disconnected from – he thinks elevated above – the world, visionary because he mostly does not care what any one else thinks, or how incompetent he may or may not be. The film is his attempt to command that world and, vicariously, Lewis’s statement of devilish desire to pull our strings.

And, in their own way, Montag and Lewis recognize the film’s problematic, fearlessly clarifying it in all its improbability in Wizard’s grand finale, which isn’t a climax culminating the text but a vortex shredding it to pieces. Sherry Carson (Judy Cler), who has been imbibing in Montag’s shows throughout the film with an equal mixture of skepticism and intoxication, invites Montag to interview on her daytime talk show. He says no but finally agrees to perform an act on the show, an act that first asserts cinema’s power over us, television, and news and then diagnoses Lewis’s own apprehension about his performance of cinematic mastery. Cinema is the controlling cultural idiom of the 20^th century, but television, he predicts, might be able to dissect cinema’s pretensions of grandeur and to stick a knife in its side by one-upping both its up-to-dateness and its insincerity. In its final, truly unhinged final moments, which I cannot in good faith spoil, The Wizard of Gore becomes a meditation on the state of the medium, and the fabric of society and the filmmaker’s place in it, as riveting as Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (being filmed around the same time).

Television, the finale suggests, wrecks absolute havoc on cinema, emerging as far, far more deviously able to play any note, change form on a moment’s notice, and fend for itself. In the film’s truly unhinged, deviously idiotic idiom, this is soul-shattering. The Wizard of Gore, in its final act, becomes a genuinely pathbreaking head-trip of a film, yet Lewis, because he takes the dumbest way out, never takes the easy way out. The obvious thing to do would be to offer a cop-out in the form of a dream sequence or a pseudo-explanation that would all too clearly allow him to demarcate the real from the false in the guise of challenging it. Lewis’s film is not clever enough for any of that. It has no interest in laundering its arcane questions about the limits of our reality, the potential purgatory of the repetitions we walk through every day, with a reason, an excuse, or a calculated gamble of showy ambivalence coded as maturity.

No, reader. All The Wizard of Gore can muster is Montag asking “What is real? How do you know that at this second you aren’t asleep in your beds, dreaming that you are here in this theater?” It’s a truly stupid line, and the reporter, who may have more power to arbitrate and dictate reality than cinema can possibly muster on its best day, disquietingly vocalizes her lack of interest: “you know what I think? I think he’s a phony.” The film takes the seemingly lazier route and makes it, through sheer force of will, an absolutely devastating emasculation of the charismatic author.

Score: Meaningless/10