SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Best movie ever!

A Major Disappointment

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

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

Master magician Montag the Magnificent (the divine Crispin Glover in peak lively'n'loopy form) performs ghoulish stage tricks on female audience members that go awry when said participants start turning up dead for real. Underground reporter Edmund Bigelow (a fine and compelling performance by Kip Pardue) finds himself in considerable jeopardy after he decides to dig deeper into what's going on. Ably directed with stylish and nourish cinematic panache by Jeremy Kasten, with a crafty and perfectly lurid script by Zach Chassler, a snappy pace, a handy helping of tasty distaff nudity, a supremely sleazy and sinister carnival atmosphere, and oodles of juicy graphic gore, this inspired remake improves on the enjoyable, yet ramshackle original with a more capable cast, slicker production values, a more complex plot, and much better and more convincing splatter effects. This film further benefits from excellent contributions by Bijou Phillips as Bigelow's spunky girlfriend Maggie, Brad Dourif as seedy quack physician Dr. Chong, Joshua Miller as sarcastic coroner Jinky, and Jeffrey Combs as a grotesque and disgusting geek. Christopher Duddy's striking cinematography makes nifty use of Dutch camera angles and garish lighting. Steven Porcaro's ominous score hits the moody spot. The meaty overriding themes concerning illusion, perception, and the manipulation of reality and people's minds gives this picture extra provocative substance. A really cool and clever flick.

The very old classical horror has been remade from strange and slightly confusing story to a giant pile of nonsense mess. It has been "modernized" - there is a lot of partial nudity including some full frontal nudity. (Two points for the nudity!) Unfortunately, the Wizard has totally lost his charisma - the new one looks more like Elvis-dressed pedophile than impressive dark person. The gore is gone as well - the gore scenes are very brief and uninteresting, the original ones were much much more longer and explicit. (Fear for losing rating maybe?) The worst part of the movie is the story however. The original one was quite simple, slow and basically it was quite interesting thriller. The new story is about wealthy psychopathic brat who may or may not cause all the trouble or may or may not to try to investigate it. Visions, subplots, jumps forward or backward in time, Matrix-like visions - mess. Total, horrible, self-important mess. This is not a good story nor a good thriller. Its just a bunch of visions from mind going mad. I would accept that if they would have been at least moderately interesting. They are not.

I recently saw the Herchell original and it holds some mild fascination and is camp as hell but it wasn't really good except in an early John Waters style OTT sort of way. With the advances in SFX technology, it should be easy to make a remake of higher quality and better gore. No? Well compared to this turgid stool of a remake, the original is a masterpiece. What should have been an uber-gross-out popcorn remake turns out to be a navel-gazing, existential self-rimjob on... to be honest I haven't a clue! Only watch this film if you can stomach a 'plot' with no focus, where you never know if the main character is awake or dreaming due to the fact that he keeps waking up in a cold sweat every five minutes covered in blood... and then... 5 seconds later - with no blood! Oh, so that was the dream? No wait, this is the dream! Or was that the dream before? Who cares. What doesn't help is a plot with characters that have their own motives and actions but it's almost impossible to follow since it's always unclear which parts are real and which are imagined - and the direction is so poor you don't feel the film deserves the energy to unravel it all. Like Guy Ritchie's Revolver this is an absolute nightmare, and not in a good way. Crispin Glover is surprisingly bad in the titular role. His hair has been buffeted up into a bouffant so he resembles a church evangelist and it's a gratingly annoying performance. Intead of trying to bring something new to the role (creepiness? / scares?), he seems happy to just mimic the campness of the original. And as for the SFX, the old version may have looked poor, but at least it didn't hide the crappy effects behind a smoky screen so you couldn't see anything that was happening like this film does! Give this one a miss