Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore (2010)

SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

GENRE: DOCUMENTARY

SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

I’ve only seen a couple of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ films, and haven’t really loved them, but I was still interested in seeing The Godfather Of Gore, a documentary about his career featuring many of the folks involved with the films, well known fans such as John Waters and Joe Bob Briggs, and even Lewis himself, who seemingly hasn’t lost any of his spark despite being in his 80s. Also, unlike the usual unknowns who helm these sort of things, it was co-directed by none other than Frank Henenlotter (who also appears as one of the talking heads), which suggested that this might be a slightly more interesting take on this sort of thing.

Unfortunately the film is geared more toward die-hard fans than newbies such as myself. While they do talk a bit about his pre-movie life (he was a teacher!), it’s not even five minutes in before his first movies are being discussed in detail. Prior to the gore films we all know him for, he produced and/or directed a number of “nudie cutie” films; most of which seem to involve little more than naked girls dancing around in between bits of lame comedy. They spend an awful long time on this stuff (well over 20 minutes) before getting to Blood Feast – which I found a bit odd for a movie called “Godfather Of Gore”. I understood the need for context, but as time went on I realized that this wasn’t so much a documentary about HGL but a long form retrospective about his most notable films.

And again, I haven’t seen many of them. So while it’s fun to see him and some other production veterans of Two Thousand Maniacs returning to the town where they shot the film and taking part in a makeshift parade, or hearing about a botched gore effect in Wizard Of Gore, most of the film consists of folks reminiscing about similar events on movies I haven’t seen, so after a while I started feeling like I was watching the bonus features on a DVD when I had yet to see the film. Indeed, you could chop any section out of the movie and put it on its respective DVD as a “30th anniversary reunion!” featurette. This is especially true of the Maniacs segment, where they devote some time to guy who played the little kid; at one point he tells a story about some Maniacs fans who were friends with him without realizing the connection – um, OK, that’s amusing and all, but can we get back to Lewis?

Thus, we get a lot of moments like this and precious little time devoted to his influence, his life outside of the movies, etc. It’s not even really clear why he more or less quit the business after 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls – hell they even skip over Blood Feast 2, which you’d think would make a logical endcap for the film since the first Blood Feast was his first foray into gore films. The remakes of Maniacs and Wizard aren’t mentioned at all, another thing that would seem obvious to me. There’s a quick shot of him talking at a marketing seminar, as that is what he does for a living now (and is even more successful in that field than he was in films, from what I understand), but that’s about it.

However, if you ARE a die-hard fan, this should prove to be a very entertaining film. I’ve never even heard of some of the films that they discuss, but comparing the doc to his filmography proves that they don’t really skip over much. Obviously the big hits are given more time than say, Suburban Roulette (a drama about swingers that he made in the late 60s), but it would have been very easy to just focus the doc on the movies that have some name value to casual fans – given the number of still-living participants of Maniacs, they probably could have made a full length doc about just that one film.

And even I took much delight at the insights from Briggs and Waters (Henenlotter is also pretty hilarious). For the most part they’re not under any illusion that these films are legitimately any good (at least twice we hear the sentiment that a film was released only because “it had sprocket holes and could run through the projector”), which is a blessing – I don’t know if I could sit through an entire movie of people trying to convince me that Wizard Of Gore is anything but a boring movie punctuated by ridiculous (and too-infrequent) kill scenes.

Some stuff, I have to wonder if even his biggest fan would find interesting. Henenlotter (and/or co-director Jimmy Maslon) has a strange fascination with showing “outtakes” that are merely crew members clapping the slate on the set of whatever film is being discussed – how is this interesting? I guess showing it once is a nice visual way of showing how everyone on these crews more multiple hats, but if that’s the only point, why show such sequences 3-4 times? And only someone with the Blood Feast logo tattooed across his entire chest would enjoy hearing that film’s obnoxious two-note “theme” playing over the ENTIRE segment on the film (15-20 minutes).

The disc has a lot of extras also geared more toward satisfying fans than “introducing” this guy to newcomers. An hour’s worth of deleted scenes are pretty much indistinguishable from what’s in the movie, so if you enjoyed the movie then by all means go right into watching these. There’s a pretty great anecdote about Charles Manson in here, and Henenlotter’s take on Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In (a Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In wannabe) is worth the cost of the disc alone. Less successful is Lewis’ short “Hot Night At The Go-Go Lounge”, which is literally ten minutes of nothing but girls dancing around. Then we get a pretty comprehensive trailer reel (with a “Play All” option for parties!) and a gallery of original art, which of course is hit or miss but a unique addition all the same. My only gripe is that the deleted scenes section has a few chapters but no index or chapter selection menu of any sort, making navigating it a bit cumbersome (on my player I couldn’t even fast forward for some reason), as folks might want to just see what extra bits there are on a particular film but would have to run through the whole thing to find them. I wish they had taken a cue from their own trailer page and let you watch deleted material by film or just play all if you wanted to take it all in at once.

Granted, few will be the folks who pick this up having never heard of the guy, so the fact that it has next to no real biographical information on him won’t bother the target audience – his biggest fans who already know all of this stuff. But I think Spine Tingler was more successful, providing more context for its subject (William Castle) and keeping die-hard fans and newcomers equally entertained and informed throughout its runtime. A nice collection of extras makes it an easy sell to the HGL faithful, but everyone else should probably check out a few (or a lot) of the movies and maybe read his Wikipedia page first - I think I'll hold on to it and give it another look after I've seen another half dozen of the flicks.

What say you?

Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore (2010)

By: Abdallh Gamal on: 6:38 PM

S&Man (2006)

AUGUST 31, 2011

GENRE: DOCUMENTARY, SERIAL KILLER

SOURCE: BLU-RAY (ONLINE RENTAL)

I’ve been putting off S&Man (pronounced "Sandman", not "S&M Man") for a while now, because I knew it featured clips from movies directed by Bill Zebub and the Toe Tag guys, i.e. underground “extreme” nonsense that I'd sooner quit HMAD than ever sit through one in its entirety (a Toe Tag production remains the only film I ever shut off in the 4.5 year history of HMAD). Not only was I not too keen about looking at it, I knew it would feature the sort of thing that would upset my wife, so I had to watch when I had time to not only watch the movie but its two commentaries and other bonus material. So when she said she was going out to dinner tonight I figured I’d have enough time to watch the movie, and then tomorrow I work late so I’d have time to go through the extras in the AM after she had gone to work.

Given my distaste for those things, a lot of the movie left me sort of cold, as it was essentially a documentary about how far horror has come over the years; after a brief overview of the slasher film from Carol Clover (author of “Men, Woman, and Chainsaws”) we are introduced to Zebub and the others, as well as Eric Rost, a guy who makes the titular “Sandman” videos, a series of shorts in which he follows a girl for a while, uses voodoo to erase her existence, and then kills her. The first half of the film is largely a straight, traditional documentary, focusing on the makers of these underground horror films and how they are made as well as their role in the horror genre as a whole. But after a while it switches gears a bit, as director JT Petty (The Burrowers, Soft For Digging) takes a more involved role in the movie as he grows concerned that Eric might actually be a real killer.

Spoilers ahead!!!

Of course, Eric is an actor, and thus the movie sacrifices some of its documentary cred in favor of an intriguing “mockumentary”/found footage type deal, where scripted (or at least, plotted) events occur as they would in a documentary. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to something like it would be the excellent comi-drama doc The Hole Story, and I think it’s far more successful than the usual Blair Witch-inspired "Is this real or fake?" flick (as I write this, NASA has just issued a statement in which they want to make it abundantly clear that Dimension’s Apollo 18 is NOT a true story – gee, thanks guys).

I wish I was fooled longer; I don’t know if they wanted to make it fairly obvious that it was staged or not, but even before the ridiculous voodoo angle is introduced I was having doubts. For starters, we see Eric steal one of his victims’ keys after she leaves them and the rest of her purse on the table when she goes to order a coffee at a crowded diner. Come on, what sort of person is that stupid? Also, just the general idea plus time give it away; the movie was shot in 2005 – I think I would have heard about this guy by now if he was an actual killer (the movie was unfortunately shelved for a few years due to internal issues at the production company). The fact that Eric was the only one of the subjects I wasn’t familiar with also tipped me off, though that's minor - I’m guessing someone like my mom would probably just assume they were ALL fake before she’d single one out as being “off”. Nope, sorry mom – Bill Zebub is an actual guy making actual godawful shit.

On the other hand, I was impressed by how much work Petty (and the actor playing Eric) put into “seeding” this guy into reality, having him give out a complete episode of "S&Man" at a Chiller convention (one I’m pretty sure I attended! If I didn’t ignore everyone handing their junk out at these things, I might have gotten one!), even apparently getting Michael Rooker to plug the S&Man website (we see a lot of clips from Henry but not that footage, dammit). Also, as I just mentioned, they actually went ahead and created an entire 30 minute episode of "S&Man", which is on the Blu-ray and damned impressive. Not the actual piece, which is largely boring (and the feature shows all the highlights anyway), but the fact that they actually did this much legwork to put the idea of this guy into reality before even starting the documentary proper. It’d be like if they actually had Josh, Heather, and Mike make some sort of student film two years before Blair Witch came out.

But while this stuff is a lot of fun (I particularly enjoyed how Petty sort of played himself as an asshole), most of the movie is given to Zebub or Toe Tag maestro Fred Vogel rambling on and on while discussing their unwatchable dreck. And throughout the movie I couldn’t decide who I disliked more; Zebub admits his movies are shit and he makes them because people buy them to jerk off to (gah!), so does this make him better or worse than Vogel, who doesn’t seem to have that sort of honesty about what he does (which is the same sort of garbage). If you’re unfamiliar with their “films”, you’re lucky, but the movie gives you enough of an idea to know whether or not it’s your thing. Zebub has a penchant for girls being tied to crosses and raped (sometimes by Jesus himself), and Vogel’s films involve girls puking on each other, followed by sex and/or killing. We’re also exposed to Debbie D, a “scream queen” who stars in fetish films that are actually ordered by people. Like, one guy apparently gets off on navel violence, and thus she makes a movie specifically for him (but available to any customer) in which her belly button is shot or zapped with lasers or whatever. And you guys say The Hitcher remake is a waste of time? Then again, one man's trash...

But it’s kind of a shame, because there are a lot of good points being made (Vogel in particular actually has some valid things to say), especially from Clover as well as a pair of psychiatrists whose names escape me (one is Krieger). Hell even Eric has some thoughtful insight, but it’s mixed with this other junk. Don’t get me wrong – I understand the need to give context and a bit of background on these guys, and obviously they have their fans who will no doubt love the fact that there’s a documentary that delivers the same sort of perverse visuals that the movies themselves offer – but since I personally can’t stand this “underground” stuff it made the movie difficult to endure at times, especially since they couldn’t have too much stuff with Eric (which was far more interesting to me), lest the audience catch on too quickly.

Luckily the commentary tracks muted the dialogue of the participants in favor of a chat between Petty and Eric. Interestingly, one track has them talking normally about making the film, how they pulled off the “snuff” scenes, how the project came about, etc – it’s a terrific listen for anyone interested in this sort of stuff, and even includes a few acknowledgments of things that annoyed me. For example, when Clover talks about the slasher film, she skips over Black Christmas, something Petty regrets (whether she never mentioned it at all or it was edited, I am unsure). One of the few notes I took was “Black Christmas?”, so again – this is why listening to commentaries is important. I could have been going on and on about how they didn’t know what they were talking about since they skipped over such an important chapter in slasher history, and it would have been unnecessary.

The other track, however, finds the two men “in character”, and it starts off with Petty explaining that Eric sued him over his suggestion that he was actually killing people (they settled out of court). Then throughout the track they are impressively dismissive of one another; for 80 minutes they always sound like they’re about one remark away from coming to blows (or worse). It’s the sort of thing that a filmmaker would do in order to further try to convince an audience of his (fake) film’s legitimacy, but the fact that it’s paired with one that very much proves that it’s staged just makes it a wonderfully amusing “alternate” commentary. It gets a bit repetitive at times (Eric is convinced Petty has staged EVERYTHING in the movie, including the insight from the experts), but still, considering I had just watched the movie twice and was still being entertained with this third go-around should be enough to prove that it’s worth a listen.

The rest of the stuff you can skip. The deleted scenes are forgettable (and hard to hear), and the trailer doesn’t even really seem to be trying to hide that it’s not 100% real, as it’s cut like a typical thriller. The trailers for the "S&Man" episodes are all the same (random footage, title card with the name of the victim, random footage, title card with the color of her hair, random footage, title card of how she died, quick shot of her death – end), and again, the full episode that is included isn’t really worth watching once you’ve seen the feature film – it’s a clever promotional tool, sure, but hardly something you’ll want to watch on its own especially once you know it’s all fake.

In terms of concept and even execution to a degree, the movie is nearly a home run. I wasn’t fooled for long, but I liked how much effort they put into setting it up in the real world, and the Eric scenes are just as suspenseful/exciting as any other “found footage” movie, if not more so since there’s no supernatural element to bog it down, like usual. And fake or not, the ending is impressively grim. But that’s only half of the movie, and the other half is spent on guys defending/discussing their worthless trash films. Maybe if a Zebub type was featured as part of a more diverse group (i.e. guys making normal horror movies, or maybe even a legit veteran filmmaker), maybe it would have been a bit more successful; a few familiar talking heads could have even helped sell the “is this real?” concept better. At any rate, it further proves that Petty is one of our more interesting new genre filmmakers, and I hope he continues to defy expectations and make movies that aren’t easy to pigeonhole. All of his films have been remarkably different from one another, something that is to be lauded. Nothing against Ti West, but all four of his features can be described the same way: "80 minutes of nothing happening and then a rushed climax". At least with Petty you don't know what you're going to get, though there's a damn good chance it'll be good.

What say you?

S&Man (2006)

By: Abdallh Gamal on: 7:35 PM

Fantastic Flesh (2008)

JANUARY 26, 2009

GENRE: DOCUMENTARY
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

I wouldn’t mind watching more documentaries for HMAD; it would certainly mix things up a bit, and since I like to learn things, a documentary would probably be much more helpful than whatever I watch today for my ‘legit’ daily entry (editor’s note: BC’s prediction was correct). But they would have to be full length films in order to count, and Fantastic Flesh doesn’t quite make the cut at a scant 58 minutes.

I assume Flesh is from the same producers that gave us Bloodsucking Cinema in 2007, which was an entertaining but flawed look at vampires in cinema. This one takes the same approach, albeit focusing on the role of makeup effects. It’s a much more interesting subject to be sure, but unfortunately it shares some of the same problems. For starters, and this is of no fault to anyone but the rights holders to certain films, we get a lot of talking heads, not enough of the actual final product (or better, showing the actual process). When you’re talking about something purely VISUAL, you want to see the work itself, not Greg Nicotero or Mick Garris commenting on it.

Another odd issue is that a lot of the films seem to be from the year 2005 for whatever reason. I don’t doubt the validity of Chronicles of Narnia (it won KNB an Oscar after all), but The Island? Sin City? Neither of those films are something I would immediately think of when considering the legendary advances in makeup (if I was to make a doc concerning greenscreen and compositing, then Sin City would be top of my list). Granted, the film is produced by Nicotero and thus KNB’s work is bound to be shown more than others, but still. They’ve done other films that are more relevant – Jason Goes To Hell, for example, isn’t even mentioned, despite having some pretty great effects (and was one of the last major horror films to come along before CGI became the standard).

One final, more crippling flaw is the total absence of Stan Winston. The film is even dedicated to him, and while the other big timers get their due (Dick Smith, KNB, Savini), Winston’s work is skipped over entirely, and the man himself is only mentioned once or twice in passing. Even if a rights issue prevented his work from being seen, there’s no excuse to skip over him completely, especially with so many celebrity guests on hand to gush about the other makeup gurus. Stills or behind the scenes footage (which belongs to whoever shot it, not the company who put out the movie it was for) would have sufficed. We get 5 minutes about a fucking Transformer and nothing about Terminator???

Otherwise, it’s a great look back at all of the amazing movie monsters and effects that us horror nerds have enjoyed all of our lives. For all its omissions, there ARE a lot of great movies represented properly: The Exorcist, From Dusk Til Dawn, Dawn of the Dead, etc. Since it aired on Starz and not Monsters HD, it could have very easily just focused entirely on non-horror films like Narnia, so to see Rhodes get torn apart in Day of the Dead in the same piece as a shot of Mr Tumnus running around is pretty great, and further proves how wide reaching the work of “horror” guys like KNB has been over the years. My favorite bit in the entire movie comes when Nicotero talks about Dances With Wolves, how Kevin Costner saw the dead bodies that KNB made for (the comedy) Gross Anatomy and assumed they could make dead buffalo as well. To these guys, it doesn’t matter if you’re Costner or Craven, they will deliver top notch work all the same.

As a purchase though, it’s too general a focus to be of much use to die-hard makeup effects fans, especially since much more in-depth looks at each film (even the non horror ones) can be found on their respective DVDs, which fans probably already own anyway. It’s enjoyable enough, but you’d probably never want to watch it again, and the disc contains no extras whatsoever. Because of this, I would think that the best possible audience for this movie would be parents who find their kids’ interest in gore and makeup to be abhorrent. The kid can show this to his parents and watch their shock to discover that the same guys who made a vagina monster eat a guy’s head off in Dusk til Dawn were the same ones who made all the lovable woodland creatures in Narnia. As Nicotero says, their job is to provide the paint and brushes for the director to create their artwork, and even if you dislike the end product, any film fan should have the highest respect for what these guys do (i.e. if you don’t like a Picasso, you don’t blame whoever made the paint itself). Hopefully someday a more in-depth look at the creators themselves will come along (hell, an entire TV series would be ok by me, each week focusing on a different creator or team), but until then, this is better than nothing.

What say you?

Fantastic Flesh (2008)

By: Abdallh Gamal on: 6:42 PM