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This movie was nearly the death of me.  It took three, count 'em three, separate tries to get all the way through it.

The premise is that a magician named Montag has a disturbing show.  He does stuff like cutting women in half, nailing a spike through their head, and making them swallow a sword.  During the trick, the women scream and bleed all over the place.  At the end though, they are perfectly fine.  However, upon leaving the theater, it is only a short period before the women suddenly fall dead and display all the wounds that they suffered from the psycho magician.

The idea is sort of neat, but the movie's execution is what kills the idea deader than heck.  First off, it is around 100 minutes long and there are (if memory serves) 5 different magic shows.  Each runs about 15 minutes and often repeats dialog.  The acting is wooden, like hammer a nail through it wooden, and the camerawork is awful.

And to cap it all off, the ending is a gotcha-gotcha that really annoys.

Are you gonna review this movie,Andrew?

How about"Oblivion 2:Backlash"?

I liked the gore effects, but I agree, the plot just wasn't there.  It's more enjoyable if you watch it with the commentary [assuming you have the DVD.]

My favorite Lewis is still 2000 MANIACS.

I almost thought I was the only one to feel this way. The wife talked me into renting this off Netflix. My wife and I are fans of bad movies but I think that's where the taste ends. She loves films like this and I will never understand. Only differance between you and I Andrew is I never made it to the end. I made my own ending by falling asleep. (A fact that I don't believe I'll ever live down)

I'll probably review it someday, but I have no present desire to watch it again (for a number of years).  "Oblivion 2" will probably be some time in coming too.  Just too many movies and too little time in the life of a man.  

Mostly I just post about movies that I have watched recently to compare notes with others who have enjoyed or not enjoyed the same film.  Talking movies is one of my favorite things.  Another reason I call up Ken Begg or Nathan Shumate every now and then:  they are fun people to talk with about movies.

"Two Thousand Maniac" is probably the best of the HGL films.  I do like "The Gore-Gore Girls" for its high silliness factor.

I fell asleep three times trying to finish this movie.  It took a superhuman effort to stay away and finish the last thirty minutes in one go.

What amazes me is that HGL and the Something Weird guy managed to talk about this movie all the way through and actually seem to think it enjoyable on any level other than pure sado-masochism....This ranks somewhere between finishing up Monster-a-Go-Go and Moonshine Mountain for me in terms of badness. Ouchie....I did like listening to Herschell make fun of one of the actress victims, particularly given that he praised the abilities pf the actor who portrayed Montag! Q: How bad an actor are you when Herschell Gordon Lewis makes fun of you?  A: Umm, really bad.

Is it just me, or does THE WIZARD OF GORE play like a hybrid of H.G. Lewis's usual style with overtones of Brazil's "King of Horror" Coffin Joe?
I'm not implying that H.G. stole from Coffin Joe, I just mean that Montag seems cut from the same cloth as Coffin Joe and many of the things that I dislike about THE WIZARD OF GORE are present in Coffin Joe's movies in spades.  I enjoyed his first film AT MIDNIGHT I'LL STEAL YOUR SOUL but  I thought the followup film THIS NIGHT I WILL POSSESS YOIR CORPSE was terrible.  Too many scenes of Coffin Joe expounding on his bizarre philosophy (which seems to be equal parts De Sade and Nietzsche) and even the much-hyped "color trip to Hell" in THIS NIGHT... is disappointing.

Well, I might be in the minority but I thought THE WIZARD OF GORE told an interesting story and had some good gore effects to offer. H.G. Lewis has said on the record that THE WIZARD OF GORE is a film that he is quite disappointed by, mainly due to little time to enhance the film further and to create a final gore shot that never made it due to an on-set mishap. Lewis still considers TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, SOMETHING WEIRD and THE YEAR OF THE YAHOO to be his better achievements and I agree. As for the substandard camerawork, it looks more like a result of the Full Frame presentation as the film was projected in theatres in a matted widescreen of 1.66:1 or 1.75:1. If it were shown in matted widescreen, the camerawork would have looked a bit better.

Oh, and Ray Sager was great as Montag. Really, he gives a great theatrical performance like he does in BLAST-OFF GIRLS (1967), JUST FOR THE HELL OF HIT (1968), YEAR OF THE YAHOO (1972), and THE GORE GORE GIRLS (1972). The rest of the acting was passable.

Count me in with the "hard to make it to the end" crowd. It started out okay, in a laughably bad way, especially the closeups of the mannequins used during some gore scenes in the magic act. But the story was very slow going, and that "ending" with it's out of nowhere twist, equal parts WTF and "Why?" and feeling sucker punched by people who didn't know how to write an ending.

Still how many movies have murder by punch press? Joe Bob Briggs had a field day with this one when I first saw it on Movie Channel years ago.

I added this to my H.G. Lewis collection a few months ago.

If you want to see REALLY bad H.G. Lewis, get your hands on a copy of the DVD double feature of THE WONDERFUL LAND OF OZ and JACK AND THE BEANSTALK (form Something Weird Video). One of the special features is the immortal H.G. Lewis short "The Magic Land of Mother Goose." The whole thing takes place on what appears to be a stage in a school auditorium (with really cheesy sets and props). The acting, make-up, editing . . . EVERYTHING is as bad as you can get. Try to stay awake through it.

I'm no huge fan of H.G. Lewis.  His movies usually bore me to tears, there seldom being anything in them besides gore to hold my attention.  I think only good schlock he's produced was 2000 Maniacs and that's it.

This was one of the first dvds I ever bought years back. Its concept is a lot cooler than the actual movie I agree with completely. It's ok with some funny parts but it feels overly cheap and fake. I'm not a fan of H.G. either really.

This movie sounds like an entry in the"Guinea Pig"series...