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First and foremost, Herschell Gordon Lewis is of course known as the Godfather
of Gore, a title nothing short of fitting considering his amazing
accomplishments that helped to create modern gore cinema as such. But to
reduce Lewis merely to his output inside the gore genre wouldn't do
justice to the man, who from the late 1950's to early 1970's worked in
quite a variety of genres, shooting movies almost exclusively for the
drive-in and grindhouse market, and one thing these films do almost all
have in common, and it's not their explicitness (neither concerning sex
nor violence) but their humour, as most of his films have a comic edge
to it not usually seen in your standard, sensationalist drive-in fare. And
thanks to their tongue-in-cheek approach, Lewis films are never quite as stupid as
their often outrageously silly storylines make them out to be. That
said, Herschell Gordon Lewis never took too much pride in his work, he
never saw himself as the big artist, but merely as a craftsman cranking
out what the public wants - and he often took swipes at exploitation
directors who saw themselves as auteurs ... which is kind of
ironic, because among the many exploitation filmmakers, he is one of the
few who has over the years developed a personal style, one that makes his
films easily recognizable (and I'm not talking about his gore-scenes here,
even if Lewis has put a unique spin to them too) - which would of course qualify
him as an auteur in the explotiation field (thing is of course, you can't
plan on becoming an auteur, either you have the talent or you don't).
Early Life, Early Career
Considering the outrageousness of at least some of Herschell Gordon
Lewis' films (and the inherent sleaze of others), his early, pre-film
business life seems rather uneventful if not to say boring: Lewis was
born in 1926 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He later studied at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois, and got a Master's degree in Journalism.
Eventually, he became a professor of English literature at Mississippi
State College, but soon would leave that job again to work first on radio,
then television in its early days, and eventually he would move to Chicago and go
into advertising. In Chicago, he soon teamed up with Martin Schmidhofer and
the two formed an advertising company of their own, rather ironically
titled Lewis and Martin Films, which also had its own studio to
film TV commercials. Schmidhofer though soon grew tired
of advertising and moved to Florida, leaving the company to Lewis ... and
Lewis soon figured that with a film studio of his own, the best idea would
be to start producing feature films, in which he figures was quite some
money to be made, especially in the drive-in circuit.
Sexploitation
Lewis
produced his first film, The Prime Time, in 1960, directed by
Gordon Weisenborn (sometimes mistaken for an alias of Lewis himself). The
Prime Time was a not particularly good but highly sensationalist movie
about a young girl's coming of age with a bit of nudity thrown into the
mix (including nude scenes of a young Karen Black in her first film). What
Lewis definitely did not like about this movie was handing
direction over to someone else, since he couldn't see Weisenborn do
anything that he couldn't do himself (Lewis by that time did already have
a background in directing advertisements and television), and Lewis knew
for sure he could do it more cost conscious ... so for his second film, The
Living Venus (1961), Lewis (who back then pretty much paid for these
films out of his own pocket) was happy to take over directing chores
himself. The
Living Venus, a film about a Hugh Hefner-style
magazine editor, was sleazy enough to lure in a sizeable audience but
still tame enough to get by the (then much stricter) censor, and both this
one and The Prime Time made ok profits - but still blew up in
Herschell Gordon Lewis' face when the distributor went bust before Lewis
was paid any significant share of the money that the films had made.
So
having made two films, Herschell Gordon Lewis' career almost came to a
halt, and he even sold his Chicago studio to at least be able to carry on.
Still, his initial experiences in the film business were not all bad,
since on the set of The
Living Venus, Lewis met David F.Friedman, a
former carnival promoter who back then worked for Lewis' distributor - and
it seemed, in Friedman Lewis has found the Yang to his Yin: Friedman knew
his way about producing and distributing films while Lewis was
a director who was not too proud to make films along advertising campaigns
(instead of the other way round) and direct whatever was thrown at him -
and in the early 1960's, in the wake of the Russ Meyer-sex comedy The
Immoral Mr Teas (1959), sex movies were the thing to do ... if you
wanted to make a quick buck from minimal investment at least.
So after
some sexy one-reelers, Lewis and Friedman got into sexploitation feature filmmaking
with The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), a by today's standards
harmless sex comedy that was considered pretty risqué though for its time
(and truth to be told, it still couldn't be shown on US-American
terrestrial television), which made Lewis and Friedman quite an amount of
money ... also of course because this time around, they handled
distribution themselves, and because Lewis was an extremely economical
filmmaker, using just 8,000 feet of filmstock for a film that ran 6,300
feet - which leaves an incredibly small margin for error.
So,
with Adventures of Lucky Pierre doing pretty well, Lewis and
Friedman decided to handle a few more sex films, the nudist camp films Daughter
of the Sun (1962), Nature's Playmates (1962), Goldilocks and
the Three Bares (1963) and Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963) -
while seeming nothing short of ridiculous today, the nudist camp movie was
one of the few genres actually showing bare breasts in the early 1960's -,
and the sex dramas Boin-n-g and Scum of Earth (both 1963).
By
the way, Lewis made several of these films under an alias, as was standard
at the time in the sex movie business, but since Lewis saw himself more as
a craftsman than as an artiste, he didn't try particularly hard to hide his true identity
behind a made up name - Lewis H.Gordon is not really too misleading, now is
it? Accordingly, David F.Friedman called himself
Davis Freeman to hide (?) his identity. Still, after a while, the market by that time also had become over-saturated with
nudie flicks and Lewis and
Friedman seem to have grown tired of nthem too and were looking for
something new to try their hands on ...
Gore
Looking for something that hasn't been done before and that would
promise a tidy profit at the box office (just like nudie films did just a few years
back), Lewis and Friedman came up with a shocker that went straight to the jugular, a
horror film that not only suggests murders, bodily mutilations and the
like but actually showed them - and thus, Blood
Feast (1963) was conceived.
As a movie, Blood
Feast - a film about a caterer (Mal Arnold) who brutally kills
people in order to sacrifice them to Egyptian God Ishtar (actually, Ishtar
is a Babylonian God, but not too much research was put into writing of the
film) and plans to publicly slaughter a girl (Connie Mason) at her own
birthday party - actually isn't all that good (and certainly not one of
Lewis' better ones), the script lacks decent pacing and humour (rather
unusual for a Herschell Gordon Lewis shocker), Mal Arnold's overacting is
almost ridiculous but without actually being funny, and the dialogues
often border the clumsy ... but the film has something other films of the
time just didn't have: an abundance of extremely explicit gore scenes, and
even if these scenes were crudely executed not only by today's standards,
they certainly were effective nevertheless, and thus, virtually overnight,
the gore- or splatter-genre was born. (All that said of course, I'm not
implying that Blood
Feast is not fun to watch even when disregarding its
film-historical significance, it's just that it could have been done much
better.)
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Allegedly, once they had finished Blood
Feast and handed it over to the theatres, Lewis and Friedman
quickly lost faith in their procject, thinking it too radical for the
audiences of the day besides being really shoddily made - but once they
saw the lines of cars at drive ins all over the country waiting to get in
to see the film and received the box office returns, they quickly changed
their mind about Blood Feast
and the splatter-genre as such - and one year later, they came up with a
follow-up ...
Fortunately, Lewis and Friedman did not make the
mistake to simply shoot a rehash of the first movie, and thus kill the
genre pretty much upon arrival, instead they learned from their obvious mistakes
making Blood
Feast and improvee over them -
and their effort paid off: 2.000
Maniacs (1964) is a vast improvement over Blood
Feast in pretty much every department: It contains better (if by
no means perfect) acting perormances, a much more elaborate plot, more
inventive murder-scenes, and there's a certain comedic edge to 2.000
Maniacs as well that makes it almost irresistible - in its own, far-out
way, that is. Basically, 2.000
Maniacs is Brigadoon (1954, Vincente Minelli) retold as a
gore film: In this one, a Southern town appears out of nothing every
hundred years to give abode to a few Northern tourists - to have them
brutally slaughtered as revenge for the Civil War. Of course, the whole plotline is more than a little
silly, but that actually is part of the film's charm, and Lewis handles
the whole thing with the necessary rough verve to make it into an
entertaining piece of crude drive-in fare of the rather violent variety.
Just
like Blood
Feast, 2.000
Maniacs did phenomenal business (and unlike the somewhat shoddy Blood
Feast, it was a film Lewis was really proud of and later named the
favourite among his films), so it wasn't long before Lewis and Friedman
made a third gore flick, Color
Me Blood Red (1965).
However, just like Lewis' first two gore
films had little in common, so did Color
Me Blood Red differ from the first two, as it was less of an
in-your-face shocker and more of a macabre comedy, the story of a
desperate artist (Don Joseph) who is convinced his pictures suck and his
career is at a standstill because he just cannot find the right shade of
red to make his paintings perfect. Ultimately though, he finds exactly the
red he is looking for, and it is - you've guessed it - blood, and all of a
sudden he is able to paint masterpiece after masterpiece - but of course,
at the expense of human lives - I mean, the blood has to come from
somewhere, right? Compared to the two earlier films, Color
Me Blood Red is most certainly much more restrained, but what the
film might lack in explicit violence it makes up for in dark humour - and
thus the whole film is less of another Blood
Feast and more of a Bucket
of Blood (1959, Roger Corman [Roger
Corman bio - click here]) - interestingly this phrase also works
figuratively speaking.
Parting Ways and
Branching Out During the filming of Color
Me Blood Red, due to an argument, Herschell Gordon Lewis and David
F.Friedman decided to discontinue their partnership, though it's not
exactly clear why. However, their split must have been rather suddenly
because it's actually rumoured that Friedman eventually finished Color
Me Blood Red himself - not that that would by any means show. Interestingly,
immediately after their split, neither Friedman nor Lewis would comtinue
making gore films right away: While Friedman went back to the
sexploitation genre for the next few years, Lewis tried his hands on a
variety of genres - with only limited success for the most part.
-
Moonshine Mountain (1964), the first film Lewis made after splitting from Friedman, is a
backwoods comedy with a rough edge to please the drive-in crowd.
- Sin, Suffer and Repent (1965) started life as a sex education
reel, complete with the then stock-in-trade live birth, and eventually
the whole thing was padded out to feature length. Unfortunately though, this film
seems to be lost as of this writing (fall 2008).
- Monster a Go-Go (1965) is actually actually credited to Bill
Rebane as director while Lewis officially only handled production, but
it is said that Lewis finished the film after Rebane bailed out. Be
that as it may, Monster a Go-Go, your typical sci-fi monster
flick, is not a very good movie.
- With Jimmy the Boy Wonder (1966) and The Magic Land of
Mother Goose (1967), Herschell Gordon Lewis even tried his hand on
kiddie-features - but the results are rather bad, but not bad in a
good way ... though both films have a certain, unintentional triplike
character to them.
- Speaking of triplike: In 1967, Lewis also made a film including an
LSD-trip as such called Something
Weird, and the movie as a whole is a pretty strange experience,
a weird blend of serialkiller elements, supernatural horrors and drug
scare messages. Now this is a movie wou will probably not be able to
make much sense of, but if you don't take it too seriously and decide
to just enjoy it as a so-bad-it's-good piece of drive-in fare, you will
probably be entertained.
- With The Girl, the Body, and the Pill (1967) a film about a
schoolteacher banned from her school after having taught sex
education, Lewis actually attacks the hipocrisy of the
educational system and the middle class of the time, but since this
was of course a drive-in flick, Lewis did not make his attack overt or
head on but rather packaged it as satirical subtext of a sex
comedy - a genre Lewis has finally returned to after years of gore, as
he would do again occasionally.
- Blast-Off Girls (1967) is another satire, Herschell Gordon
Lewis-style - and over the years, he has gotten quite good at this -,
this time set within the music industry. Maybe not the greatest film
about the subject for sure, but a great piece of 1960's nostalgia
nevertheless.
- With A Taste of Blood
(1967), Herschell Gordon Lewis returned to the horror genre, but
unfortunately, this movie, a modern-day Dracula
tale, is one of his most
bloodless films ... and bloodless
both in the figurative and the literal meaning of the word: On one hand,
there is next to no blood, quite a letdown after blood feasts à la Blood
Feast, but the film's main problem is actually that it treats its
main subject - vampirism - in a way too academic manner, lacks Lewis'
trademark black humour, and running for almost two hours, it's way too
long as well. That said, the film isn't all bad, it's actually pretty
intelligent for a drive-in flick about vampires ... just don't expect
this one to be great entertainment, Herschell Gordon Lewis-style.
- The Gruesome
Twosome (1967) finally saw Herschell Gordon Lewis return to the
folds of gore cinema again: This movie about a mother-son team
(Elizabeth Davis, Chris Martell) of
wigmakers who have found the perfect source for human hair - human heads
- is a black comedy much in the tradition of Color
Me Blood Red, and it's about as sick and bizarre - but sick and
bizarre in a good way. Plus, several setpieces - first and foremost the
talking styrofoam wigheads at the beginning of the film and a drive-in
movie two characters watch later on - are simply priceless in their
absurdity.
Still, The Gruesome
Twosome did not mean that Lewis returned to the gore genre to
stay, as soon he again branched out into other territories and actually
did not make another gore movie for the remainder of the 1960's. Of all
his later 1960's non-gore films, She-Devils on Wheels (1968), a biker film with female protagonists, is
probably his most notorious - however, it's also far from his best ...
The
main problem with She-
Devils on Wheels might be that even though all the familiar genre
elements are in place, and despite the female perspective and despite quite a
bit of sleaze, it's just an impersonal and routine low budget exercise in
genre cinema, with nothing that sets it apart from dozens of other biker
movies (except the female leads of course, but that's a novelty that
quickly wears off), and in its rehashing of biker movie mainstays, the She-Devils on Wheels
soon even becomes episodic.
Of much more interest than She-Devils on Wheels
is probably Suburban
Roulette, also from 1968, a social satire about wife-swapping
suburbia that's pretty similar to and but more biting than some of Joe Sarno's
suburbia-movies - but somehow, this film failed to attract too much
interest, mainly because there is no actual nudity involved, something
that would have been natural only a decade ago, but seemed way too tame
for a dirty little movie from the late 1960's. A bit of a shame, actually.
Lewis' other sex films he made in the late 1960's - Alley Tramp
and the sci-fi-themed How to Make a Doll from 1968, and The Ecstasies of Women
and Linda and Abilene from 1969 - were less restrained than Suburban
Roulette for sure, but neither was as interesting or indeed as
biting plotwise - and the same can be said about the juvenile delinquency
movie Just for the Hell of it (1968) or Lewis' first film in the
1970's, the comic sex anthology Miss Nymphet's Zap-In (1970). It
already seemed that Lewis was beginning to lose his bite.
Returning to Form and Saying Good
Bye: The 1970's
By 1970, the attitude of the film industry towards on-screen violence
and gore had changed considerably since 1963 and the taboo-breaking Blood
Feast, and blood would splatter even in mainstream films such as Bonnie
and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch
(1969) - even if these movies were still relatively restrained in
comparison to Lewis' gore flicks. The point is though that the novelty of
gore on film had worn off and gore as such had almost become a mainstay.
So it would seem that the days of Herschell Gordon Lewis, gore-filmmaker
were counted ... when out of the blue, Lewis returned with one of his most
gorey and violent and also most bizarre movies, The
Wizard of Gore (1970).
Plotwise, The
Wizard of Gore doesn't actually make all that much sense - and it
doesn't need to, either. The nonsense story about a stage magician (Ray
Sager), who performs terrible acts of murder on stage only to then have
them appear as illusions only to turn them into murders again later is
actually part of the film's weird charm, and even though the actors all
play it straight, one can't help but regard the film as some sort of grand
guignol comedy, in which the joke is lost on those who just can't find
anything funny in Lewis' increasingly grotesque murder scenes. More than
any of his previous films, The
Wizard of Gore has become Lewis' signature film, as it combined
buckets of blood, bizarre murders and a far-out sense of humour
perfectly, and Wizard of Gore would eventually become one of Lewis'
nicknames (along with the more customary Godfather of Gore of
course).
Despite The
Wizard of Gore's success, Herschell Gordon Lewis strayed away from
the gore genre again, to make two very likeable and pretty funny backwood
satires, This
Stuff'll Kill Ya (1971) and Year of the Yahoo (1972). This
Stuff'll Kill Ya tackles religion, telling the story of a
smalltown preacher who uses his church to run a business selling moonshine
(and ti eventually have girls gangraped, as it happens). The film might not
be highly intelligent, but it's pretty amusing nevertheless. Much more
thoughtful was (the rather stupidly titled) Year of the Yahoo,
the story of a simple-minded country singer (Claude King) making his way
to the senate. Interestingly, this film not only anticipates Tim Robbins'
clever political satire Bob Roberts by 20 years (and was almost
certainly a direct influence, as the similarities are striking - even if Bob
Roberts is the much more thought-through film), it also features some eerie
similarities to the USA's 2004 election, where the American nation for
some reason elected a simple minded hick (George W.Bush) over a competent
but dry politician (John Kerry) - which is almost the exact plot of Year of the Yahoo,
even if the film, unlike life, has a happy ending on election day ... In
1971, Herschell Gordon Lewis also made his only excursion into hardcore
pornography, Black Love,
supposedly a documentary about sex among blacks, but actually just an
excuse for showing some actual lovemaking (combined with simulated
lovemaking with added on penetration close-ups) that takes itself so
seriously and has so little to say on a documentary level, that it's a
hoot to watch.
By
1972, Lewis had already grown a little tired with the film industry, and
the drive-in end of the industry started to change as slowly but surely,
Hollywood majors were taking over drive-in theatres and started to flood
cinemascreens across the USA with soulless films that eventually became
known as blockbusters. But it wouldn't be Herschell Gordon Lewis if he
didn't go out with a bang, a bang called Gore
Gore Girls (1972). In terms of gore, Gore
Gore Girls pretty much rivals The
Wizard of Gore, but that's not the film's main, or at least not
its only selling point, as Gore
Gore Girls works rather as a black comedy than a gore film, an
extremely violent and utterly bizarre comedy maybe but a comedy still. The
film tells about a gogo-girl killer, and a flamboyant detective (Frank
Kress) more than a little bit reminiscent of Jason King and
a nosey girl reporter (Amy Farrell) trying to track him (or her, as it
would turn out in the end) down - but the whole whodunnit plot is played
strictly for the laughs and even the murders are too over-the-top to be
taken all that seriously - and the whole thing is really lots of fun and
shouldn't be missed by anyone who finds some humour in even the most
gruesome killings. In all, Gore
Gore Girls is the perfect swansong to Lewis' career as a
director, as it combines all the key ingredients - gore, sex and comedy -
of his oeuvre so far into a uniquely crazy blend.
The Comeback Kid
After Gore
Gore Girls, Herschell Gordon Lewis left the movie business to
continue his career in the more profitable and less risky world of
marketing - something he had never completely given up even when making
movies - and over the years became something of a guru in that field, so
much so that he also wrote more than 30 books and held lectures on the
subject. Of coure, many of his films were also marketing wonders, and he
freely admits that he often modelled his films around their ad campaigns,
sometimes quite successfully, and maybe, without his background in
advertising, the gore genre would have never been born in the first place
... In the mid-1970's, Herschell Gordon Lewis sold the rights
to his films, as he thought he would have no more use for them and
intended to leave the movie business completely ... but then, in the
1980's, the home video boom hit the filmworld, and following films like Dawn
of the Dead (1978, George A.Romero) and Friday
the 13th (1980, Sean S.Cunningham), the gore genre had something like a rennaissance
and suddenly, Lewis' films, the undisputed forerunners of all 1970's and
80's gore cinema, found a second, successful life on videotape, while
several publications were running articles on Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Amidst
all of this, it is hardly surprising, that some time in the mid-1980's,
Lewis and his former producer David F.Friedman decided to set aside their
differences and make a sequel to the film that started it all, Blood
Feast. For some reason though, Blood
Feast 2: All U Can Eat did not take off until 2001 (in other
words, 38 years after the first part) - but what a comeback it was: The
film, basically a rehash of part one with added humour, is the perfect
continuation of Herschell Gordon Lewis' distinct brand of cinema, and in
its over-the-top depictions of violence paired with a weird, macabre kind of
humour, it feels as if it was made the week after Gore
Gore Girls and not 29 years later. And as if to prove Lewis'
significance as a director, fellow cult director John Waters has a rather
hilarious cameo in Blood
Feast 2 playing sleazy priest.
Unfortunately, the Herschell Gordon
Lewis-revival also saw less than special hommages to the man hitting the
big and small screen, like the totally botched up dressed-as-a-sequel
remake 2001 Maniacs
(2005, Tim Sullivan) starring Robert Englund [Robert
Englund bio - click here], that manages to match neither the
original's violence nor its humour. But what do you expect from a movie
produced by the vastly overrated Eli Roth? Unfortunately, a sequel to that
movie, 2001 Maniacs: Beverly Hellbillies is set to be released
Halloween 2008. In 2007, director Jeremy Kasten remade Lewis
quintessential The
Wizard of Gore as - you might have guessed it - The Wizard of
Gore, starring Crispin Glover in the title role, Bijou Phillips, Jeffrey Combs, Brad
Dourif and the Suicide Girls, and at least he tried to update the
original and give it a post-punk look - but somehow, this concept doesn't
click, and despite all the gore, the new Wizard of Gore seems
weirdly bloodless.
But not all is lost yet, as Herschell Gordon
Lewis, a man now in his eighties, has not quite lost the desire to direct
gore movies, and his next film, Blood De Madame: The Fallen Ones, a
film starring such big names of the B-movie realm as Tiffany Shepis,
ubiquitous Debbie Rochon and Monique Dupree, is announced for 2009. Besides
directing and being remade, Lewis also turned in several cameos in films
by directors who are his declared devotees, like in Chainsaw
Sally (2004, Jimmyo Burrill), which also features a cameo by Texas
Chainsaw Massacre's (1974, Tobe Hooper) Gunnar Hansen, The Gainesville Ripper (2007,
Josh Townsend) and the upcoming movies Psycho Holocaust (2008,
Krist Rufty) and Smash Cut (2009, Lee Demarbre), the last one
starring cult genre actors David Hess and Michael Berryman, and lovely young pornstar Sasha
Grey.
Closing Words
Truth to be told, Herschell Gordon Lewis will probably
never receive a lifetime achievement award from any self-respecting
serious film institute, but on the other hand, his efforts for modern
filmmaking cannot be overrated, as he, and he alone, has brought gore to
the movies, and in buckets, too, modern action cinema would be a whole lot
less violent with out him, and - for better or worse - slasher movies and torture
porn would not exist without his pioneering efforts. But his influence
cannot only be found in formulaic genre fair, many arthouse directors
(from the fringes rather than the mainstream), first and foremost of
course John Waters, have cited Lewis as a source of inspiration, as do
most modern horror directors from every branch of the genre.
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As I have noted above, Herschell Gordon Lewis would hate
to be considered an auteur, yet one can't deny his personal style, a style
often born out of budgetary necessities, like somewhat random
editing (everytime an actor fluffed a line, Lewismoved the camera
and take it from there rather than have the actor take it from the top again
in order to save filmstock), less than perfect (sometimes even incompetent)
actors, or a bellowing off-screen narration (being done by Lewis himself in
order to save on a voice actor). Plus Lewis, who also had a background in
music, also frequently wrote the soundtrack for his own films, operated the
camera, and had his hands in special effects. Plus, thanks to his
marketing backgrounds, his films often seemed like clever marketing gags
to begin with, which invariably focussed on the obvious. Having
said all this, I admit it would be easy to just dismiss Lewis as a typical
low budget hack, a bad director even - though it's true, he has made his fair
share of artistic failures. The point is, if you manage to focus on his films'
strengths rather than their shortcomings, if you open yourself up to his
weird world of exploitation rather than just dismiss it as cheap trash,
and if you keep an open mind for humour and satire found even in the
darkest places, you are in for a quite amazing cinematic ride when
exploring his movies. Enjoy!
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