The Wizard of Gore (2007)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Boring

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Remake of the 1970 Herschel Gordon Lewis Film follows an underground reporter named Edmund Bigelow (Pardue) to a master illusionist known as Montag The Magnificent (Glover). Montag picks a person from the crowd and butchers them on stage in one form or another. Once the audience is gasping in terror and fright he brings the victim out alive to face the shocked crowd. Problem is the stage victim is turning up dead for real with the wounds inflected on stage. This movie moves into psychedelic areas where it all may be happening in the crazy mind of the main character Bigelow. What it really is, is an excuse for tons of bloody gore and bizarre hallucinogenic moments that may or may not make sense. This could be entertaining to the right Horror film fan but it failed to scare me at all. Crispin Glover has some inspired crazy moments as Montag and Brad Dourif finally got a small role that had some meat on it for him. Well made by Jeremy Kasten, but the movie just doesn't seem to have a point and in the end is just a bloody head scratcher that leaves you feeling filthy when it's over.

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.

Brutal remake of a H.G. Lewis classic. The original in these days feels dated, primitive, but it still keeps the unique charm of the master H.G. Lewis.The remake does something really good. It adds a more complex plot, character development, and sub-plots that make it more interesting and not so cheesy. The movie looks surreal, brutal, and at some points, very real. The black comedy is still here. The sex is still here. Bijou Phillips looks extremely hot! The gore is also very good. So we can say this is a revolutionized remake. Crispin Glover is great in his role as the demented Montag The Magician. Kip Pardue is just good. I didn't expect more from him. Brad Dourif, Jeffry Combs are just spectacular. Dourif in a character that looks like Rob Zombie and Combs is hysterical. I love both of them. The gore is beautiful, nasty, exaggerated. I liked it. It has the H.G. Lewis feeling on it. The settings are dark, and even look terrific. The ending will please everyone. I love when problems are solve WITH EXTREME GORE!A worthy remake that should please fans of the original and make newcomers adore H.G. Lewis.

Kip Pardue, Bijou Phillips, Crispin Glover, Brad Dourif and The Suicide Girls (!) star in the 2007 remake of "The Wizard Of Gore" as directed by Jeremy Kasten. While the box-art seems enticing – an intense Glover beckons you to join him amidst scantily clad females – the movie itself is rather flat and self-indulgent. Glover plays Motag The Magnificent, a bizarre magician who is fond of dismembering and torturing his volunteers to horrified audiences on a nightly basis. It's all fun and games in the crowd's eye, as each would-be victim emerges unharmed. However, when a young reporter by the name of Edmund Bigelow (Pardue) catches onto some crazy coincidences – namely, the participants turning up dead the next day in a fashion similar to their staged fate – the line between his reality and Montag's stage-show is blurred. Is Bigelow somehow responsible for their fates? Is Montag playing a game with him that he doesn't know about? Or is it all just a side-effect of some mind-expanding drugs?Kasten (whose previous credits are as thin as the movie's plot itself) tries to juice up a weak story with a bit of visual flare, but unfortunately wacky camera angles and color filters can't hide the lack of substance. The film is almost redeemed by its strong cast, though. Brad Dourif plays a creep well, and it serves his role appropriately. Following up "Hostel II," Bijou Phillips turns in one of her more likable roles, but it is Glover who truly steals the show. With his hilariously over-sized codpiece and Conan O'Brien-from-Hell hairstyle, it's hard to imagine he didn't know he was involved in a train-wreck, but he makes the best of things, hamming it up and his scenes are the best the film gets. Genre fans will appreciate some of the creative death scenes, although, the way they are presented (with some truly obvious and offensive CGI) kills any effectiveness whatsoever. The biggest problem, though, is the air of self-importance this film carries, especially considering how weak the story is. The bad attempt at mind-games – especially in the final act – kills any sense of enjoyment and strips the movie of at least earning the label of "enjoyable B-movie." Too pretentious for its own good and too nonsensical for what it attempts, "The Wizard Of Gore" is a messy failure, at best.At one point – somewhere in the final act – my wife turned to me and asked me if I "get this movie." The answer was "I think so," but the real question should have been "Are you enjoying it?" to which I would have answered a solid "no." "The Wizard Of Gore" doesn't have much to offer. It may confuse you into thinking it is actually a smart movie, but nothing could be further from the truth. The film is too amateurish to be convincing (think late-night HBO/Cinemax fare) and too pretentious to be enjoyed on the most basic level. I personally can't comment on how it compares to the original movie as I've never seen it, but that is irrelevant, since the movie – on its own merits – is one sorry piece of work.