A bizarre mindfuck of a movie, The Wizard of Gore manages to be only sporadically entertaining.
Magic, madness and mayhem join in this diabolical remake of the 1970 horror cult classic. Crispin Glover ("Willard") stars as a master illusionist whose female audience participants (Suicide Girls) are hideously murdered onstage, only to miraculously reappear untouched. But when an underground reporter (Kip Pardue, "Remember the Titans") finds they're later turning up dead with the same wounds as those inflicted during the performance, his investigation leads to unimaginable terror.
What is it with the movies I've watched lately? They start out intriguing only to fall apart at the end. First "Skinned Alive" and now The Wizard of Gore.
Director Jeremy Kasten's film establishes a visceral, real alternative world, a sort of carnival of horrors atmosphere during the opening minutes. This world is populated with all sorts of freaks, interesting and uniquely entertaining. At the center of this weirdness is Crispin Glover as Montag the Magnificent, a magician whose tricks are a lot gorier and deadly than any magician I've ever seen. The scenes of Montag performing his "tricks" on oddly willing participants (played by uniquely attractive models from The Suicide Girls website), often beginning with Montag pointing out in the audience to the participant and proclaiming "Sit down, bitch! You're going to die tonight!" are quite riveting because you just don't know what will happen next. On top of that, Glover is such a quirky method actor that you can't take your eyes off him. The tricks are all about degradation, starting with Montag stripping the women naked in front of a large audience before he eventually maims and/or mutilates them. These scenes work because of the performances mixed with the "What will happen next?" mystery.
Unfortunately, the film gets away from the showmanship aspect and devolves into a lame "who and how did they do it?" attempt at a mystery with way too much emphasis on making things bizarre and surreal that it forgets to be entertaining. Kasten has to share the bulk of the blame because he not only directed but also edited the film. It is his fancy, inane showy for showy sake editing that almost singlehandedly derails the film. Not that the dull lead performance by Kip Pardue helps matters. The man couldn't seem more disinterested in the proceedings if he tried. And poor Bijou Phillips is given next to nothing to do. Only the aforementioned Glover and Brad Dourif seem to be having fun with their roles.
Really, that's the problem with the film as a whole. While it starts off fun and intriguing when Glover and the Girls take center stage, once Pardue becomes the main focus The Wizard of Gore becomes an over-edited bore.
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