The Wizard of Gore opens with a promise and a threat. “What you are about to see is real.” Or close enough. The house lights dim. The stage breathes. You lean in before you realize you’ve leaned.
Ray Sager steps out as Montag—smooth, unhurried, a man who never wastes a gesture. He invites women from the audience onto the stage and subjects them to increasingly grotesque “illusions”: sawing, piercing, dismembering. Onstage, it looks fatal. Afterward, the victims walk away intact. Smiling. Whole. That’s the hook. Then the hook sinks—because later, those same women turn up dead, their bodies marked exactly as they were onstage.
Judy Cler and Wayne Ratay chase the logic, trying to decide if they’re watching hypnosis, mass suggestion, or something uglier leaking through the cracks. Phil Laurenson hangs in that gray zone—skeptic, then not, then something else.
Herschell Gordon Lewis doesn’t ease off. Color screams. Blood flashes bright and wrong, thick as paint under stage lights. Not realism. Not the point. It’s spectacle—deliberate, gaudy, confrontational. Montag keeps his voice even, almost gentle, while the acts escalate. That contrast does the real work. Polite tone. Obscene action. It hums.
Scenes drift in and out of focus. Dialogue circles, doubles back, loses its place. Cause and effect slip. You expect a clean explanation—the curtain pulled back, the trick revealed. It never happens. The film prefers the question to the answer and lets the unease sit there, breathing.
And that’s part of why it stuck—why it grew into a cult object instead of fading out. The sheer audacity helps: early, unapologetic gore presented like a stage act, daring audiences to flinch and then laugh at themselves for flinching. The structure helps too, that looping uncertainty where illusion and reality refuse to separate cleanly. People argue about it. They remember it. They quote it. Midnight screenings, grindhouse roots, word-of-mouth curiosity—this is the kind of film that thrives on reaction more than approval.
It’s messy. It’s blunt. It shouldn’t quite work. But it lingers. You don’t walk away satisfied—you walk away unsettled, maybe a little amused, maybe a little complicit. The trick isn’t how Montag does it. It’s that you kept watching—and will again.
Home Video Distributor: Arrow Films
Available on Blu-ray - November 10, 2020
Screen Formats: 1.85:1
Subtitles: English
Video: 1080p
Audio: LPCM Mono
Discs: Blu-ray Disc; seven-disc-set
Region Encoding: Locked to Region A
When Arrow resurrected the Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast Blu‑ray box set, it wasn’t just a re‑release — it was a full‑scale archaeological dig conducted by maniacs who love cinema too much to let its weirdest artifacts rot in the swamp. This set arrives like a grindhouse holy text, a lavish, oversized altar to the Godfather of Gore, packed with restorations so crisp you can practically count the brushstrokes on the latex intestines. Arrow treats Scum of the Earth and its deranged siblings with the reverence usually reserved for Bergman or Kurosawa, which is exactly the kind of cosmic joke H.G. Lewis would appreciate. The packaging is a riot of lurid artwork, the extras are deep‑cut academic fever dreams, and the whole thing feels like a lovingly curated museum exhibit dedicated to the moment American cinema shrugged off good taste and said, “Let’s see what happens if we show EVERYTHING.” It’s not just a box set — it’s a blood‑drenched celebration of outsider filmmaking at its most gloriously unhinged.
Video
The Arrow Video release of The Wizard Of Gore significantly improves the film’s presentation compared to older DVD versions by using a new high-definition restoration sourced from the best available film elements. While the movie itself remains a rough, low-budget exploitation picture, the Arrow Video upgrade makes the visuals noticeably clearer, with better contrast, sharper detail, and more stable colors that bring out the gritty biker aesthetic of the late-1960s production. The improved transfer also helps preserve the work of director Herschell Gordon Lewis, presenting the film in a way that more closely reflects how it would have looked in theaters during the era.
Audio
Arrow’s release also improves the film’s audio compared to earlier home-video versions. Arrow restored the original mono soundtrack and presented it in a cleaner, lossless format, reducing background hiss and distortion that were common in older DVD transfers. While the dialogue and sound effects still reflect the limitations of the film’s low-budget 1960s production, the upgraded track makes voices easier to understand and gives the motorcycle engine sounds and music a fuller presence.
Supplements:
DISC SIX pairs How to Make a Doll with The Wizard of Gore and builds a whole mini-archive around Herschell Gordon Lewis, kicking off with his own introduction to both films before diving deeper into the bloodier half of the set. The Wizard of Gore gets the spotlight treatment: a full audio commentary from Lewis, plus Montag Speaks, an interview with actor Ray Sager, and The Gore The Merrier, where remake director Jeremy Kasten reflects on the film’s legacy and influence. The disc widens out with an episode of The Incredibly Strange Film Show, hosted by Jonathan Ross, featuring interviews with Lewis, producer David F. Friedman, actor Bill Kerwin, and cult filmmaker John Waters, all circling the strange, scrappy rise of gore cinema. It wraps, fittingly, with the original Wizard of Gore trailer—one last blast of lurid showmanship to close things out.
Commentary:
- See special features
Special Features:
- HOW TO MAKE A DOLL (1968) & THE WIZARD OF GORE (1970)
- Introduction to the films by director Herschell Gordon Lewis
- Audio Commentary on The Wizard of Gore with Lewis
- Montag Speaks – an interview with Wizard of Gore actor Ray Sager
- The Gore The Merrier – an interview with Jeremy Kasten, director of the 2007 Wizard of Gore remake
- The Incredibly Strange Film Show: Herschell Gordon Lewis “The Godfather of Gore” – episode of the Jonathan Ross-hosted documentary series focusing on Lewis’ films, featuring interviews with Lewis, producer David F. Friedman, actor Bill Kerwin, John Waters
- The Wizard of
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