The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast

This 17-disc set presents 14 films directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, an exploitation filmmaker with the mind of a promoter who earned the nickname "Godfather of Gore" for the bloody low-budget horror films that he made in the 1960s and ‘70s. This collection features the infamous "gore" movies that cemented Lewis's reputation: Blood Feast (1963), a bloody comedy about an Egyptian cultist who caters a party with a buffet of human parts; Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), a drive-in Brigadoon with Civil War ghosts returning for bloody revenge on Northern tourists; Color Me Blood Red (1965), a comic gore film centered on a mad painter who discovers a new shade of crimson in blood and starts slicing up his models for more paint; and The Wizard of Gore (1970), about a magician who eviscerates his volunteers and then hypnotizes everyone into believing it was all an act. The performances are wooden, the dialogue hackneyed, and the effects are unconvincing at best, but Wizard delivers gross-out gore by the bucketful and earned the filmmaker a cult following. Also included here are Lewis's less notorious gore films The Gruesome Twosome (1967), A Taste of Blood (1967), and The Gore Gore Girls (1972), the nudie movies Scum of the Earth (1963) and How to Make a Doll (1968), the hillbilly pictures Moonshine Mountain (1964) and This Stuff'll Kill Ya! (1971), the witchcraft film Something Weird (1967), the biker gang actioner She-Devils on Wheels (1968), and the nihilistic juvenile delinquent drama Just For the Hell of It (1968). These cult films are notable for being crude, cheap, and outrageous, but they have their fans and are presented in an impressive special edition collection, with extras including new video introductions, audio commentaries, the 2010 documentary Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore, and new and archival featurettes and interviews. Classic cinema this is not, but Lewis's work is key in horror film history. A strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)