“Yes! I am Montag. Master of illusion. Defier of the laws of reason. What is real? Are you certain you know what reality is? How do you know, that at this second, you aren’t sleeping in your bed, dreaming that you’re in this theater?”

In Herschell Gordon Lewis’s bloody 1970 schlock-fest, The Wizard of Gore, a TV talkshow host and her newspaper sports-writer boyfriend investigate a “master illusionist” who seemingly kills off female volunteers from the audience of his shady, underground Grand Guignol with horrific dismemberment, and yet, take a bow, they actually weren’t killed. Well, not yet at least. That happens later. Or does it?

The Wizard of Gore, with its reverse Cartesian logic (“I think therefore I’m… not sure I’m dead... yet”), prodigious flesh and blood quotient and the surreal speeches of deadly magician Montag, occupies a space shared only by the Coffin Joe films and Bloodsucking Freaks, one of the most infamous, morally depraved and misogynistic grindhouse flicks of all time (Bloodsucking Freaks is actually based on The Wizard of Gore). The demented funhouse mirror reasoning that permeates the film is quite effective and adds a philosophical underpinning to the proceedings that take it to a higher intellectual level (I’m not kidding!) and making it unique amongst gorehound classics.

What was once only able to be viewed in a urine and vomit-stained Times Square flea-pit or in low rent drive-in movie theaters down south can now be viewed, in its entirety, on YouTube… You used to have to work to see this stuff!