There’s been a lot of well-deserved buzz surrounding the Roger Corman documentary Corman’s World , but without Herschell Gordon Lewis there might not have ever been a Roger Corman in the first place.
Lewis started out making nudie-cutie films in the early 1960s before single handedly launching the splatter horror subgenre with his trilogy of horror films Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965). In the coming years he’d release a handful of gore features The Gruesome Twosome (1967), The Wizard of Gore (1970) and The Gore Gore Girls (1973). In between his various horror efforts he also released a variety of other exploitation films before retiring from the film industry in 1973. Only, like a good horror monster, he came back with a vengeance some 20 years later.
Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore is a fantastic ride through Lewis’ career featuring interviews with cast and crewmembers from his various films as well as the ever-quotable John Waters and infamous B-movie critic Joe Bob Briggs.
The Godfather of Gore is an incredibly funny and often bizarre look at the early days of independent filmmaking where the only thing better than a good film was a bad film that made money.
Afterwards you might want to give the Blu-ray release of the “Blood Trilogy” a look. Despite their extremely low-budget roots the three films look remarkably better on Blu-ray than they do on DVD. The prints show a fair amount of wear but that’s all part of the charm. The films themselves aren’t exactly high art, not even for the horror genre, but they’re so over the top that you can’t help but enjoy them. Lewis even provides a commentary for each of the films (which are a bit dry but interesting nonetheless). Bonus features include over an hour of outtakes, a vintage instructional film directed by Lewis that explains how to carve a turkey as well as a short film about a voyeuristic-cross-dressing killer.