Fantasia 2010: Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore

Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore

Directed by Jimmy Mason and Frank Henenlotter

Herschell Gordon Lewis is best known for creating the “splatter film” sub-genre of horror. He is often called the “Godfather of Gore” even though his film career included works in a range of exploitation film genres, including juvenile delinquent films, nudie-cuties, two children’s films and at least one rural comedy. Without a big budget, special effects team, or professional actors and crew members, Lewis created films that he himself admits were trash. He has never regarded himself as a great filmmaker. His interest in a motion picture career was predicated solely on making money. As a filmmaker, Lewis was a businessman above all else, and his movie career was spent either chasing or creating trends.

In the documentary Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore, Jimmy Mason (producer of Blood Feast 2) and cult filmmaker/exploitation historian Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case , Bad Biology) seem intent on making a tribute video to the man as opposed to documenting his life. In fact, the majority of the feature is told by Lewis and Friedman themselves, reminiscing on their strange accounts over the years in exploitation filmmaking. Terrific story tellers that they are, fans of Lewis won’t come out learning anything they might not have already heard in previous interviews or read about in any of his biographies. Viewers are not given any information about his childhood nor his stint as an English and journalism professor at the University of Mississippi. Nothing is mentioned of him as a DJ, advertising salesman, or even station manager for various radio stations in Wisconsin. Instead, the film focuses mostly on his partnership with David F. Friedman, an ex-carny and road show man who had the background and instincts to help exploit Lewis’ films to their utmost potential, so much so that “Lewis and Friedman” would have served for a better title to the film.

Mason and Henenlotter waste no time in jumping into talk of the nudie business, showcasing the low-budget products Lewis and Friedman created such as The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (which only cost only 7,500 dollars to make) and the silly burlesque-style rip-off of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas. Eventually, after a solid 20-minute segment on Lewis’s T&A features, the film jumps into his work with the infamous Blood Trilogy and a number of his other exploitation subjects of stomach-churning carnage. We’re reminded of the sequence in Blood Feast in which a young girl has her tongue removed. The filmmakers purchased a sheep’s tongue which they had shipped in from Tampa, but due to a power shortage resulting in the refrigerator remaining warm, the tongue had begun to smell and would prove unusable for the scene, until Hall coated it with PineSol. The likes of legends such as Bunny Yeager, Joe Bob Briggs, John Waters and the always-entertaining Henenlotter himself frequently appear, and they are all are terrific raconteurs. All deliver wild accounts of their admiration and personal adventures with the man. In perhaps the film highlight, Lewis tells of an unwanted set visit by KFC’s own Colonel Sanders, who crashed one of his productions mid-shoot. Stories like that one makes for an entertaining, worthy watch, especially for fans of the director, but ultimately it makes for somewhat lazy and quickly packaged journalism.

Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore works best as an introduction to the career of a legendary filmmaker for anyone unfamiliar with his work – but the film borders on hero worship and seems made less for theatrical distribution than as an anchor for additional DVD features packaged into an anniversary box set. It qualifies as an affectionate portrait of a man who found success in gimmicks – perhaps too affectionate a portrait to really dig into Lewis’ weaknesses as a filmmaker, but it is an interesting study of the director and survey of his career and the legacy he leaves behind.