I recently saw the Herchell original and it holds some mild fascination and is camp as hell but it wasn't really good except in an early John Waters style OTT sort of way. With the advances in SFX technology, it should be easy to make a remake of higher quality and better gore. No? Well compared to this turgid stool of a remake, the original is a masterpiece. What should have been an uber-gross-out popcorn remake turns out to be a navel-gazing, existential self-rimjob on... to be honest I haven't a clue! Only watch this film if you can stomach a 'plot' with no focus, where you never know if the main character is awake or dreaming due to the fact that he keeps waking up in a cold sweat every five minutes covered in blood... and then... 5 seconds later - with no blood! Oh, so that was the dream? No wait, this is the dream! Or was that the dream before? Who cares. What doesn't help is a plot with characters that have their own motives and actions but it's almost impossible to follow since it's always unclear which parts are real and which are imagined - and the direction is so poor you don't feel the film deserves the energy to unravel it all. Like Guy Ritchie's Revolver this is an absolute nightmare, and not in a good way. Crispin Glover is surprisingly bad in the titular role. His hair has been buffeted up into a bouffant so he resembles a church evangelist and it's a gratingly annoying performance. Intead of trying to bring something new to the role (creepiness? / scares?), he seems happy to just mimic the campness of the original. And as for the SFX, the old version may have looked poor, but at least it didn't hide the crappy effects behind a smoky screen so you couldn't see anything that was happening like this film does! Give this one a miss
Review of The Wizard of Gore
