Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore
Director: Frank Henenlotter, Jimmy Maslon
Part of: /slash Filmfestival

Plot:
The Godfather of Gore is a documentary about Herschell Gordon Lewis, chronicling his start with the nudies and his development of gore through interviews with Lewis himself, John Waters, David F. Friedman, Frank Henenlotter and many more.

The Godfather of Gore shows an interesting piece of cinema history but it’s a little unfocused and lengthy.

The movie sticks a little too long with the nudies, takes too long (imo) to get to the gore and it didn’t really find a good ending. But that’s usually the problem with documentaries – it’s just hard to filter out a story out of life.

But it is a fascinating piece of cinema history nevertheless. I really loved the stories from Lewis’ sets. And Lewis is interesting himself. He’s an unashamed commercialist. At one point he says:

People say my movies are too commercial. That’s like saying, “That’s a great suit. Unfortunately if fits.”

That just made me laugh real hard.

Summarising: interesting, but it’s pretty clear that neither Frank Henenlotter nor Jimmy Maslon are used to directing documentaries.

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The showed The Uh-Oh Show before this documentary but they had a technical problem and the copy was running a little slower than it should have. While it was watchable, it was hardly bearable and my brain just shut down after about 15 minutes and I fell asleep. I had a good nap, but there’s not really anything I can say about the film apart from hoping that they’ll show it again because what I saw of it looked really cool.