Cultpix Radio Ep.56 - Herschell Gordon Lewis the Godfather of Gore

Django and Smut feast on the films of exploitation filmmaker extraordinaire Herschell Gordon Lewis (HGL), aka the Godfather of Gore, who went from journalism and TV and radio sports to making nudie cuties, invented the gore genre, did a bunch of other films and then left the movies to teach others how to be a success in marketing and advertising. "Anyone can point a video camera," he said, "but it takes talent to get an audience to come and watch your film." He sure had that talent. 

Cultpix has almost all of his films, starting with nudie cuties such as "The Adventures of Lucky Pierre" (1961), "Nature's Playmates" (1962), "Daughter of the Sun" (1962), "Goldilocks and the Three Bares" (1963), "Boin-n-g!" (1963) where Lewis sends up the sexploitation biz, and "Bell, Bare and Beautiful" (1964), with burlesque legend Virginia Bell.

Lewis then switched tack completely and single-handedly invented the gore genre with the Blood Trilogy: "Blood Feast" (1963) where the caterer/cultist Fuad Ramses asks the classic question: “Have you ever had… an Egyptian feast?”, "Two Thousand Maniacs" (1964) with its epic theme song "The South's Gonna Rise Again", and "Color Me Blood Red" (1965).  His other gore greats included "A Taste of Blood" (1967), "The Gruesome Twosome" (1967), "The Wizard of Gore" (1970) and his last 70s film "The Gore Gore Girls" (1972), "a fascinatingly sick swan song." He also did other genres such as the exposé of smut peddling "Scum of the Earth" (1963), folk horror "Moonshine Mountain" (1964), trippy horror "Something Weird" (1967), delinquents "Just for the Hell of It" (1968) and biker film "She-Devils on Wheels" (1968) and Hillbilly horror  "This Stuff'll Kill Ya!"(1972).  We also have the documentary "Herschell Gordon Lewis: the Godfather of Gore" (2010).

Smut interviews Jimmy Maslon, who saw the popularity of Lewis' films on US college campuses first-hand and had the foresight to start buying the rights to his films long before the advent of VHS. They discuss the movies, music and marketing genius of Lewis.

On Lewis'; career, AllMovie wrote, "With his better-known gore films, Herschell Gordon Lewis was a pioneer, going further than anyone else dared, probing the depths of disgust and discomfort onscreen with more bad taste and imagination than anyone of his era."

And dig the HGL Spotify playlist.