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The Gruesome Twosome
[Something Weird]
1967; color
Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
Starring: Elizabeth Davis, Chris Martell, Gretchen Welles & Rodney Bedell
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Ostensibly the blackest comedy of the gore cycle, The Gruesome Twosome mashes over-the-top bloody squishiness with some of the most surreal acting this side of a Bunuel film. The basics: co-eds are mysteriously disappearing from the local college campus, and a local wig shop has been getting a surge in business. The owner of said shop, a divinely wacky character named Mrs. Pringle, has also been advertising a room for rent in the local paper to which a number of college girls have responded. Trouble is, they never get to see the room. Because once they step through the door, they're quickly killed and scalped by Mrs. Pringle's retarded and bloodthirsty son, Rodney. (For those not paying attention, the scalps provide the merchandise for the wig shop.) While her son carries out the dirty deeds, Mrs. Pringle passes the time knitting and talking to a stuffed bobcat named Napoleon, delivering her lines in an almost Shakespearean fashion; more to the world at large than directly to anyone or anything. She's great, there's no two ways about it, and (as Lewis points out in his commentary) despite the fact she's essentially the film's villain, it's practically impossible to hate her. Sure she's nutty as a fruitcake, but hating her would be like hating your own grandma. Aside from Mrs. Pringle, the rest of the characters are, for the most part, woefully unequipped as far as acting skills go but their sincerity is enough to make their performances somewhat convincing. (Or, at the very least, tolerable.) As the toll of missing girls continues to mount and the town's talk turns to mur-diddly-urder, one girl, Kathy, begins to let her imagination run wild—which, according to her dormmates, is nothing new—and begins to play amateur sleuth in an attempt to figure out who the killer is. Her bumbling efforts earn her a warning from the police and hassles from her boyfriend, but once her best gal pal turns up missing, and her last known whereabouts were the wig shop, Kathy is on a tear once again. Soon she finds herself in the clutches of Rodney. As all this is going on, Kathy's boyfriend, Dave, arrives on the scene with the cops. While they're talking to Mrs. Pringle, they hear strange noises coming from other parts of her house (meaning the wig shop and it's back room) and Dave convinces the cops to let him go in. Just as he does, Kathy overpowers Rodney and gouges out one of his eyes, leaving it dangling off the side of his face. The gore level is this one is a 10+ for Lewis and this really marks the plunge into the levels of ultra-gore as seen in his later films like Wizard Of Gore and The Gore Gore Girls. During the course of the film not only is there a scalping, complete with some sort of gooey matter dripping from the inside of the scalp, there's a beheading with an electric knife (an item which was all the rage in '68 according to SWV's Mike Vraney's commentary), a machete-ing in the stomach with lots of entrail play, and the aforementioned eye gouging.
—The Kommandant
(Click here to read more of our salute to Herschell Gordon Lewis, This Stuff'll Kill Ya!)
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