THE GRUESOME TWOSOME – Random little things help me decide whether I’m going to like a film or not. In the case of ‘The Gruesome Twosome’, the placement of a stuffed pink poodle next to a radio announcing the latest co-ed murders tells me all I need to know. “But The Gruesome Twosome has so much more to offer, why stop there?” I ask myself. And true enough, practically every moment of TGT screams cinematic dysfunction and a breathtaking dedication to getting it all so completely wrong it could never not be right. This is a film where a bunch of girls in the same frilly bedroom as the pink poodle suddenly start grooving to sixties pop whilst chomping on chicken drumsticks. From his bucket on the bed, The Colonel letches at them like a dubious uncle; I’ve never seen more inspiring product placement. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In TGT, all human interaction is about as meaningful as deranged wigmaker Mrs Pringle ‘s conversations with her stuffed Bobcat (and pink poodle competitor) Napolean, or the grunts of gurning scalp ripper Rodney. It is a film whose majestic incompetence spins out into beach scenes that so disregard the fact they’re supposed to be in a movie that they practically turn to verité, into scenes that take what seems like minutes to depict someone casually opening a door, and the very pinnacle of all this, into scenes of amateur sleuthing that are utterly devoid of tension because, come on HG, you’ve already f*cking told us who the killers are! It’s genius. Imagine someone trying to do all that now? Either they wouldn’t know how, or possibly a higher authority would intervene. The juice that oils the Lewis machine is present and correct i.e., makeshift gore of the lowest quality; the splatter is not only inept but completely divorced from any narrative tension, meaning that all the offal and strawberry jam ends up looking exactly like what it is – a bad prop in a movie where no-one gives a shit. It’s still more convincing than the acting, however. All of that matters, because it’s part of what makes HG Lewis flicks genuinely magical. It’s not everything, though. I just said that ‘The Gruesome Twosome’ is a movie where no-one gives a shit, but that’s not really true. It’s not the insane badness that elevates ‘The Gruesome Twosome’ and so many of Lewis’s other flicks to a higher plane, it’s the sheer imagination and generosity of spirit, present to a degree far more pronounced than in most other genre flicks from the late sixties. I mean it. What about the curtain raiser, a conversation between two hair pieces mounted on childishly made-up dummy heads? You didn’t get that in Rosemary’s bloody Baby. TGT is a wigged-out delight that will never win friends on the grounds of good taste or good anything, but, if you happen to be Hershell Gordon Lewis flick, sometimes it’s better to have enemies. Right, Napolean?
 |