So, how’ve you been? As for me, it’s been a big-ass six months. I’ve moved to a nicer, bigger, cheaper place in a town that doesn’t reek of methamphetamine, continued working full-time as a writer for two newspapers, taken on and conquered a fully-loaded semester at college (my first 4.0 ever! Fuck yeah!), went on a spontaneous road-trip to see Tenacious D in concert (the greatest two-hours of my life), and am currently working my way through a divorce (we’re going for the record of the world’s most amicable divorce ever) and another lame season for the Dolphins, all while discovering new love (hey Emily!) and, of course, rocking as many awesome movies as I can get my hands on. Don’t you hate the way people gloat in their Christmas letters? Fuck some people!

So, as I hope you can understand, there hasn’t been much time to write reviews while writing for full-time work and full-time school, plus other stuff too. But everybody else makes time, right? Well, I’ve also been going through a crisis of faith, so to speak. You see, I’ve tried reviewing movies recently, but every movie I pick out turns out to be a turd – not good enough to be enjoyable, not bad enough to be fun or to really piss me off like The Greenskeeper or Pinocchio’s Revenge did. So, after the umpteenth lame-ass movie, I looked at myself in the mirror, caked white with cocaine and tears, and asked, “Is this really the end?” NO! So, with a few days off for New Year’s (I was originally hoping to set out on this reclamation project last week, but with moving to a new place and Christmas, and porn and hookers too, I didn’t get anything done), I’ve decided to get healthy with the best medicine I know how. This week, there will be no rolling of the dice on movies that might be worthy of my time. The answer to my problem was obvious: H.G. Lewis, my favorite filmmaker of all-time. So, submitted for your approval, and submitted for my own sanity, here is the first in a six-pack of H.G. Lewis movie reviews, The Gruesome Twosome.

Gruesome Twosome isn’t the goriest offering from the Godfather of Gore, but it’s every bit as awesome as classics like Blood Feast and 2,000 Maniacs. It marked Lewis’ return to the splatter world after a brief departure to more incoherent projects such as Monster A-Go Go and Jimmy, The Boy Wonder, as well as the decidedly less bloody A Taste Of Blood. The story centers on a batty old broad, Mrs. Pringle, and her drooling mongoloid of a son, Rodney. Mom and Rod run a mom-and-pop shop out of their home, selling wigs made entirely of human hair. And how do they get the hair for these wigs? I’m glad you asked. Under the guise of having a room to rent out, Mrs. Pringle, who is constantly conversing with a stuffed bobcat, Napoleon, gets a college coed to come into her home and shoves the unsuspecting dame into a room where Rodney is waiting, knife in hand. Rodney proceeds to scalp his victim alive, grunts and drool flowing freely. In all Lewis’ glory, we are treated to long and gruesome gore scenes that still kick ass by today’s standards, ending with Rodney toying with the gore-drenched head chunks inside the removed scalp. While these scenes are enough to get any gore-whore drooling, there are only a couple of them, so it’s definitely quality over quantity.

There are a few bare threads of a plot to keep us motivated to pay attention until the next scalping. Middle-aged teenagers from the local university, who spend their time hanging out in nightgowns and dancing in their dorm rooms, are way into wigs. Also, they’re way into rooms. So there’s usually one of them wandering into the clutches of Mrs. Pringle and Rodney for one of the two. One of them, Kathy, fancies herself a middle-aged “Young James Bond” and sets out to solve the murders that have police baffled, if not completely uninterested. Eventually, she figures things out and goes over to the wig shop, only to be fed to Rodney. But this one’s a feisty one, and she ends up stabbing Rodney in the eye with a long needle as the police bust in. Mrs. Pringle weeps, but only for her wig shop, and Napoleon, her other accomplice and Yoda-like mentor, ends up in the trash can. Movie. Over.

The real gems of this movie, however, are a few handfuls of goofy-ass unexpecteds, thrown in specially and lovingly for you, the viewer. For starters, and see if this does anything for you, the first four minutes of the film feature a voiced-over conversation between two prop heads with wigs on. Seriously, and they speak in Southern voices and not about too terribly much, basically two gals gabbing on the town. Later, in a spirited attempt at character development, we follow the exploits of Kathy as she follows some guy with a bone home for 10 minutes and cries murder, only to find that he’s burying soup bones for his dog to dig up on his birthday. But the undisputed highlight of the movie was an inane subplot (and I mean plot by the barest of standards) involving a guy who loves to eat and a girl who loves to talk about the things we talk about when we talk about love. Unless I missed them being actual characters in the movie, you never see their faces, just their mouths. As she implores him to have a heart-to-heart with her at a dinner, we’re treated to close-ups of the guy shoveling greasy handfuls of potato chips into his mouth, devouring fruit with his bare hands, gorging and burping. His only response to her squawking is the immortal line, “more beer!” Joe Don Baker, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give him a hand.

The Gruesome Twosome is a must-see for gore-whores and Lewis worshippers, and at least for a moment, it has revived my desire to watch movies and obnoxiously tell the world what I think about them. Be sure to get the super-sweet Special Edition from our friends at Something Weird Video, for commentary from the Godfather himself and extras. Thank you H.G., for making me laugh about love, again. God, I love this job sometimes.