Review of The Gruesome Twosome

Mr. Hershell Gordon Lewis, I'm a great fan of your twisted imagination... but you surely have issues!! "The Gruesome Twosome" may not be Lewis' best film (far from it, actually) it's yet another fun demonstration of his eccentric style and progressive horror visions. The story revolves on a sweet, yet utterly crazy old lady who talks to a stuffed wildcat named Napoleon and owns a little wig shop near a university campus. The wigs in her store look so realistic because they're made of actual girls' hair, bloodily scalped by her retarded son when they visited the house in order to rent a room! The sequences that are relevant to this story, like the slaughtering of the girls and the clumsy police investigation, maximally cover about 20 minutes of the 73 minutes playtime. The rest is pure padding, varying from morbidly funny gimmicks to hugely annoying and overly talkative scenes. I don't have a problem with a little bit of padding now and then, but Lewis slightly exaggerates here and he should have used the lost time better. The kinky intro with the gossiping foam heads was quite cool, but the overlong stalk-the-janitor sequence as well as the emotional girlfriend/glutton boyfriend scene were downright pointless. And what do you think about a bedroom full of college girls that start dancing out of the blue whilst eating fried chicken? Still, I can't possibly rate this movie any lower than 6 simply because H.G. Lewis is a horror pioneer and the gore in "The Gruesome Twosome" is so effectively nauseating and over-the-top gross! Poor Rodney scalps, cuts up and even fully dissects innocent girls with a careful eye for detail. Just make sure you haven't eaten before you watch this movie!