The Gruesome Twosome Reviews

Following his break with producer David Friedman on COLOR ME BLOOD RED (1965), H.G. Lewis took a brief hiatus from gore, making the children's films (!) JIMMY, THE BOY WONDER and SANTA VISITS THE MAGIC LAND OF MOTHER GOOSE and a few sexploitation epics, ALLEY TRAMP; SUBURBAN ROULETTE; THE GIRL, THE BODY, AND THE PILL; and BLAST-OFF GIRLS. In 1967, Lewis returned to gore with a vengeance, making SOMETHING WEIRD; A TASTE OF BLOOD; and GRUESOME TWOSOME in quick succession. While SOMETHING WEIRD combines ESP, the supernatural, and international spy rings, and A TASTE OF BLOOD is a vampire epic, GRUESOME TWOSOME is more akin to BLOOD FEAST, this time with a more obvious sense of black humor. Set in a major city, the film follows a demented old woman, Mrs. Pringle, who owns a building that houses both her residence and a wig shop. The old woman rents out spare rooms to boarders--usually beautiful young women--and her son, a murderous imbecile, kills the girls, scalps them, and gives the hair to his mother for use in wigs. From the opening, which shows two styrofoam wig-heads with cartoonish cut-paper facial features having a conversation, GRUESOME TWOSOME heralds itself as a comedy, but the gore Lewis presents here--scalpings, throats cut with electric knives, disembowelments--is some of the most disturbingly realistic of his career; this trend that would reach its apex with THE WIZARD OF GORE (1970).