After a twenty-year hiatus, Herschell Gordon Lewis returns to the genre he created with 1963's eponymous Blood Feast - and it's good to have him back. His new film The Uh-Oh Show is a demented splatter-comedy with enough flying limbs and arterial spray to satisfy even the most ardent gore fiend - oh, and there's some nudity thrown in for good measure, too.
'The Uh-Oh Show' of the title is a popular cable TV game show where contestants compete for huge prizes. Good if they win, but for the losers there's a spin of the wheel to decide which body part is going to be lopped off! Reporter Jill Burton (Nevada Caldwell) is asked to present a piece on the popularity of the show, but not before her own boyfriend is a contestant and, err, loses his head over it. Soon Jill is investigating just what happens to what's left of the losers - and she's joined by the host of the show, Jackie, and his glamorous assistant Champagne (!) who have been fired just before the gory show goes prime time. They want answers and they want revenge on the TV boss who pushed them out of a job. In order to get them they have to stop the new show - now a series of blood spattered 'Grim Fairy Tales'- but when fairy-tale characters are armed and insane this can be quite a challenge…
The tone of this film couldn't be further away from Lewis's earliest splatter films - which although schlocky weren't intentionally comedic - but it does have something in common with the tongue-in-cheek humour of Gore Gore Girls and certainly a lot in common with the groan-out-loud grisly humour of Troma films (look out for a cameo by the inimitable Lloyd Kaufman of Troma.) It has a camp sense of fun, and its comedy lies in its grotesqueness rather than in razor-sharp jokes. People resignedly re-attaching their severed limbs and fairytale characters hacking each other to bits won't change your life and probably won't have you crying with laughter but you'll enjoy the general premise nonetheless. Lewis seems to be enjoying himself here, both by appearing as the film's storyteller (although he said, "I'm only in it because I didn't want to pay anyone!")and by knowingly pitching this film at those who can forgive a bit of hokum in a cult director's return to film.
The Uh-Oh Show got its world premier at the Abertoir film festival this year - and so eager was Herschell Gordon Lewis to present it to an appreciative audience that he brought it along before the final edit had taken place. This meant that the final sound edit, including music, was incomplete. I imagine a good game show jingle and some flesh-ripping sounds will add significantly to the final effect so it will be interesting to see this again when it's all done. It's also great to hear that HGL could have another project on the way soon: I can only hope I'll be having that much fun when I'm 80.
Review by Keri O'Shea
| Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis |