Herschell Gordon Lewis is the one they take seriously?

I wonder how she got all that corn syrup out of her hair.

The Criterion Channel has two gore "films" of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Blood Feast and Color Me Blood Red.

Lewis had made nudie and sex movies in the '50's. In the '60's, Hollywood was moving in on that territory and they had to do something different. They had to think of something that people would pay to see that was in such bad taste that Hollywood wouldn't do it. So they settled on gore. He made a number of movies that were just an excuse for a series of bloody gore scenes.

Now, my theory, which I've stated elsewhere on this blog, was that if you made a movie that was simply an excuse for a series of nude scenes or a series of gore scenes, your movie would probably come out pretty good. It's the Taoist concept of Wu Wei---passive achievement, or "not trying". Lewis wasn't out to do anything but make money.

Ed Wood made movies that were personal or had something to say about the threat of nuclear annihilation. And there was Phil Tucker's Robot Monster, a film about genocide. How many Roger Corman movies dealt with the subject of nuclear war? For years, the US had an extremely high death rate from cancer and it was largely due to nuclear testing and they were the only ones in Hollywood who thought this was bad.

Plan 9 From Outer Space was nicely edited. HG Lewis filmed in master shots and lit his movies like a Brady Bunch episode.

Cinema is truly the art of the artless.

I saw online that these idiot comic book fans have their superhero panties in a bunch because Martin Scorsese said he tried to watch comic book movies but he didn't consider them cinema. They're actually enraged that a 76-year-old intellectual doesn't read comic books or watch movies based on them. And they're thrilled that Michael Moore praised the new Joker movie.

Moore said somewhere:

“I loved this film’s multiple homages to ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Network,’ ‘The French Connection,’ ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick?”

Is he saying Stanley Kubrick films were full of homages to other movies? Is that the best we can hope for now?