Hold onto your hair! From the undisputed Godfather of Gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis, comes one of the most outrageously tasteless shockers ever unleashed on unsuspecting drive-in audiences!
In a quiet Miami wig shop, sweet little old Mrs. Pringle and her dim-witted son Rodney cater to fashionable young women looking for the latest styles. But business is more than booming — it’s butchering! Behind closed doors, co-eds are bludgeoned, scalped, and stripped of their luscious locks to supply Mrs. Pringle’s ever-growing collection of wigs. When a string of gruesome disappearances rocks the local college scene, it’s only a matter of time before someone pulls back the curtain on this blood-soaked beauty parlor of horrors!
There are horror films that flirt with bad taste, and then there’s The Gruesome Twosome, a rancid, neon-splattered endurance test from exploitation godfather Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Released in 1967 during the peak of Lewis’s gore cycle, the film is less a narrative feature than a crude delivery system for hacked scalps and arterial spray. Set around a wig shop run by the unhinged Mrs. Pringle and her drooling son Rodney, the plot—if one insists on calling it that—concerns college girls lured in, bludgeoned, and scalped so their hair can be harvested for fashionable coiffures. Subtlety is not merely absent; it has been buried in a shallow grave somewhere off-screen.
Lewis’s aesthetic has always been a finger-painting approach to carnage, and here he doubles down on the lurid absurdity. The blood is impossibly bright, the acting aggressively wooden, and the humor so dry it borders on surreal. Scenes linger far past comfort, not because they build tension, but because Lewis seems perversely fascinated with the mechanics of mutilation. The infamous scalpings are staged with a carnival-barker enthusiasm—lingering close-ups, rubbery props, and syrupy crimson pooling in thick, almost edible-looking swaths. It’s grotesque, yes—but also weirdly fascinating in its single-minded commitment to excess.
What makes The Gruesome Twosome endure among gorehounds is its shambling incompetence, which curdles into accidental art. Continuity collapses, characters vanish mid-plot, and a laughably tacked-on political youth subplot drifts in and out like a pirate broadcast. Yet this chaotic structure gives the film a dreamlike quality—as if we’re watching a snuff reel spliced together with a failed sitcom. Lewis was never aiming for Hitchcockian polish; he wanted sensation, and he delivers it with blunt-force determination. The result feels less like cinema and more like a grimy relic rescued from a drive-in projector clogged with dust and cigarette ash.
Arrow Video’s presentation in The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast box set treats this disreputable gem with unexpected reverence. The transfer preserves the garish color timing and film grain without scrubbing away its grindhouse grime. Special features contextualize Lewis’s place in horror history, framing him not merely as a schlock merchant but as a pioneer who understood the box-office power of taboo. Seeing the film cleaned up yet still definitely sleazy creates a strange tension—it’s like restoring a splatter painting but leaving every chaotic drip intact.
Ultimately, The Gruesome Twosome isn’t “good” in any traditional sense, nor does it aspire to be. It is bloodsoaked kitsch, a cinematic middle finger dipped in stage plasma. For seasoned gorehounds, it’s a vital artifact of American exploitation—a reminder that before horror became respectable, it was sticky-floored, threadbare, and gloriously tasteless. Arrow’s lovingly curated edition ensures that Lewis’s scalp-happy fever dream continues to shock, amuse, and repel in equal measure.
Home Video Distributor: Arrow Films
Available on Blu-ray - November 10, 2020
Screen Formats: 1.85:1
Subtitles: English
Video: 1080p
Audio: LPCM Mono
Discs: Blu-ray Disc; seven-disc-set
Region Encoding: Locked to Region A
When Arrow resurrected the Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast Blu‑ray box set, it wasn’t just a re‑release — it was a full‑scale archaeological dig conducted by maniacs who love cinema too much to let its weirdest artifacts rot in the swamp. This set arrives like a grindhouse holy text, a lavish, oversized altar to the Godfather of Gore, packed with restorations so crisp you can practically count the brushstrokes on the latex intestines. Arrow treats Scum of the Earth and its deranged siblings with the reverence usually reserved for Bergman or Kurosawa, which is exactly the kind of cosmic joke H.G. Lewis would appreciate. The packaging is a riot of lurid artwork, the extras are deep‑cut academic fever dreams, and the whole thing feels like a lovingly curated museum exhibit dedicated to the moment American cinema shrugged off good taste and said, “Let’s see what happens if we show EVERYTHING.” It’s not just a box set — it’s a blood‑drenched celebration of outsider filmmaking at its most gloriously unhinged.
Video
In Arrow’s Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast box set, Blood Feast sits like a sacred relic—the Rosetta Stone of red‑dyed mayhem. Restored in high definition, the film’s colors pop like a fever dream painted on a motel wall. You can practically smell the Florida humidity and the latex organs. The restoration doesn’t “fix” the film. It immortalizes it. Every rough edge, every clumsy cut, every moment where an actor forgets their line and stares into the void—it’s all preserved like a prehistoric mosquito in amber. This is cinema archaeology at its most delirious.
Audio
The audio, formerly a tinny echo from exploitation purgatory, comes through with startling sharpness. Every wooden line delivery, every shrill outburst from Mrs. Pringle, every dull thud of bludgeon meeting co-ed skull lands with renewed punch. Arrow wisely resists polishing away the film’s inherent sleaze. Instead, the restoration elevates the chaos, spotlighting the handmade absurdity and splatter ingenuity that define Herschell Gordon Lewis at his most shameless.
Supplements:
Disc Four of The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast pairs two of 1967’s most deliriously different Lewis outings — the scalp-happy splatter freakout The Gruesome Twosome and the comparatively gothic, talk-heavy vampire oddity A Taste of Blood — and backs them with a generous spread of contextual extras that dig deep into the Godfather of Gore’s outsider artistry.
At the center are introductions and feature-length audio commentaries by Herschell Gordon Lewis himself. Typically wry and disarmingly candid, Lewis reflects on budgets, locations, performers, and the practical realities of regional exploitation filmmaking. His commentaries are less scholarly analysis than carnival-barker memoir — full of dry humor, unapologetic pragmatism, and the kind of blunt self-assessment that only a true independent pioneer could deliver.
The newly produced featurettes broaden the perspective. In “Peaches Christ Flips Her Wig!”, San Francisco drag performer Peaches Christ celebrates The Gruesome Twosome as high camp before camp had a name, unpacking its accidental comedy, outrageous performances, and endurance as midnight-movie gold. “It Came From Florida” finds cult filmmaker Fred Olen Ray discussing the anything-goes spirit of Florida-based productions, situating Lewis within a scrappy regional scene that thrived on hustle over polish.
“Herschell vs The Censors” provides perhaps the most fascinating historical insight, with Lewis recounting battles against local censorship boards, outraged civic groups, and even angry patrons determined to shut his films down. It’s a reminder that these splatter cheapies once provoked genuine moral panic — and that Lewis’ notoriety was as much a marketing weapon as the gore itself.
Rounded out with original trailers for both features — pure, breathless exploitation hype reels — Disc Four’s supplements form an affectionate but clear-eyed portrait of a filmmaker who understood shock value as both art form and business model. Arrow’s curation doesn’t just preserve the films; it captures the showman behind them, scalpels, capes, and all.
Commentary:
- See special features
Special Features:
DISC FOUR: THE GRUESOME TWOSOME (1967) & A TASTE OF BLOOD (1967)
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Introduction to the films by director Herschell Gordon Lewis
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Audio Commentary on The Gruesome Twosome with Lewis
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Audio Commentary on A Taste of Blood with Lewis
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Peaches Christ Flips her Wig! – the San Francisco performer on The Gruesome Twosome
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It Came From Florida – filmmaker Fred Olen Ray (Scalps) on Florida Filmmaking
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Herschell vs The Censors – Lewis discusses some of the pitfalls involving local censorship and the lengths to which angry moviegoers tried to stop him
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Trailers for The Gruesome Twosome and A Taste of Blood
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