Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Reverend Roscoe Boone (Jeffrey Allen, who was the Mayor in Two Thousand Maniacs!) isn’t really a man of the cloth, but don’t tell the people in his deep southern town, who he rules over as he sells moonshine and keeps the law — Agent Colt (Tim Holt) and Markel (Prentis Smithson) — at bay by getting them wasted under threat of death and then taking compromising pictures of them with underage girls.

I mean, you can see why they follow him. He gets everyone in town drunk, gives them work and then is given to fiery sermons like “Corinthians done sayeth: “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” Now, all you boys with passion get in line there.” And then all the young boys get to make out with the hottest women in town.

This is the kind of place where tourists like Sandy (Dana Demonbreun) and Jane (Joy Smothermon) come to visit and get crucified and one of the girls who set up the feds decides to tell the law that she lied, which leads to her getting stoned. There’s also a head that gets blown off that’s so brutal that I was like, “Oh yeah. This is a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie.”

It’s also Larry Drake’s first movie.

If you’re into scummy Southern movies with lots of blood and aberrant sexuality — and who isn’t — this will satisfy your urges. Kind of like moonshine, this stuff won’t kill you but enough might make you blind.