Product Details

• Actors: Andrea Barr, Rodney Bedell, Marcelle Bichette, Tom Brent, Ronnie Cass
• Format: Color, DVD, Special Edition, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0)
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: August 22, 2000
• Run Time: 72 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6305944261
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,338 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Gruesome Twosome (Special Edition)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

The most barbaric humor since the guillotine! Crazy old Mrs. Pringle runs "The Little Wig Shop," where she specializes in wigs made entirely of human hair. Offering to rent rooms to local college girls, Mrs. Pringle scurries the gals into a back room where her psycho son, Rodney, provides the "wigs" for his mama by gorily scalping the women. But when a co-ed friend of amateur sleuth Kathy disappears, Kathy investigates until she too comes face to face with Rodney and his new electric carving knife... A macabre blend of humor and horror, "The Gruesome Twosome" is another berserk epic from director Herschell Gordon Lewis (The Gore Gore Girls). It also has one of the strangest openings of any horror film: two Styrofoam wig heads with cartoon faces amiably chat about the upcoming plot until one of them abruptly gets stabbed. WOW!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars surreal, July 19, 2002

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gruesome Twosome (Special Edition) (DVD)

If you've never experienced a Herschell Gordon Lewis film this is as good a place to start as any.Everything,literally eveything about his ultra low budget epics is so wonderfully inept yet the end result is always hugely entertaining and compulsively watchable.The other-wordly like acting is a hoot.The camera hardly ever moves.Shots are framed badly.If you can take the excessive gore(which adds to the surreal tone)that is present in most of Lewis's films check a few out for something quite unlike anything you've seen before.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A mother, her son, and his new electric knife!, February 26, 2004

By 

B-Movie Nightmares "obsessed with cinematic c... (Sparks, NV United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gruesome Twosome (Special Edition) (DVD)

For those of you unfamiliar with the work of director Herschell Gordon Lewis, I advise you to start with 2000 Maniacs (his best in my opinion) or Blood Feast. For those who have seen those classics, I would consider this a "minor" yet worthwhile work along the lines of Color Me Blood Red. You get four good gore scenes, which may not seem like a lot, but when the movie only runs about 1 hr. 15 min. that's actually pretty decent.

The plot concerns the elderly Mrs. Pringle and her drooling, mentally deranged son who run a wig shop. The wigs are made out of human hair which the son obtains by killing and scalping beautiful young women. Clearly the old-woman-helping-her-son-kill idea influenced several newer horror films, most obviously the classic Mother's Day. Mrs. Pringle also has a stuffed cat (I'm guessing a leopard) named Napoleon who she talks to repeatedly throughout the movie. Napoleon has a central role in this film; those familiar with Lewis' work will appreciate the fact that an embalmed animal can steal a scene from some of the human actors involved.

Objects also become actors in the much-discussed introduction to the movie, which features two styrofoam heads with wigs talking to one another. It's this kind of low-budget inventiveness that makes Lewis' movies entertaining. Sure it pads out the running time, but what the heck! it's creative and bizarre. I also enjoyed the movie that was playing at the drive-in: the camera never shows the couple's faces but instead shows their actions at the dinner table during their conversation. Their hands pour beer, handle food, crush potato chips, and smash fruit in a way that corresponds with what they're saying. Truly weird.

The heroine of The Gruesome Twosome is a meddling college girl who is trying to figure out the recent murders. Don't expect rocket science or great acting here. Do expect her and her college girlfriends to start dancing in unison, whether in the dorm room or at the beach. I especially liked the girl who danced on the bed while eating a KFC drumstick. Careful not to choke!

The usual nice extras are here from Something Weird Video. There's a short film about wig making, Lewis' running commentary through the feature, and Lewis' gallery of exploitation art (print ads, posters and other promotional material from his films). I really enjoyed the ads, but in some cases the small print was difficult or impossible to read. My main complaint about the DVD (and every other Something Weird release of Lewis) is the inside cover. If you've never seen the movie before, don't look at it! It gives away key gore scenes in full-color close up. Other than these minor drawbacks, I recommend Lewis' horror films to fans of gory sick humor and bizarre, low-budget film making.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Weak, February 6, 2004

By 

Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Gruesome Twosome (Special Edition) (DVD)

In 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis, an independent filmmaker best known for making limited release "cutie" pictures, changed forever the face of American cinema when he released "Blood Feast." That film, as low budget as you could possibly get, heralded the era of the gore film. While it would be quite some time before Hollywood caught on to the fact that certain segments of the movie going public hungered for films containing nauseating scenes of explicit violence, H.G. Lewis took one look at the receipts for "Blood Feast" and decided he better quickly make another movie similar to this one. What followed was a series of gruesome zero budget shockers, films like "The Wizard of Gore," "A Taste of Blood," "2000 Maniacs," and this exercise in bloodletting, "The Gruesome Twosome." Lewis went on to make one more gore film, the downright offensive "The Gore-Gore Girls," before retiring from the film business in order to devote his time to the advertising business. It wasn't until 2002 that the director returned to form with "Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat," a movie which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Godfather of Gore still has what it takes to gross out an audience.

"The Gruesome Twosome" tells the story of Mrs. Pringle, her mentally defective son Rodney, and her stuffed cat Napoleon. Mother and son live alone in a rambling house where they run a small wig business out of a room on the ground floor. The store draws in many customers, so many that in order to restock the product Pringle happens upon a novel idea. Since a university sits right down the road, Pringle puts out a bogus advertisement about a room for rent that soon draws in plenty of potential female boarders. The girls aren't in the house for more than a few minutes before they learn the horrific truth about this elderly lady and her disturbed son. Pringle shoves the victim into a room, locks the door, and unleashes Rodney on the frightened victims. A bloody scalping, an evisceration, and a tracheotomy performed with an electric carving knife provide the grue typical of a H.G. Lewis film. The disappearances of several women worries Kathy, a university student with an overbearing attitude and a nosiness that goes beyond all rational sense. When Kathy's friend Dawn suddenly disappears after looking for lodgings, our annoying amateur sleuth starts to uncover clues that will lead to her own personal showdown with Pringle and Rodney. "The Gruesome Twosome" is definitely not the goriest Lewis motion picture, not by a long shot, but it does contain a few scenes guaranteed to turn the stomach. Unfortunately, the infrequent gore is about all this film offers the viewer.

As far as Herschell Gordon Lewis films go, "The Gruesome Twosome" is a mediocre effort. Sure, all Lewis films rely heavily on atrocious acting, wooden pacing, and sloppy editing, but the outlandish gore sequences usually balanced out--to some extent anyway--these horrendous flaws. Regrettably, the gore scenes are rare in this picture, but that is the least of our worries here. The Kathy character poses the biggest problem; she is so annoying and so steadfast in her ridiculous quest to blame anyone for the disappearances that I quickly hoped she would come to a bad end. There is some nonsense about her boyfriend getting angry with her about her inquisitiveness, along with several useless scenes involving Kathy and her girlfriends, which totally stifle the pace of the film. Moreover, Lewis admits on the commentary that he failed to shoot enough footage to manufacture a seventy plus minute film. The sort of theaters that showed Lewis films would only present movies of a certain length, so the director had to add several scenes of filler to flesh out "The Gruesome Twosome." Check out the ludicrous opening sequence with the talking mannequin heads or the confusing potato chip/fruit sequence midway through the film to see what I am talking about.

Still, a few notable items stand out. The actress who played Mrs. Pringle did a good job with her character. She has a hilarious tendency to turn everything he says into a rhetorical question directed to her stuffed cat Napoleon. After watching a few scenes with Pringle, I began to seriously think that this person might have been the most competent actor Lewis ever hired. The chap who played Pringle's son Rodney also did an effective job as the grotesquely unhinged killer. His leers and grunts while he commits a dastardly deed are quite disturbing in their own right. Sadly, Rodney gets little screen time. I think if "The Gruesome Twosome" had spent more time developing Pringle and Rodney, it would have been a much better film. Instead, we get the two aforementioned filler scenes, a few cheesy dance sequences with Kathy and her friends, and boring shots of the beach, a car race, and a chase scene involving Kathy and the school janitor. Boring!

DVD extras include a theatrical trailer for the film, a poster gallery from Lewis's numerous films, a commentary from the man himself, and a clip about making wigs that came from one of the "Mondo Cane" films. The picture quality is sub par, with fading colors and streaks appearing with frightening regularity. This is especially disappointing when one remembers how great "2000 Maniacs" looked on DVD. While "The Gruesome Twosome" disappoints in many areas, it is still a movie with that distinct Herschell Gordon Lewis feel. Personally, I would watch "Blood Feast 2" or "The Wizard of Gore" again before diving back into this mess. "The Gruesome Twosome" is for Lewis completists only.