This Stuff'll Kill Ya / The Year Of The Yahoo

REVIEW
Herschell Gordon Lewis is undoubtedly most renowned (or reviled, depending on your point of view) for the series of pioneering gore films he directed throughout the 1960’s—landmark opuses of disembowelment and dismemberment like Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs--yet as a prolific exploitation filmmaker, Lewis functioned in a wide variety of different genres, and this Something Weird release collects two examples of the hillbilly drive-in subgenre that was popular with southern audiences. The results are…well, a mixed bag, but they provide a fascinating look at Lewis’ work outside of the horror genre, as well as a glimpse of a specific type of regional no-budget filmmaking that’s been largely forgotten. This Stuff’ll Kill Ya!, an odd hybrid of bloody shocks and down-home comedy involving a fraudulent preacher and his moonshine-swilling flock, is not one of Lewis’ better films. In fact, it’s unlikely this could be among any director’s better films, given the film’s amateurish performances, static staging, and leaden pacing. Let’s move on…Year of the Yahoo!, a film thought lost until only recently, is one of Lewis’ best, a caustic and cynical satire of media politics with a country music star turned senate candidate manipulated by a team of seedy spin doctors. A sharply written and strikingly prescient precursor to social satires which would emerge later that decade, Yahoo is like a cornpone compound of Network and Nashville, with the razor-sharp dialogue and bravura performances of those classics replaced by…er, Lewis’ typically endearing ineptitude. Both films also come with informative commentary tracks from Daniel Krogh, Lewis’ former collaborator and biographer. Yee-haw, kids!