Editor's Note
This unnerving remake adds further story and character depth to Herschell Gordon Lewis's bizarre 1970 shocker. When wastrel Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue), a trust-fund baby and part-time amateur journalist, attends one of the Magnificent Montag's shows, he is stricken with awe and terror along with the rest of the audience as the magician butchers female crowd volunteers on stage before the lights finally go up and the women are revealed to still be alive and intact. Unlike the rest of the audience, however, Edmund just can't let the unexplainable occurrence go. He is only further bewildered by the realization that the girls do indeed eventually turn up dead and in the same horrific condition in which they appear during Montag's shows. Is the Magnificent Montag displacing time? Is he in fact a murderer? Are his secrets even more unnerving than anyone could ever imagine? Edmond takes a headlong journey into an utterly depraved world of morbid brutality, carnivalesque Grand Guignol, and primitive drug use as he habitually attends the mysterious magician's performances, losing his sanity along the way. This head-trip of a movie sports of a cast of seasoned veterans of the disturbed and macabre, including Bijou Phillips (HOSTEL: PART II), Jeffrey Combs (RE-ANIMATOR), Brad Dourif (CHILD'S PLAY), Joshua John Miller (NEAR DARK), and the inimitably bizarre Crispin Glover as the Magnificent Montag.
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