BRIDGEPORT, CT — Film restoration company Process Blue has launched a Kickstarter campaign to secure a minimum of $10,000 to restore and preserve three sexploitation movies from cult filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Process Blue has acquired the negatives to1972's "Black Love," an erotic film with an all-black cast, and 1969's "Ecstasies of Women" and "Linda and Abilene," a lesbian western shot at the Spahn Ranch in California just months before the Charles Manson clan moved in.
"These three films represent some of his finest and most unexpected work in that genre and, from what we can tell, have never been released on home video anywhere in the world nor have they been screened theatrically in close to 40 years," Process Blue writes on the project's Kickstarter.com page.
The company hopes to raise $10,000 by June 10 to begin restoring the films with the goal of releasing them on DVD and Blu-ray and, possibly, theatrically.
Lewis broke into the movie industry in the early 1960s, directing a string of campy nude features, including the 1961 comedy "The Adventures of Lucky Pierre" and the 1963 musical "Goldilocks and the Three Bares."
He is best known today as the "Godfather of Gore" and the creator of the "splatter" horror film. His most celebrated genre classics include "The Wizard of Gore," "Scum of the Earth," "The Gruesome Twosome" and "Blood Feast," long considered cinema's first ever gore film.
