The Gore Gore Girls

Now, thanks to the Internet we know that there is a market for every vile kink you can think of. But when ol' Herschell Gordon Lewis made the switch from nudies to splatter in the '60s, the idea was pretty outré.

By the time of his first slimy swan-song - 1972's The Gore Gore Girls - regular folks also had a taste for the grue in the form of movies like Bonnie and Clyde or The Wild Bunch. Nonetheless The Gore Gore Girls remains stomach churning even today, despite low production values, doses of black humor and a pervading sense of tongue-in-cheek.

Intrepid whoever Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress impersonating Bert Convey, apparently) is lassoed into solving a series of stripper-murders by some random reporter-gal. I might have missed the connection between the two as I was busily trying to determine where Gentry's wildly patterned shirt separated from the wildly patterned couch.

Boredom-curing touches of '70s style aside, that's about it for The Gore Gore Girls which - after its ultra-violent shocker opening - slides into a series of light-n-campy performances punctuated by scenes of the extreme carnage you punters crave. HGL delivers; because some of these bargain basement effects are so over-the-top and extreme that they end up looking like authentic crime-scene photos. Others are crass, sophomoric, and utterly unbelievable - something for everyone!

Even with the laughs and head-scratchers, (like the Vietnam vet who sits in the strip-club bar drawing faces on melons which he then smashes) these murders are only for the iron-stomached. Stripper after stripper has her face misogynistic-ally smashed-in while extras from the bar scenes suddenly turn up as cops and investigative reporters.

If you're curious about Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, this ain't a bad place to start. It's pretty short and breezy (though 10-minutes less of Go-Go dancing would have been nice …) has great '70s style, and murder scenes that will make the most jaded viewers cringe.