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The Gore Gore Girls (1972)

Dir: H G Lewis.

H.G Lewis's last gore film (until the recent "Blood Feast 2" ) before he moved into marketing/advertising, is a gory, high camp exercise in black-comic nastiness.

When erotic dancer Suzie Creampuff (real name Ethel Creampuff!) is murdered, the local paper gets their star reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) to hire the famous private eye Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress) to track down the killer. For exclusive story rights of course.

Gentry agrees and with Nancy in tow he heads to the strip club where Ms. Creampuff worked. And it's a classy joint! It looks like a garage with a few chairs and tables dumped on the floor. Here Gentry watches the delights of skinny girls doing boring dances in nipple cones and really bad underwear. One of the dancers is named 'Candy Cane' and after giving our intrepid investigator a lead, she is battered on the head (cue a gruesome gag where the gum bubble she is blowing is suddenly filled with blood) and has her face horribly mutilated exactly like Ethel. Sorry, Suzie.

Gentry checks out another of the clubs where the girls worked called 'Tops and Bottoms'. Here we actually have red painted walls and blue drapes, so this is obviously a step up the ladder for any self respecting stripper. Gentry (after getting Nancy drunk to keep her out the way) sees a man at the bar drawing faces on melons and various vegetables before squashing them! Turns out this freaky fellow is named Grout and he's an ex marine known for mutilating the faces of dead soldiers.

The plot thickens when a 'Women's Lib' group attack the club. While this feminist frenzy is going on, Grout flees and Gentry (leaving the drunk Nancy to be picked up off the sidewalk and driven home by an old cab driver. Who says chivalry is dead!) drives one of the strippers back to her home. The stripper (in between wild eyelash fluttering) tells Gentry that the leader of the 'Women's Lib' group has threatened the girls.

As the killings continue and a comic Police Detective stumbles around without a clue, Gentry grills the owner of the clubs, one Marzdone Mobilie (Youngman, a famous Jewish comic who also appeared as himself in such diverse films as "Death Wish 2" and "Goodfellas") and hatches a plan, involving Nancy and Mobilie's best strip club (yes, believe it or not there are even better things awaiting up and coming strippers than blue drapes and red walls) to catch the dastardly killer. But is it the mad, melon mutilating marine the frenzied feminist or...someone else? All shall be revealed. Which is more than the strippers do by the way!

H.G., God bless him, has made a film that defies logic. It plays like a Sunday afternoon TV detective show (of the cheesiest kind) but then goes so over the top in the murders that all expectations are wonderfully stripped (ha ha) away.

The facial mutilations are easily the nastiest thing seen in any of Lewis's famous gore films, and are only saved from being completely offensive by the dodgy model head effects. We are shown the killer mutilating in graphic close up as faces are literally ripped open in a welter of pulped flesh and blood, eyes are pulled out and squashed then the ruined sockets stabbed and hacked until the features are reduced to smoking ruins by a hot iron and cooking oil.

These sequences are all done in such a slow and deliberate way that, if the effects were better, it would put them in the top rankings of extreme cinema. Parts of this make "Blood Feast" look like "Mary Poppins". It's also nice to see a strong Giallo influence in the killings as the unseen killer commits the murders wearing those iconic black gloves that any fan of Italian horror cinema will gleefully recognize.

Lewis also adds a strong sexual tint to the deaths. One women has her panties pulled down and her bare backside pounded to a mush with a meat tenderizer and one has her nipples snipped resulting in a truly bizarre sequence where one spurts out plain milk and the other chocolate milk!

And the surreal elements don't end there. One bizarre moment is a speeded up sequence of drinks being mixed to comedy organ music, Gentry floors three heavies, with his ever present cane sounding bells as he hits them. Then there are a couple of times where Gentry and Nancy actually talk to the audience!

But, aside from the stupendously gory murders, the other highlight is the character of Gentry himself. He is amazingly rude to almost everyone he meets and goes through the whole grizzly plot (wearing some outrageous floral shirts) without ever breaking a sweat. One choice insult is when he places an empty, long necked bottle back on the tray of a strip club waitress he dislikes saying "A girl like you should know what to do with this"! He also has the strangest line in the film (and that's saying something) when after first meeting Nancy he says to her as she leaves "Stay out of trees". Yeah, I have no idea either.

As you would expect from a Lewis movie the acting ranges from the barely acceptable (Farrell) to the outrageously dreadful. With the strippers being particularly bad. But somehow a H.G. film without these crap performances just wouldn't feel right!

And finally the humour on show is at least (mostly) intentional, unlike a lot of "Blood Feast" and once you add the wonderfully camp character of Gentry what could easily have been a fatally nasty film is actually turned into a highly enjoyable piece of gore filled trash that, even if the end is a bit anticlimactic, is a must see for any fan of Exploitation cinema.

And you just have to like any film that ends with the words..."We announce with pride: This movie is over".