The Gore Gore Girls

The Gore Gore Girls
1972
Directed By Herschell Gordon Lewis



SYNOPSIS

Someone is killing and horrifically disfiguring strippers. A reporter (Amy Farrell) and a famed sleazy private investigator (Frank Kress) team up to solve the murder spree.



MY THOUGHTS

For better or worse, The Gore Gore Girls is a fine example of an exploitation film.

The exploitation genre freely celebrated it's liberation from Hollywood's dead production code. Old taboos like extreme violence and nudity were allowed to crop up in mainstream film in the 1960's. Exploitation films 'exploited' these and showed them to the extreme. Once the newness of all this liberation faded, so did the genre.

The genre was mostly made outside of Hollywood and far from the major studios. The films would almost never make it into a traditional theater. Only the more sleazy drive-ins and theaters would show them. Their very low budgets and subject matter helped these 'fringe' films make a healthy profit.

Director Herschell Gordon Lewis was one of the kings of the genre. The Gore Gore Girls would be his last for 30 years.

This film lives up to its title and features gore to the extreme. Heads are shredded with bare hands, throats slit, etc. This has to be one of the most misogynistic films I've ever seen. Not recommended for the squeamish. The gore is very obviously fake but it's still nasty.

The humor is also over the top and is as campy as humor can get, complete with characters quipping directly to the camera. The humor is a dark and sadistic as the violence.

The acting (if you want to call it that) is uniformly bad but that's the point. The strippers were picked for their nice bodies, not because they could speak. Their 'seductive' dances are very dated but add to the campy fun.
Of all people, legendary stand up comic Henny Youngman appears as the owner of the affected strip clubs. Most of his dialogue wisely consists of one liners, as that was his specialty ("Take my wife, please!" doesn't appear here.)

I have to be in a specific dark, cynical, depraved mood to truly enjoy an exploitation and thankfully I was tonight.