THE GORE GORE GIRLS (1972)
Article 3280 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-13-2010
Posting Date: 8-7-2010
Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
Featuring Frank Kress, Amy Farrell, Hedda Lubin
Country: USA
What it is: More Gore from Herschell

Someone is brutally killing and mutilating strippers. A newspaper hires a private detective to solve the murders.

This movie marked the end of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s directorial career for a good thirty years. By this time, he had achieved a certain level of competence in his filmmaking, and the acting shows some improvement over his earlier movies. He even managed to land a name star – Henny Youngman. As a result, this movie just looks and sounds better than some of his earlier movies. The gore is pretty extreme, but I wouldn’t really call it convincing. Considering the misogynistic nature of Lewis’s gore movies, I’m a little surprised that I don’t find his work near as offensive as that of certain other directors, maybe because I don’t really sense any nihilistic hatred underneath; I don’t sense that Lewis really takes any of this seriously, and I find after a while that I can’t either. If there’s any one thing I really noticed, it’s that Lewis was one pretty strange filmmaker; he clearly has a sense of humor (though it is wildly uneven), and there are numerous head-scratching touches (why are all the police investigations accompanied by a bad arrangement of the “Anvil Chorus?”). Yet, somehow, it managed to hold the attention even during the non-gory sequences.