The Gore Gore Girls

Tartan Terror round up their excellent 'Herschell Gordon Lewis Collection' with probably the best release yet...'The Gore Gore Girls', a stunning and wild gore extravaganza that will please blood hounds no end!

The film opens with a stripper getting her face smashed repeatedly into a mirror by a black gloved killer (sans so many vintage Italian shockers that we know and love from the 70's). Then following the opening titles we meet super suave private detective Abraham Gentry (a sort of poor man's Jason King) who is being tempted onto the trail of the strippers killer by spunky journalist Nancy Weston who waves the offer of a $50,000 pay off for the murderers identity. Accepting the case, Gentry heads off to the deceased stripper's workplace to chase up some clues.

The black gloved killer continues to keep ahead of the wily detective and as time goes by the body count grows, each new murder more violent and brutal than the last. Will Gentry and his bubbly sidekick Nancy catch up with the killer? Who is the mysterious killer? Is it the psychotic ex-Nam veteran Grout who passes his time pounding melons whilst reminiscing about the skulls he crushed during the war? Or is it the fervent stripper hating Women's Libber Mary seeking ultimate retribution? Sure in time all will be revealed but what will be the renaissance for genre fans here will no doubt be the ridiculously extreme gore mayhem that will have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief!

'The Gore Gore Girls' is without doubt the pinnacle of H G Lewis's gore genre career. Whilst all his movies are strict to their B-movie exploitation origins (i.e. they are mindless badly produced bunkum fun), on the main outside of classics like the original 'Blood Feast' and 'Two Thousand Maniacs' they've been pretty maudlin affairs that are simply brainless fun for the exploitation generation. But with 'The Gore Gore Girls' Lewis pulls down all the barriers on the relentless violence front and delivers long brutal images of ultra violence that we rarely see, even to this day. And amazingly best of all is the fact that the BBFC (UK film censors) have let the film go through completely uncut! (Obviously someone was either drunk or in a great mood that day!)

Whilst outside of the gory fun there are some stand up points that make this grade Z movie a whole lot of fun (Frank Kress as investigator Gentry is a treat and the script/dialogue as a whole is the best yet for this series), it is the splatter that will steal the show. Now what about the gore is it that makes this one so prominent? Well, how about the long gruelling scene of the lady that gets her face hacked into mush in close up or the woman who has her bare arse bludgeoned, covered in salt and her eyes gouged out with a meat fork! And that's not all, what about the scene where a young woman has a hot iron held to her face then her nipples are sliced off with shearing scissors and her friends face is held in a scolding hot chip frying pan!! During all of these scenes the camera holds close to the bloody carnage of the semi naked women for long periods of time, there's no quick cut editing here - pure gory exploitation overload and lovingly presented in (as the packaging always states) 'in startling colour'.

Sure 'The Gore Gore Girls' suffers from all the usual low budget misery that these old B-movies do (i.e. bad camera work, cheeseball acting etc) but this one is the business and is without a doubt the most extreme splatter release to legitimately hit the shelves uncut in the UK. Lovely finger licking fun stuff!

The disc from Tartan is a nice enough package also. The print used is actually very good considering the origins and age - bright, sharp and colourful. And the audio is pretty much hassle free too, clear and audible and no doubt matching how it sounded when the film was first made. The extras (contained within the funky animated menu screens) are very much on par with the rest of this latest batch of the collection with a nice old trailer for the film itself, an all too brief stills gallery, some film notes by Chris Campion (which is more like a review than anything else), the usual 'bio' pages and the bewildering inclusion of some 'Copy Notes' from the gore meister himself - these though are more to do with marketing (of the business sense) than low budget movie making but are somewhat interesting none the less. As ever with Tartan releases there are a selection of Tartan Terror trailers and the H G Lewis Teaser Trailer reel.

If you plan to buy only one of this latest batch of H G Lewis releases this month then this should definitely be the one. Also, if you haven't yet discovered the great mans work then jump in feet first and see what is definitely his best work to date. But be warned - this one is as bloody as hell! A splatter classic and a worthy DVD release from Tartan Terror - essential, buy it now!

Review by Alan Simpson