Flickering Opinions: The Gore Gore Girls

This is the first in my Herschel Gordon Lewis reviews. You're not gonna believe this guy. I can't say enough about this movie. It had everything.

So the basic plot of the film runs like this: Some whack job is brutally murdering the girls who strip at clubs owned by a guy with the improbable name of Marzdone Mobilie (the great Henny Youngman). Cute newspaper reporter Nancy Weston wants to find out who is killing the girls. Apparently, Abraham Gentry is the greatest private detective ever, and Nancy gets $50,000 from the paper to give to him if he'll agree to solve the case. The stipulation is that the paper gets the exclusive story as to his methods.

It's solid plot. It's better than Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead. Those of you out there suddenly screaming obscenities at the air around you and feeling vaguely nauseated know what I'm talking about.

So there's this detective trying to find out who's killing the girls. He's very smooth, very smart, very handsome, and also ambiguously gay. The girls are always hitting on him, including our reporter Nancy, and he's always blowing them off with some witty quip and/or bon mot (which is a type of chocolate candy, I believe).

This guy kills me. When they walk in on the first body, the reporter girl passes out. He calmly walks over to the fridge, gets a can of soda, walks back casual as you please, pops the top and tips it up slightly so that just a drop spills. This of course immediately wakes her up. This is intentionally weird and over the top. And it's damn funny. She is, of course, completely fine with the horribly mutilated corpse after that.

Marzdone's strip club is a place where semi-attractive women semi-strip to rousing Sousa marches. If John Philip where alive today, he'd be really old. We get to see some girls dancing around with pasties on and Nancy has a few drinks too many while Abe checks things out. She's so cute when she's drinking Zombies... in a tall glass mind you.

They get up after Abe gets some useful info and they leave. Nancy is REALLY drunk and passes out on the sidewalk outside. Dude just leaves her there drunk on the pavement while he flags down a cab for her, tells the driver to take her home, gives him money out of her purse, hands him her driver's license, and tells him to keep the change.

Abe is such an ass. I love him.

Abe goes and talks to one of the strippers for a bit. Some of the girls in this thing are terrible, terrible actors (still not as bad as that guy in Unspeakable, though). After he gets some information from her, he leaves. Moments later, with a different hairstyle and in a similar yet completely different outfit, she is spanked. To death. With a meat tenderizer. You heard me. Then the killer sprinkles salt on the wounds in her buttocks AFTER she's dead, once again to the strains of a rousing Sousa march. I bet JP would have a tear in his eye at this point he'd be so proud. Gooshy, gooshy sound effects as the killer squishes her head, which apparently brings joy as the killer does it a lot and gets really into it. It looks very fake, but in context it's pretty fucked up. I bet when this thing was made people fainted while watching it. Wussy people.

There is a crazed police Lieutenant who yells all the time. Abraham is damn gay, which is hysterical in this movie considering the type of girls he's having to talk to. They never SAY he's gay, but it's not precisely like they hide it either. He likes to mess with the cops. A LOT.

So there's some more killing. Face ironing, nipple clipping (milk spurts out and the killer collects it into glasses, then clinks them together like making a toast to the fine murder we've just had), head frying... all of this followed by a weird scene of a lady pretending to be freaked out by finding the bodies, and her friends pretending to shake her and calm her down to find out what's wrong. The screaming lady nearly breaks up laughing at one point, you can see her barely recover in time. The police procedure music is part of the "Anvil Chorus", and has that great factory worker quality we all love.

The best line in the movie comes when Henny Youngman's Marzdone and Abraham are talking and Marzdone starts to swear, but Abraham cuts him off very quickly --

"No Shi-"
"Very little. If any."

We learn several things that we didn't know in this film. Apparently Poland is a large producer of acid (the corrosive liquid, not the drug). Or maybe they just produce the little vials that one routinely uses to store acid. We also learn that wry gay men are completely unmeltable and can in fact CATCH bottles of acid that are tossed at them.

Abraham neatly deals with the killer. Sort of. Then, when Abe calls the police Lieutenant on the phone, they use that weird squeaky cartoon voice that sounds like Chip and Dale sped up and huffing helium. Very weird movie.

All in all, I recommend watching it at least once. Rent this thing. The acting is average, the comedy is dry and weird, and the kill scenes are gruesome. This is a great exploitation flick that mixes horror, comedy, and outright gore very well. H. G. Lewis is to be commended. This was his last film (until the upcoming Blood Feast 2) and it was a good way to go out. I'll be doing some of his earlier works soon.

One last thing -- the film ends with the fourth wall broken, Abe appearing less gay than we thought, and a title card reading:

WE ANNOUNCE WITH PRIDE:
THIS MOVIE IS OVER.