THE GORE GORE GIRLS – Here is my review of 'The Gore Gore Girls', a belated birthday present for the great H G. Hershell, tuck in and enjoy! I bet it beats that scented candle set your wife got you from Wilkos! She's shagging your gardener, by the way! Your whole life is an illusion which will crumble bit by bit as you slide towards oblivion! Thanks for the movies, though. Well, I never used to rate TGGG very much, and I kind of dismissed it for appearing to be merely a couple of gore gags strung together with dull plot and irritating characters. In all fairness, the youthful FT probably had his head even further up his arse than the contemporary version, and, watching TGGG with eyes that have since witnessed an endless tide of B movie monstrosity, these days the finer points of this trashy delight are much more obvious to me. TGGG has a slightly grating figure at its core, a private investigator who comes on like a vague cross between a regency era Jason King and Dr Who's 'The Master'. Said PI investigates the gruesome murders of some local strippers – and that's about it. For those not expecting 'Anna Karenina', TGGG contains a wealth of oddity within its simple structure. First of all, the violence is really sadistic although utterly fake, and pretty much exemplifies that HG butchershop feel. I remember being a bit thrown by how yucky the facial mutilations seemed when I first watched it many moons ago. I can take or leave that kind of thing now, but what really drew me into TGGG this time was the whole vibe, the almost verite level cheapness, which gives it a really fractured feel. There's almost always a looped psychedelic – surf – 'strip club jazz' riff playing in the background which just pushes the bad editing in your face, although this gets taken to new heights when a completely out of context military tattoo plays over shots of a young woman having her ass tenderised! Genius. All this zaniness has a hetero John Waters feel to it, too – we're given a vision of America on the brink of groovy social apocalypse, where militant feminists take down strippers and Vietnam vets vent their bloodlust by crushing anthropomorphisised vegetables. Like all or most of HGL's films, TGGG somehow has an unearthly glow, a feverishness. Films like this take the temperature of a sick, dementing culture. TGGG isn't my fave HG Lewis film, but it has gone way up in my estimation.
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