Review of The Gore Gore Girls (1972) by John M — 23 Jun 2016

Underground cinema doesn't get much better than this. From the opening giallo-inspired scene of a gloved hand smashing a woman's head repeatedly into a mirror, director Herschell Gordon Lewis gives viewers a taste of the extreme violence perpetrated against women to come in The Gore Gore Girls.

He presents almost cartoonish graphic images of women's faces getting both smashed to pieces and melted away in a pot of boiling water, the snipping off of a woman's nipples and catching the resulting flowing liquid in cocktail glasses, and the most brutal use of a meat tenderizer ever put on screen, Not strictly an excuse to show extreme violence, The Gore Gore Girls also features some oddly amusing elements: a genre-defying middle-aged cane-sporting dandy private detective, a town filled with cut-rate Preston Sturges characters, and a strip club patron who randomly spends his time crushing produce at a bar owned by Henny Youngman (yes that Henny Youngman).

Holding The Gore Gore Girls to traditional critical standards would be challenging, and it would be missing the point: the experience offered by directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis and alternative movies in general is to liberate their audience from the moral constraints of society and free them to laugh and think and be disturbed in ways that would otherwise be impossible.