If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if a rancid joke book and a gallon of stage blood tried to solve a murder together, The Gore Gore Girls has your answer. Herschell Gordon Lewis’ last major splatter outing isn’t so much a movie as it is a sloppy dare: “How long will you keep watching this?” It’s billed as comedy-horror, but most of the time the only thing dying on screen is the punchline.
The “plot,” bravely wearing that word like an ill-fitting costume, follows Abraham Gentry, a smug private investigator, and Nancy Weston, a reporter for The Globe, as they attempt to catch whoever is cheerfully butchering strippers. It starts with the murder of Suzie Cream Puff, and before long we’re in a full-on strip-club whodunit, except the mystery is thinner than the costumes and treated with about the same level of respect. Gentry is supposed to be a brilliant, eccentric sleuth; instead he comes off like a discount Sherlock Holmes who’s read too much Ayn Rand and drinks like he’s being paid per glass.
His sidekick, Nancy, is nominally a journalist but spends most of the film being plied with alcohol until she staggers around in a state of perpetual tipsiness. It’s meant to be comedic—ha ha, the plucky reporter can’t hold her liquor—but mostly it plays like someone wrote “comic relief” on a napkin and then spilled a bar on it. The film tries to morph their dynamic into a romance by the end, but it’s hard to root for a couple whose meet-cute is “I’ll use you as bait for a murderer and maybe you’ll be too drunk to notice.”
The murder investigation itself feels like a parody of detective work, except no one remembered to write actual jokes. Gentry and Nancy wander from strip club to strip club, questioning suspects who are less people and more walking gimmicks. There’s Joseph Carter, an early red herring. There’s Grout, the mentally unstable Vietnam vet who crushes vegetables to relieve stress, because subtle commentary on war trauma is for other films. He draws faces on squashes and tomatoes and then smashes them, which is about as nuanced as this movie ever gets: “Get it? He’s unstable.” Yes, we get it. We got it ten minutes ago.
Then there’s the radical feminist group, crashing into the club with slogans like “Lewd is Crude” and “Quit with Tit.” They’re clearly meant to be ridiculous, a gag at the expense of women’s liberation, but they’re written with the grace of a drunk uncle’s Facebook rant. The movie wants extra credit for satire while also leering at every woman in sight. It’s hard to take its “commentary” on anything seriously while it’s staging yet another strip routine that looks like it was choreographed in a parking lot.
Of course, this is an H.G. Lewis film, so the real star is the gore. The kills are where he puts his heart—if not his budget. We get a series of increasingly grotesque set pieces, each one trying to top the last in bad taste. Lola Prize has her buttocks pounded with a meat tenderizer and then seasoned like a Sunday roast. Candy Cane is dispatched with gleeful excess. Bodies are mutilated, blood sprays, and it’s all presented with the maturity of a middle-schooler who just discovered the horror section at the video store. Sometimes the effects are inventive in their cheapness; sometimes they look like a butcher shop and a craft store had a messy breakup.
The problem isn’t just that it’s gory—that’s the deal you sign up for. The problem is that the film is convinced that outrageous violence alone can carry it. There’s no tension, minimal suspense, and very little sense of consequence. The victims are strippers with cutesy names and barely any characterization, existing primarily as setups for the next splatter punchline. The killer’s psychology, once revealed, is an eye-rolling cliché: jealousy and rage over lost beauty, literalized by burn scars on Marlene’s chest. The film pats itself on the back for this “twist” as if it’s just cracked the code on female rage, when it’s basically shouting, “Ugly girl mad at pretty girls!” and calling it a day.
Marlene herself, when finally unmasked, feels like a wasted opportunity. Up to that point she’s just an obnoxious waitress with a bad attitude, a personality trait she shares with most of the cast. The revelation that she was once a stripper whose breasts were destroyed in a fire could have been the starting point for something—if not profound, then at least interesting. Instead it’s just another excuse to ogle and mutilate female bodies, first figuratively, then literally. Her death—tumbling out a window and having her head crushed by a car—is played as a kind of gory punchline, as if the movie is winking and saying, “That’s what you get for caring about things.”
Henny Youngman pops in as strip-club owner Marzdone Mobilie, because what this slaughterfest really needed was a one-liner machine in a cheap suit. His presence gives the film a strange, bargain-basement Borscht Belt vibe; the jokes are old when he tells them, and the editing doesn’t help. Scenes drift, timing collapses, and punchlines hit the floor harder than Marlene.
The big climactic “trap” at the amateur strip contest encapsulates everything wrong with the film. Gentry gets Nancy blackout-level drunk and nudges her into performing, turning her into bait for the killer. She goes all the way, wins the contest, and then stumbles home, blissfully unaware she’s being used as a walking mousetrap. When Marlene attacks and Gentry heroically pops out from behind the door to reveal he had it all figured out, the movie expects us to applaud his genius rather than ask why the supposed hero is treating his supposed love interest like disposable evidence.
By the time we get to Gentry’s long explanatory monologue—laying out how he deciphered the clues from Grout’s comments about Marlene’s burns, her past as a stripper, and her hatred of the other dancers—you can feel the film congratulating itself. It’s doing the Agatha Christie thing, except Christie never had Poirot announce the end of the story and then immediately start making out over a fresh corpse. Gentry looking straight into the camera and telling the audience the movie is over is the one moment of honesty in the entire 95 minutes. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone flipping on the lights in a dingy bar and saying, “Seriously, go home.”
The final title card—“We announce with pride: this movie is over!”—lands like a confession. Yes, it’s smug. Yes, it’s meant to be meta and cheeky. But it also sounds a lot like relief. The Gore Gore Girls has flashes of bizarre energy and a kind of junk-food charm if you’re in exactly the right mood—half-drunk, nostalgic for 16mm grime, and morally numb. But as a horror-comedy, it mostly proves how hard it is to do both at once. The horror isn’t scary, the comedy isn’t funny, and the most effective emotion it generates is the faint, creeping sense that everyone involved was having more fun than you ever will watching it.
