THE GORE GORE GIRLS

By 1972, the formula had truly gone stale. THE GORE GORE GIRLS (or BLOOD ORGY, depending on the print of the film) was Herschell Gordon Lewis’ swan song, his last foray into splatter until 2002’s belated BLOOD FEAST sequel. All the trademark Lewis elements are here. The black humor, the self-aware gags, the tomato paste gore, the hammy actors playing cornball roles… Inch for bloody inch, this is a Lewis film. And it is boring.

And it wasn’t just me who was bored by THE GORE GORE GIRLS, Lewis was too. You can see it all over the film, in every frame, in every ill-timed edit. Lewis was running out of patience and energy. This long winded tale of a black gloved psycho mutilating strippers feels more like a eulogy than a serious effort. Times had changed and so had the exploitation movie. The kind of cheap gore flicks that once filled drive-ins were now antiquated laughing stocks and Lewis, the man who turned splatter into gold, was all but a dinosaur.

THE GORE GORE GIRLS is filled with scenes of bored strippers shaking their tits while looking directly into the camera. The gore is still plastic bodies filled with hamburger and mannequin limbs with one end dipped in stage blood. The big cameo in the film is given to Henny Youngman, a man whose humor had aged as well as his body. 1972 had given us films like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, TOWER OF EVIL, DEATHDREAM, RAW MEAT, THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW, DEMONS OF THE MIND, THE ASPHYX… The exploitation film had left Lewis behind years ago. His style of film simply could not compete with the more socially conscious (and therefore all the more immediate) horror films of the time.

THE GORE GORE GIRLS begins with a stripper having her face rammed repeatedly into a mirror. In order to solve the mystery of who has been leaving dead dancers all over the city, Nancy Weston, a reporter for the Globe newspaper, hires Abraham Gentry, a world famous private investigator. As our two leads do the bare minimum required to solve the case, the killer continues to mutilate women in various uncomfortable ways. Throats are slashed, eyes are ripped out, heads are mashed into a pulp. One woman has her nipples sliced off, the left one producing a stream of milk, the other a stream of chocolate milk. Her roommate has her head shoved into a bowl of hot cooling oil. In another scene, the killer smacks a woman on her bare ass with a meat tenderizer over and over, eventually killing her.

On top of the nasty, sexualized murders, Lewis has virtually every female character humiliate themselves for the pleasure of men. He has his female characters abuse each other. He turns them into money hungry opportunists and verbal abuse sponges. Knowing his depiction of women wasn’t going to go down well with the current women’s liberation movement, Lewis decided to double down. Never one to bow to political correctness, THE GORE GORE GIRLS features a bevy of feminist protesters, all of whom are clearly costumed to look more like men than women. After Nancy goes undercover with the feminists, she has a brief scene with Abraham in which she spouts feminist talking points like a brainwashed radical. Clearly, Lewis was trying to go out with an offensive bang.

Unfortunately, THE GORE GORE GIRLS fades like a fart in the wind. Much of the problem lies with the lead character, our Private Investigator, Abraham Gentry. Given his meticulously styled hair and his walking cane, I think we were supposed to find this character suave and charming. Every woman he comes across certainly falls for him. But truth be told, the guy is just a dick. A massive, obnoxious, borderline intolerable dick. I hated this character. I hated everything about him. I especially hated how the character would sometimes stop and turn to the camera to deliver some horrible pun. Stop it, goddammit. Just stop.

But virtually every character in the film is written to be an intolerable oaf. Nancy is shrill and demanding, and her constant attempts to seduce Abraham just made me hate her more. The various strippers we meet throughout the film are empty headed bimbos who exist only to fill the nudity quotient. The police lieutenant is a screaming jackass. The major red herring of the film was the only character in the film that I liked, an angry ex-Marine who used to bash in the skulls of corpses in Vietnam. Now all he does is sit at the end of a strip club bar smashing cabbages. I liked that guy, largely because he barely spoke throughout the entire film.

The murder mystery angle gets dropped two thirds of the way into the running time just so Lewis can film a short parade of strippers dancing topless. It was at this point that I zoned out and never really came back. I was done, done with this film and done with this week of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies. Truth be told, I enjoy the works of Lewis quite a bit. Like the director himself, I was just ready for a nice, long break.

THE GRUESOME TWOSOME

THE GRUESOME TWOSOME is as close as you’re ever going to get to a Herschell Gordon Lewis giallo. The disappearance of several college girls sparks the obsessive curiosity of a pretty blond named Kathy. Her investigation leads her to a wig shop run by a kindly old woman named Mrs. Pringle, a widow living with her stuffed cat Napoleon and her mentally challenged son Rodney. What Kathy doesn’t know is that Mrs. Pringle is the culprit, a psychopath luring young college girls to her home with the promise of a cheap room to rent. Once the trap is sprung, Rodney murders the co-eds and messily scalps them. Their long locks of hair are then turned into Mrs. Pringle’s fancy wigs.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I did just sum up the entire plot of this film in five sentences. Lewis’ 1967 return to full-on splatter isn’t exactly teeming with narrative. In fact, it begins with a bizarre puppet scene of two mannequin heads, each adorned with paper mache eyes and mouths, discussing the events of the film. The only reason this scene exists is to help pad the run time out to feature length. It isn’t the only bit of padding either. There’s a damn near five minute long scene of college girls dancing on beds in negligees crammed in there too. As we know who the killer is right from the get go, there wasn’t much need for a seven and a half minute long scene of a curious Kathy following her school’s suspicious Swedish janitor to his home. Red herrings don’t work if you know the killer’s identity. But the film really needed to be 70 minutes so….

With Kathy filling the required amateur detective role, the second most important bit of the giallo formula would be the murder set pieces. How does THE GRUESOME TWOSOME stack up, you ask? Well, the film might be suspense free, but it is not without its fair share of nauseating violence. Released a scant 19 days after Lewis’ anemic vampire thriller A TASTE OF BLOOD, THE GRUESOME TWOSOME dives straight back down the rabbit hole of excess with a handful of grotesque murders. Each scalping results in a nasty sludge of tomato paste running down a victim’s face. Rodney uses an electric carving knife to slowly decapitate a woman. A down-on-her-luck lass looking to sell her locks for a few bucks is graphically disemboweled. It’s sick, gooey stuff.

The nasty gore sits alongside a generous helping of Lewis’ typical black humor. There’s a really weird scene of Kathy and her boyfriend Dave at the drive-in. All she wants to do is talk about the unsolved murders. All he wants to do is make out. Their scenes are intercut with the movie playing on the drive-in screen, a pretentious arthouse film all about a man eating potato chips and squishing fruit while his off-screen lover tells him how much she adores him. The aforementioned slumber party scene features our nightgown wearing babes eating from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken as they shuffle suggestively to the jazz music blaring on the soundtrack.

None of it makes much sense, even the relatively straight forward stuff, but then again, it’s not really supposed to. It’s a nonsense brew made of mystery thriller tropes, proto-slasher psychobabble and soft nudie-cutie moments. It delivers the splatter and a few chuckles, and that’s about it. It’s as flimsy a plot as you’re likely to find, carried out in typical Herschell Gordon Lewis fashion. It’s easy going sleaze. Take it or leave it.

COLOR ME BLOOD RED

The final film in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ so-called Blood Trilogy, COLOR ME BLOOD RED tells the familiar tale of a down-on-his-luck artist whose fortunes are suddenly reversed when he begins melding artistic creation with cold blooded murder. Far less engaging than Roger Corman’s 1959 take on the tale, A BUCKET OF BLOOD, COLOR ME BLOOD RED struggles to maintain a pulse throughout its 79 minute run time. Following the lively and entertaining TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, Lewis’ third foray into splatter feels positively uninspired.

Lewis was always able to turn the act of murder into an entertaining bit of low(est) brow art, but here in a film about that very thing, he stumbles completely. Adam Sorg, the downtrodden painter who discovers that human blood provides his art with just the right oomph to attract critical praise and commercial interest, could be seen as a stand-in Lewis, an ex-advertising man turned nudie-cutie director whose film career was going nowhere fast. Lewis came upon the idea of adding graphic, ludicrous gore to his films and just like that, he found himself a profitable commercial niche. 

But a niche can sometimes be a noose and you can definitely sense that Lewis was afraid of being trapped in the gore film forever. In that way, COLOR ME BLOOD RED can be seen as a kind of testimonial film, a movie all about an artist whose bloody work creates a kind of commercial and artistic whirlpool from which he cannot escape.

However, for as interesting as the film might be on a kind of autobiographical level, it just does not work well as a piece of entertainment. You can feel Lewis exercising a considerable amount of restraint throughout the film, especially in the area of on-screen violence. In terms of raw body count, COLOR ME BLOOD RED is by far the most anemic film in the entire Blood Trilogy. There is at least one great killing in the film, a riotous scene in which Sorg terrorizes two love birds riding water bikes in the ocean, but for the most part the killings are all strikingly tame. The only real bit of gore we get is a brief scene of Sorg wringing some blood out of an exposed wad of guts. The rest is rather unmemorable.

The characters are just plain awful. Sorg is every inch the annoying artiste, a bug eyed, whining brat of a man prone to screaming fits and grating histrionics. Oddly enough, when we first meet him, he’s quite likable, albeit a touch too sarcastic. His early scenes with his live-in lover Gigi are some of the best scenes the film has to offer. The two have an “if we ever get married…” in-joke that runs throughout all their scenes together, a kind of rib-poking light insult that gives the couple a genuine spark and chemistry. But then Gigi has to go and accidentally cut her finger on a broken frame, bleeding onto an empty canvas. The sight of the red blood awakens Sorg's creative energies and Gigi.. well, she ultimately ends up with a knife to the face as a result.

Her blood ends up smeared all over a rather terrible painting and that painting attracts the attention of Mrs. Carter, a well-off art appreciator with a lovely teenage daughter named April. April has a boring new boyfriend named Rolf and two beatnik friends, Jack and Sydney, who think it’s farrrr out to dress in identical costumes, right down to wearing the same wig. April and the gang will form the other half of the film’s focus, culminating in Sorg taking an unhealthy interest in April.

Unfortunately, April and her friends are every bit as annoying as our lead psychopath, especially the beatnik couple. They’re the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. So what we have here is a gore film that is light on gore filled with characters light on character. Though the jazz score is catchy and the film does contain some of the most striking compositions in all of Lewis’ oeuvre, the film really is an abysmal watch. The subtext of the film is the only thing worthy of consideration here, but even then the film makes it’s entire point shortly after Gigi’s murder. So had the film just been a 35 or so minute short, it would have been pretty damn good. But no, the film then spends 40 minutes lazily repeating itself until the underlying point of the film is drowned beneath all the lousy pacing and grating performances. It's a terrible miscalculation of a film and had it been, as it was planned to be, Lewis' farewell to the horror genre, it would have been a very bad way to go out.

BLOOD FEAST

*** Today begins a week long look at the horror films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the late, great(?) gore auteur that brought graphic bloodletting to the drive-ins in the 1960s. I had planned on writing a fresh review of BLOOD FEAST, but after reading an old review of mine, I decided to be a lazy prick. Truth be told, my feelings on the film haven't changed at all and I could use the day off. So here you go, a reprint of an early Films That Witness Madness review from 2010, grammatical errors and all. Enjoy(?). *** 

No use in mincing words: BLOOD FEAST is awful. Not awful in the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE kind of way either. Just plain awful. But while it may be unoriginal and unforgivably dull to watch today, in its time, BLOOD FEAST was anything but. In fact, no one had ever seen anything like it before. BLOOD FEAST was, for all intents and purposes, the first true gore flick, a pioneering work that brought unbridled bloodletting and sadism into the drive-in theaters. 

While PSYCHO had already done the whole "madman slicing up pretty girls in the shower" three years earlier, BLOOD FEAST added to that scenario all the gruesome details Hitchcock wisely left unseen. Thanks in no small part to its lurid ad campaign (dreamed up by the film's writer/director Herschell Gordon Lewis and its producer Dave Friedman, both longtime exploitation players) and gallons of spilled blood, BLOOD FEAST found itself a sizeable audience of thrill-seekers and heavy-petters. The rest, as they say, is history. 

BLOOD FEAST, for the fifteen or sixteen of you who don't know, centers around an Egyptian caterer named Ramses who has been carving up women in preparation for an Egyptian "blood feast" in honor of the goddess Ishtar. The homicide detectives - there's only two of them - investigating the crimes have no clues and no leads, but one of them is dating a young girl whose mother has booked Ramses as the caterer for a party she is throwing for her daughter. Ramses, having gathered all the appropriate bits and pieces for his ritual, plans on using the daughter as the final sacrifice, the one that will bring the bloodthirsty goddess back to life.

Were it not for its historical importance, BLOOD FEAST would be all but indefensible. Shot in nine days for under $70,000, BLOOD FEAST looks cheap and feels cheap. There are no name actors on the film (only Playboy Playmate Connie Mason could be considered for that particular honor) and the talent behind the scenes was clearly second-rate at best. The sets are all garish and amateurish, everything is awash in primary colors and dime store props and several individual scenes are clearly pieced together from shots taken in various locations. Of course, complaining about such things is unnecessary and a bit trifling. Anyone expecting professionalism and high-production values in a film called BLOOD FEAST should have their head checked.

This film exists for one reason and one reason only: gore. So how does BLOOD FEAST stack up? Again, those expecting quality effects should think twice before viewing, but there is something genuinely unsettling and queasy on display here. Far from slickly done, the crude effects work in BLOOD FEAST manages to disgust a good bit more than the slicker horror films of the 1980s. Nothing in BLOOD FEAST even remotely approaches realism, but the gore in the film is much stronger than I remembered it being precisely because it is NOT slick and well-executed. The scene where Ramses attacks a woman, forcing his hand into her mouth and pulling out her tongue, a long mangled hunk of something meaty, is still quite disgusting. More sophisticated audiences may laugh off all the shoddy violence on display in BLOOD FEAST but the audiences back in 1963 must have shit their pants.

As much as I would like to join the cult of BLOOD FEAST and proclaim this movie as a mini b-movie masterpiece, I cannot. I simply don't think it's any good. It's poorly paced and terribly inept at just about everything it tries to do - minus the one or two gore effects that genuinely work. The two follow-up films in his "Blood Trilogy", COLOR ME BLOOD RED and TWO-THOUSAND MANIACS, are better made and more entertaining. Either one of those two films would make for better viewing than BLOOD FEAST.

Strangely enough, though Lewis was put through the shredder by American critics through-out his career, the usually more stubborn French critics took him much more seriously. The critics of the Cahiers du Cinema pegged him as "a subject for further research". They really didn't need to look any further than BLOOD FEAST. It is a perfect summation of much of Lewis’ work as a filmmaker: cheap, laughable, borderline misogynistic and obsessed with the red stuff.