5. The Gore Gore Girls (1972)
Nancy, a reporter who always seems to be drunk, teams up with know-it-all Private Investigator called Abraham Gentry in order to solve the murder of Suzie Cream Puff - a stripper who has been brutally murdered. Before you know it, dead strippers are littered all over the place. They usually get their faces mashed up, and I mean really mashed up - eyeballs gouged and squeezed. One poor stripper gets her face crisped in a pan of boiling oil. Interspersed with the murders are some of the most unerotic strip tease sequences ever committed to celluloid. These are an atrocity for the viewers' eyeballs, worse than the ocular mayhem perpetrated against the strippers' eyeballs by the killer. To further liven things up, there is an unintentionally funny sequence where women's rights protestors hijack the strippers' stage. There is also a weird Vietnam vet who keeps drawing faces on tomatoes and melons and crushes them with his bare hands. After a while the nonsense is resolved by the PI and the lush and there is the best car running over a head sequence I have ever seen in a movie to round things up. It doesn't sound nasty on paper, but The Gore Gore Girls is very deserving of an NC-17 certificate. The violence in the film is of such a brutal nature, it is highly repellant and hard to stomach. Director H G Lewis tries to temper the violent acts with humour which only partially works. A typical scene would be a stripper bent over the table having her ass mulched to bits with a meat tenderiser by the killer. The killer, after he has played enough with the tenderiser sprinkles spices and condiments all over her derriere. A funny touch, but the violence against the strippers is so extreme, it doesn't mitigate the horror of the film. Lewis is aiming for pitch black humour but ends up with savagery and butchery. His other films are brutal, but they are very campy, The Gore Gore Girls is mean spirited and vindictive.