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June 2001
Download the word version, perfect for printing and handing out on street corners!
Cult Pick 'O The Week: The Gore Gore Girls *****
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Ash
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Now, regular readers of PULP will know that I don't often use the term 'feel good movie of the year' when writing a film review. This is mostly because I very rarely feel good, and when I do it's caused by either paint fumes, Paxil, or someone else's misfortune, and not by movies or television shows. But I will make an exception for famed exploitation filmmaker Herchell Gordon Lewis' classic The Gore Gore Girls, which is definitely the feel good movie of the year, or more accurately the feel good movie of 1972. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that this a horribly misogynist movie, and I just like it because I hate women, or so the general consensus about me would have you believe. I assure you that this is not true. While I grant that the film is horribly misogynist, I personally don't hate women at all. I have nothing but respect for them and their ability to simultaneously complain and cry at the same time. Plus, and a properly proportioned woman can make an excellent, aesthetically pleasing coat hanger in a pinch. However, as much as I love their whole specie, I do have my reservations when it comes to women. See, in my experience, women, or 'skirts', as they prefer to be called, have the unfortunate tendency to use their feminine wiles, or 'girl power', as they prefer it to be called, to gain the upper hand over men, or 'the master race', as they prefer us to be called. This results in them essentially getting whatever they want, as men rush to their beck and call with one stamp of a platform-sneakered foot, one flash of a tattooed shoulder, one pout of a vanilla-flavoured glossed lip, plying them with flowers, chocolates, and episodes of Ally McBeal. As such, women, led by their beastly mother-goddess Oprah, pretty much control the world, and on occasion, poor down-trodden men folk like me get a little bitter about it. That's why it's so refreshing to see a film that finally takes the power back from megalomaniacal vixens bent on world domination. The Gore Gore Girls is one of the films that fits into this much-neglected sub-genre of feminist backlash films, a genre whose origins stretch back until the dawn of time, or at least until Zsa Zsa Gabor's Queen Of Outer Space. The Gore Gore Girls deals with the mysterious and brutal slayings of several strippers, all of which are shown in loving detail and set to a bizarre musical score that sounds as if it was performed by Koko the Clown after he crawled out of the inkwell and into the absinthe bottle. The hero of the film, Abraham Gentry, is a sort of pissy, ugly Sherlock Holmes, who saunters around with a silver-headed cane and way too much eyeshadow for heterosexual comfort. He is hired, for no apparent reason, by a female newspaper reporter to solve the crimes, which he does by repeatedly plying her with tequila and leaving her alone in random places, like alleys and what appears to be Austin Powers' living room, until the killer tries to cut her face off. The suspects in the case first appear to be a group of radical feminists who resort to extreme methods like painting placards and yelling a lot to get their point across. Leave it to women to use arts and crafts as a viable means of protest, and backing it up with nagging. However, in a surprise twist, the killer actually turns out to be a waitress in a local strip club, whose ugliness and flat chest cause her to seek her revenge upon the beautiful strippers via face-skinning. As far as movie serial killer fetishes go, face removal is one of my favorites, as it provides an opportunity for a filmmaker to really push the boundaries of the medium, to see how many times the audience will watch an eyeball being removed via meat-cleaver before they get either disgusted or, in my case, bored and a little sleepy. Among the other charming gore effects to add to Lewis' canon of varied murder scenes is a segment that involves lactating breasts and a pair of sewing shears, a rather amusing sequence involving a speeding car and what appears to be a bag of raw hamburger passed off as a human head, and of course the famed meat-tenderizer spanking scene, which will go down in the annals (ha!) of horror movie history as one of the most truly distressing ways to expire. But, oddly enough, throughout all the misogynist carnage, the cast gamely avoids swearing, relying instead on hilarious, Shaft-ian "shut yo' mouth" techniques every time a cuss word threatens to rear its immoral head. Because heaven forbid the children in the audience should pick up swearing when they're learning how and why they should kill women.
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