This is one movie that doesn’t jack around, folks. Not even wasting time with credits, the first thing we see is a stripper brushing her hair, only to have her head brutally bashed in on a mirror by an unknown killer. Take that, Alfred Hitchcock, with all your damn tension and plot development! Someone has to solve this horrific crime, and luckily our hero is perhaps the greatest to grace the screen this side of Ash. The man for the job is Abraham Gentry, a sarcastic, aloof jackass of a private detective. Playing the role of Gentry is the immortal Frank Kress, who tragically never made another film, but is just sitting around in an easy chair getting cooler ever moment. Personally, I think Abraham Gentry would have made an awesome recurring sidekick for Sgt. Friday on “Dragnet”. Abe is hired by the local newspaper to solve the murder for $25,000. He accepts, and before long he’s hanging out in the greasy local strip club and making smart-ass comments to waitresses. He even suggests that one of them stick a liquor bottle up her, um, well some orifice anyway. Gentry is teamed up with foxy Globe reporter Nancy Watson (Amy Farrell), as they spend most of their time making rude comments to each other, before apparently falling in love somewhere down the line.

Meanwhile, the murderer strikes again in even more over-the-top fashion. Another stripper, while giving herself a full-body lump exam at home, is stabbed and has her head absolutely mangled by hand. By the end of it, her head looks like someone emptied a gallon of stage blood onto three pounds of ground beef and had sex with it.

Abe and Nancy continue investigating the case, though Abe keeps his lovely partner drunk out of her mind to keep her from getting into trouble. In a first for a Lewis movie, we must wait to find out who the killer is, where in the past it’s been clear from the start. But who’s doing the killing? Could it be a vengeful stripper? One of the militant feminazi protesters (“We’ll show these striptease bitches what we think!) who storm the stage as one stripper takes off her pantsuit to Lewis-penned plate-spinning music? Is it the club owner, Marzdone Mobilie (who just happens to be played by The King of One-Liners himself, Henny Youngman!)? Or is it the biggest, wettest, stinkiest red herring of them all: Grout, a hulking mongoloid who spends his spare time drawing faces on pieces of fruit and smashing them with his bare hands? Sorry, you’ll have to wait until the end. Trust me, it’s worth the wait.

Whoever the killer is, he/she somehow manages to top the last killing with the most unforgettable one yet. Just after the pantsuit stripper is finished being interviewed by Abe in her home, the killer breaks in, cuts her throat, bends her over in the kitchen and pounds (literally) her ass to a bloody mess with a meat hammer. (Seriously, I’m not using “meat hammer” as a metaphor. So take that Freud book and jam it up for peephole) Then, after properly seasoning the ass with salt(!), the killer rips her eyes out with a fork and proceeds to mangle her face as bad as the last girl. Just incredible. Just across town, after Abe convinces the police that the killer is a religious fanatic who stole her Bible (a wonderful scene), the murderer strikes again. First he/she irons another stripper’s face and snips her nipples for milk (one nipple gives white milk, the other chocolate, I kid you not). Next, he/she drowns another in a pan of boiling french fries. It’s pure poetry.

After the latest murders, Abe hatches a brilliant plan, an amateur stripping contest, to draw the killer into his hands. After subjecting audiences to a bevy of unappealing strippers, Lewis finally gives the audience what it wants, or at least what I want, to see when Nancy, once again in a drunken stupor and egged on by Abe’s aped drooling over another stripper, takes the stage and wiggles around spastically. Call me crazy, but I had a thing for this girl, despite some confusing facial expressions. H.G. Lewis definitely knew where to find foxy 60s chicks, even if not one of them could act.

As you can expect, Nancy rocks the house and claims the title of Town’s Best Stripper before nearly passing out and being carried backstage by Abe. But our hero is actually using his woman as bait for the killer. Soon enough, the killer, with bubbling acid in hand, is stalking a prone Nancy. But Abe is on the scene to save the day! And the killer is … Marlene, the surly waitress who has been bickering with Abe the entire movie! But wait, how can a 110-pound woman rip heads to pieces with her bare hands? As it turns out – brace yourself – she is an ex-professional wrestler (Betty the Beautiful) who was scarred in a fire and has been killing strippers because she was jealous of the other strippers and ashamed of her own disfigured body. Just writing that sentence makes me warm and gooey inside. The climax is fittingly, fantastically hilarious. After being exposed and thwarted by Abe, Marlene walks out of a second-story window head-first. Her head cracks wide-open on the street, and an oncoming car drives over it! How many times can a movie top itself? It’s the cinematic equivalent of having nine orgasms in eight minutes.

It was as if Lewis knew that this would be his last foray into filmmaking for 30 years, because he managed to take everything that was wonderful about his previous body of work and cram it all into one unforgettable self-parody of a movie. There’s more blood than even Blood Feast. Abraham Gentry, in all his camera-winking, pompous glory, is his best character yet (even surpassing Montag the Magnificent and Fuad Ramses), and everything is so over-the-top and self-satirical that it’s impossible for a true gore movie fan not to fall in love with it. There is nothing to complain about here, aside from some unattractive strippers. But hey, it doesn’t matter how they strip, it only matters how they bleed. Gore Gore Girls rocks from beginning to end, but I can’t help but feel sad when Abe pulls down an imaginary shade and tells us we’ve seen enough. He’d been right about everything right until that point. I, for one, had not seen enough of him, the movie or the man who made it all possible.

Sadly, finishing this movie temporarily taps my H.G. Lewis collection, so I’ll have to wait until I get a copy of the Blood Trilogy or something like that to do another Lewis movie. This was certainly fun for me, and I hope you gained a new appreciation for the Godfather of Gore. So I must say goodbye for now, but I’d like to close with a short poem I wrote in honor of H.G. Lewis and this experience: