It’s a rare movie these days that actually makes my jaw drop over gore, and this movie wins if only for making me do exactly that more than a few times over its duration. It’s as badly acted and cheesy as the other HG Lewis movies I’ve watched over the year, but alongside Two Thousand Maniacs it’s really the only one I’m ever likely to watch again.

The gore really is astoundingly vile, lol, and it’s incredible how like the old Lewis movies it really feels, despite being made decades after – like, these days, we still have bad acting in movies, but somehow Lewis managed to cast people here who deliver a whole different class of bad acting. I think that’s perhaps why it works better than the older ones for me; like, the reproduction of that feel of almost 40 years previous is almost a gimmick in itself … and 5 years before Tarantino’s Grindhouse, you’ve kinda gotta put your hands together for an near-80-year-old who can still deliver something so schlocky. It almost makes me want to check out the others again. The John Waters cameo is icing on the cake

There’s literally nothing to say about this one. Like, it even failed to be quite so bad as I’d been led to believe. But right from the dodgy opening credits, this is just a miserably cheap excuse for a Christmas movie. Harvey Fierstein should be absolutely ashamed of himself for stooping so low as he does here, but the rest of the cast aren’t much more excusable. When there are movies out there like Elf and The Grinch that effortlessly bear brute-force repeat viewings this time of year, stuff like this really should be pictured next to the word “waste” in the dictionary.

Blah. Another quite underwhelming piece of trash from Herschell Gordon Lewis. A bunch of girls on bikes – who appear to have been cast straight off the street – umm … ride their bikes, tease some men, and finally behead one of them. That last part is actually fairly cool by virtue of its surprise. Knowing that Lewis started out in soft porno movies, midway through this, nothing having happened, I started to assume (despite the title and DVD packaging) that this must’ve been one of his earlier movies. So, yeh, the ending works to some extent. But worth 80 minutes of my time? Not likely.

Move aside, Porky’s, lol. This deserves praise for doing pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, to a staggering degree, right from the opening credits. The uniforms, the lettering on the credits, the song, and then … skin … vast quantities of female flesh.

It’s porn cheese city, and there’s very little more to say about it. Like, it’s so much just a porn movie that I found myself considering whether I would even count it as a movie and write about it here. But it has to be said, it’s got something of a story (albeit it most of it rushed through in the last 15 minutes), it’s better shot than most porn I’ve seen, and it has a slight bit of tongue in cheek. Some of the exercise equipment stuff is just inspired.

I just really dug the simplicity and innocence (for want of a better word) of it all. Like Slumber Party Massacre without the massacre or something. It’s probably very exploitative and caters to highly prurient interests (at one point one of the girls dresses in the clothes of her teddy bear, clothes she got when she was 12) ... but I guess I just wanna say, “whatever” to that lol. I found it simple, sexy, and hilarious. Almost instantly a cheesy fave of mine.

“Holy bananas! It’s a girl’s LEG!!!!!”

Oh my. Well that certainly beats, “He’s cold!” “Is the pizza?” from Slumber Party Massacre, ROFL.

Well I still have a few HG Lewis movies to look at but I’m becoming increasingly certain that Two Thousand Maniacs was just an almighty anomaly in his filmography in being a film that was just a little more than blood – though now I’m even inclined to give that a second check ‘cos I’m not so sure anymore that it was as good as I thought.

There’s something weird going on in the reviews I’ve read of Lewis’ work and I guess I can’t really argue with it too much since I have some kind of unconditional love for Ed Wood’s work since seeing Tim Burton’s movie on the guy and I guess it’s the same thing that’s happening. But I just find with Lewis that even the people who adore his movies won’t go so far as to give them more than 2 or 3 stars. People who hate them hold themselves back over this “fact” that Lewis has this moniker “The Godfather of Gore”. It’s like there’s this massive trepidation to call a spade a spade and say, basically, these movies are just plain bad – and no … it’s rarely in a “so bad it’s good” way as you might expect. There’s something delightfully sinister here in the last few lines, “I guess … I won’t take up painting for a while,” and “You could’ve at least saved the frame …” ... but it doesn’t really colour me much more than my usual shade of pink.

Something in me still has massive issues with the stilted delivery of the dialogue in these movies (yes – I know – in this case it’s meant to be overly theatrical, but still it rings awkwardly untrue – Vincent Price did it better in the Phibes and Theatre of Blood type movies) ... but ultimately, this one is just glorious grande guignol in the extreme. Of course, in the days now where you can tune in to “Autopsy” and watch Gunther von Hagens doing a lot of this stuff for real (on dead corpses, of course, but hey, tit for tat), a lot of the impact is lost – but I found it marginally more interesting than Blood Feast, and like I said, if you imagine the bad acting is just “theatrical”, it almost works.

Hmm. I guess I can’t complain following my comment on Blood Feast that it wasn’t as bloody as expected – this HG Lewis schlocker most certainly lives up to its rather promising title. The music is funkier, too, but still the acting is pretty shocking, almost like a parody of 70s porn in places. Again, it won’t put me off watching more of his movies … but again, mostly a let down.

After Two Thousand Maniacs, I was really looking forward to delving into Herschell Gordon Lewis’ other works. I guess I still am – I realise this was his first real blood fest so I’m still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt – but this was still a massive disappointment for me. It’s nowhere near as bloody as I expected, the acting is like an Ed Wood movie, and frankly, that doesn’t leave much else to be desired.