When one has plumbed the kind of depths reached by Blood Feast and Color Me Blood Red, one feels a little self-conscious when claiming that The Gore Gore Girls is even worse, but I watched Color Me Blood Red a week before this one, and it looks like a masterpiece by comparison.

I'm no stranger to the dregs of film history, but, hand on heart, I honestly can't recall another film that's so toe-curlingly abysmal on every single level. It looks hideous (see below), the dialogue is unspeakable, the acting is uniformly atrocious, the two leads in particular rank among the most annoyingly obnoxious I've ever come across (and that's not "obnoxious" in the lovable Groucho Marx/Pee-Wee Herman sense, it's the strict dictionary definition that goes "an object of aversion or dislike") - and even its director refers to the film being 'excreted' rather than released!

Added to that is the fact that the plot is merely an excuse to show half a dozen or so semi-naked women being butchered in graphic close-up at considerable length - and I mean butchered: we're talking exposed entrails and brains, gouged eyeballs, severed (and spurting) nipples, burnt and mangled flesh, the works - and you have a film that should by rights be not only virtually unwatchable but also a challenge to even the most extreme libertarians amongst us. Put bluntly, how on earth can this stuff be defended on any level at all - particularly when only last week I ticked The Exterminator off for a far less outwardly reprehensible scene?

There is certainly a difference, but it's one unlikely to impress the average censorious MP or family values campaigner. I found The Exterminator much harder to sit through because it was played with a totally straight face, whereas the sole saving grace of The Gore Gore Girls is that it's impossible to take seriously on any level whatsoever. Despite the fact that the victims are invariably women in a state of undress, there's nothing particularly sexualised about the violence (whether this was deliberate or simply a by-product of Lewis' total inability to stage anything even vaguely erotic is hard to say) and the gore effects, though wildly excessive, are so obviously fake that at no point are you fooled into any kind of willing suspension of disbelief, and to be honest I doubt you'd want to be.

As the title hints (the alternate title was Blood Orgy for those more staid Southern territories that didn't know what go-go girls were), the film is about a series of strippers who are being systematically killed and mutilated by an unknown assailant. Sensing a story, glamorous reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) hires private investigator Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress) to solve the mystery before the police do, though quite how he manages to have a conversation with anyone without being attacked in his own right is a rather bigger mystery.

It's hard to put into words just how repellent Gentry is. Combining an Elliott Gould perm with a Jason King moustache and a Groucho Marx leer (including a couple of conspiratorial asides to the audience!), it's clear he thinks that he's an irresistible blend of Tom Jones and Oscar Wilde, despite the rather overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The passage of time has not, to put it mildly, been kind to his taste in clothes and hairstyles, but I find it hard to believe an early 1970s audience would have found him any more appealing.

If anything, Nancy Weston is even worse, coming across as a supremely irritating blend of hard-nosed journalist and girly simperer - made ten times worse by her sudden discovery of feminism halfway through the film as a result of one of the strip clubs being invaded by a bevy of demonstrators waving placards with such catchy slogans as "Lewd Is Crude" and "Quit With Tit!" (additional then-contemporary social comment is supplied in the form of - you guessed it - a psychotic Vietnam veteran), and then almost immediately casting her newly-discovered principles to one side when she realises she has a chance of winning the Stripper of the Year contest.

Her constant innuendo-ridden conversations with Gentry were clearly supposed to echo Bogart and Bacall's immortal exchanges in films like To Have And Have Not and The Big Sleep, but… well, let's just say they don't quite hit the same spot, and discreetly leave it at that.

And the killer's identity? Well, let's say that if you don't work it out roughly an hour before it's finally revealed, you haven't been paying attention - and it's made even more obvious by Lewis' ham-fisted attempts at diverting our attention away by introducing suspects whose behaviour is so furtive, suspicious and suggestive that you know they have to be innocent pretty much as soon as they appear. Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock were both still active when this came out, but I don't recall any signs of them being worried that they had a new rival in the mystery and suspense stakes.

That said, appalling though it is - in every sense of the word - The Gore Gore Girls is also embarrassingly entertaining, though I can almost hear the straitjackets being prepared as I write this. True, you need a pretty depraved sense of humour to actually enjoy it (guilty as charged), but if you fancy what's essentially a feature-length version of the notorious Monty Python "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days" sketch, the chances are you'll love it.

But be warned that even by Lewis' standards, the gore is quite astonishingly extreme - the fact that no-one's ever bothered submitting it to the BBFC comes as no surprise, and it's all too likely that Customs probably won't look especially kindly on it if they intercept and watch this DVD while it's in transit. After all, they've been known to seize copies of Blood Feast, which looks like Teletubbies compared with this!

As with the other discs in Something Weird's series, the print is in very good condition and the transfer is pretty well impeccable - so the overall visual quality stands or falls on the original cinematography. And as long-term Lewis fans know all too well, the fact that none of his films has ever won an Oscar for cinematography has never been cited as one of the great injustices of our time - films like Two Thousand Maniacs!, mostly set outdoors in bright sunshine, look fine, but it's a very different story with The Gore Gore Girls, a film largely set in dimly-lit nightclubs - and I stress the word "dimly".

The harsh shadows and extreme contrast between the often overexposed foreground and grossly underexposed background suggests that lighting was somewhat minimal - when Gentry looks at one of the strippers and says "that is the sexiest woman I've ever seen", all I could see was a whitish pink blob gyrating in the background. In short, it looks awful - but to be fair to Something Weird, I doubt even a full-scale frame-by-frame Criterion digital restoration job could have done much more for this material. And it's certainly not the transfer's fault, because the few daylight scenes show that it's up to the usual high standards.

Incidentally, the framing is at 4:3, and unlike the situation with many other Lewis films I'm not entirely sure this was the original aspect ratio: there are quite a few shots where something seems to have been cut off at the sides, though since Lewis isn't exactly Peter Greenaway when it comes to immaculate visual compositions, this isn't a particularly major problem. Certainly, Lewis himself doesn't seem the least bit bothered by it in the commentary.

As with the picture, the soundtrack is a good clean transfer of a less than wonderful mono original, but all the dialogue comes across loud and clear (a mixed blessing under the circumstances, to say the least). There are the usual twelve chapter stops.

The extras are along the lines of the other discs in Something Weird's Lewis collection, though in the place of the trailer and out-takes, they've thrown in a staggeringly gory sacrificial ritual from the ultra-obscure Love Goddess of Blood Island, which is a more than adequate substitute. Also well worth catching is the hilarious three-minute Something Weird compilation that plays when you first play the DVD, a potted guide to some of the most unspeakable images and dialogue ever to reach a cinema screen.

And there's also the traditional Gallery of Exploitation Art, this time focusing on the last films of Lewis' career such as the now-lost Miss Nymphet's Zap-In, which has the intriguingly convoluted tagline "The Sexy Laugh Riot That No More Resembles Any Other Picture Than A Boeing 747 Resembles The Wright Brothers".

The highlight, as ever, is the commentary by Lewis with backup by Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video and Jimmy Maslon, the man who gave the films a new lease of life after he bought up all the rights. As on the other DVDs in this series, Lewis is under no illusions as to the quality of the film ("Hi, I'm Herschell Gordon Lewis, and I made this… movie, I guess you'd call it"). He's very funny on things such as the guest appearance of one-liner king Henny Youngman as a strip club owner - for some unaccountable reason Youngman subsequently denied he had anything to do with the film, despite the rather incontrovertible evidence: "I suppose we could have morphed Henny Youngman onto someone else, but not with our budget!"

As ever, it's a hugely entertaining blend of gossipy anecdote, general background information and confessional highlighting of mistakes (the barman's virtuoso high-speed cocktail-mixing skills came about thanks to a camera going wrong and the footage turning out too fast!), coupled with constant reassurance that The Gore Gore Girls is not to be taken seriously on any level whatsoever. Which, under the circumstances, comes as something of a relief.

Michael Brooke