I watched Hugh Gallagher's entire gore trilogy today; GOROTICA, GORGASM, and GORE WHORE and what can I say but WHAT A TREAT!!!
GOROTICA (1993) is about a heist gone wrong. Two crappy burglars have the fuzz hot on their heels so they decide that one of them better swallow the most valuable jewel. It would've been a grand idea if a Cop hadn't arrived and shut dead the guy who just swallowed the stone. For the rest of the film his buddy drags him (i.e. the dead corpse) around as he doesn't want to lose his ticket to a better life. Fortunately he runs into a chick who digs him - or so he thinks anyway but actually she prefers his dead friend. There lots of gore and nudity. In contradiction to Gallagher's other two films this one contains quite a few graphic real death photos (at the beginning when the necro chick masturbates to a video tape that shows the photos). The film clocks in after 60 minutes.
The main character of GOREGASM (1990) is on the opposite side of the law compared to the main characters in GOROTICA. He's a cop (albeit a crappy on) who gets assigned to track down a killer who ties up men in their home and stabs, slices or carves them to death. At the house of the first dead guy he finds an erotic fanzine with ads for a woman who promises "the ultimate climax". Altho the cop mucks up his investigation he does end up in the hands of the ultimate climax woman. Or was it a hand he lost? Hmm. With a running time of around 20 minutes longer than GOROTICA I thought it dragged for a bit too long. I would have preferred a tighter narrative of 60-70 minutes but over-all almost as good as the first one, and lots of gore and boobs in this one too. Each film is different to one another and Gallagher should get kudos for not repeating himself!
In the first film we had necrophilia, in the second one we had an escort girl who finished off her customers real good, and in the last film, GORE WHORE (1994), we have... ZOMBIES! (but no need to worry, fake dicks and tits (not fake) in this one too!). A scientist hires a depressed private investigator to find his female assistant who's taken off with some very important documents. What are the documents about? Don't ask, just get them! The private dick finds and follows the ex assistant who spends her time having lesbian sex and killing a woman (in the most gory scene of the three films. It's like Hugh Gallagher and his buddies each had a ketchup bottle and just sprayed the stuff around, haha) and she is then off to, surprise-surprise, the graveyard to get some, uh, green dick. This final entry to Gallagher's gore trilogy is no less enjoyable than the first two films.
The director wrote a piece on the film in his magazine DRACULINA and I seem to remember he said he found the "actress" (I use the term loosely) by placing an ad in a newspaper and that she was really a stripper. If she really was a stripper it must have been from the cheapest seedy end of whatever crumb-bum town she came from. Sorry, but she looks like a crack ho (if you think I'm being too rude here sorry about that but that was my impression). In the film she so skinny you'd think the only thing she had digested for many months before the shoot was cum (and what's with her walk? Looks like she'd crapped her pants. No fucking kidding!). I forget how long the film runs and I'm not gonna check again. Let's say 70 minutes or so. Btw, there is a familiar face in GORE WHORE; the truly lovely D'Lana Tunnell (who plays a cop) was also in the very cool SORE LOSERS. I urge you to seek out SORE LOSERS! (it's a film about a hitman from the 1950's who was abducted by aliens and who returns to Earth to do one last hit so he can finally rest in peace. He's played by whatshisface from the old multo cool'o garagerock band THE OBLIVIANS - and the equally cool Japanese garagerock band GUITAR WOLF is in there too. It's on vhs and dvd).
These movies are home-made films, sure, but they are well done and they contain a crudeness and lack of "good taste" that you'll usually find in bigger productions. Sure, judging by the films none of the actors seemed to have grand acting careers ahead of them, and the special effects are cheap ass cheap. But when one necrophilia girl says, "Love doesn't last, hate is forever" (and has sex with a corpse in the bathtub) you know you're no longer in Kansas. I've tried several times to get in contact with the director but he flat out ignores my emails. I guess he's somewhere else in life now and doesn't give two shits about the films he made when he was 20 years younger. Too fucking bad if you ask me.
ABOUT THE TAPES AND THEIR RELEASES:
Like I said, Hugh Gallagher's three Gore movies are low budget indie productions ("indie" is what we used to call underground movies back in the day!) and I believe the video label was the director's own company (probably only set up to release these films); Ill Tex Productions on the last two film and Main Force Pictures on the first film (the p.o. box is the same with all three releases).
GOREGASM was made in 1990 but the Main Force Pictures copyright date on my VHS states 1993. Why the copyright is dated three years after the film was made I have no idea. Maybe Gallagher released the film on an earlier tape that wasn't released on Main Force Pictures? My copy of the tape is from 1998 so I assume it's a re-release but how many times he released the film I don't know. GOROTICA; made in 1993 and my VHS has a copyright date that says 1993. Finally, GORE WHORE is from 1994 and I have two copies, one from 1993 and one from 1998. The covers are identical, only the tape labels are different and on the tape from '98 there is an FBI duplication warning but it's not on the first release (on GOROTICA the copyright warning states that Gallagher is gonna kill anybody who bootlegs the tape and he'll use their corpses in GOROTICA 2, haha).
The films only came out on VHS (small cardboard cases only) and have never been re-released on DVD, and they're probably never gonna get a re-release either. Someone is selling copies of one of the films on DVD on eBay but it's clearly a bootleg. All three tapes are very rare which is unfortunate as the movies are pretty cool. The most frequent of the three tapes to get listed on eBay is the last one, GORE WHORE. I've seem GOREGASM two or three times there. And I think I've only seen GOROTICA listed twice (and I won it one of those two times).
All three films are probably on torrent sites and on dvd-r from iOffer. And you can get copy of GORE WHORE from Amazon.com if you're loaded (right now a new copy is $510 and a second hand one is $110. ARGH!!).
