Tweet
Released by: Massacre Video
Released on: April 26th, 2022.
Director: Michael Hugo
Cast: John Seeman, Dianne Galke, Justina Lynn, Joan Devlon, Turk Lyon, Toni Scott, David Book
Year: 1974
Purchase From Amazon
Hard Gore – Movie Review:
1974's Hard Gore (also known under the alternate titles of Sadoasylum, Hardgore and Horror Whore, and directed by one 'Michael Hugo') is a crazy, crazy, crazy film. Part demonic horror film, part deranged sex film, Hard Gore has long had a high standing reputation amongst fans of vintage smut and messed up seventies horror films - and with good reason. Whereas Joe D'Amato's 'gornos' like Porno Holocaust and Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead were distinctly European in their look and feel, this one is sleaze American style - you can see it in the fashions, in the sets, and in the performers themselves and somehow that just makes the whole thing scuzzier.
Diane Galke (who also appears in a short called Never Talk To Strangers and the feature length Teenage Runaway) plays a troubled young lady named Maria. In order to cure her of her psychological malfunctions, Maria has been shut away in the Fox Hollows Sanitarium and placed under the care of one Doctor George (John Seeman) and his sexy lesbian nursing staff.
Once she gets settled in, Maria gets it on with a few of the female members of the staff and quickly sheds whatever sexual inhibitions she may have had coming into the hospital (that is if she had any at all to being with!). Unfortunately for the nurses that Maria gets down and dirty with, they all end up dead in some increasingly gruesome murder set pieces after pleasing Maria with dildos and sex toys.
Maria starts to head out on her own and explore the hospital under cover of the night, and what she finds is a cult of demonic Satan worshippers involved in all manner of despotic blood orgies and evil black magic rituals. The longer Maria stays in the hospital, the more she gets pulled into these rituals and soon she's participating in the orgies herself, and orally servicing the overseer of the rituals only to get fucked from behind with her head in a guillotine – kinky!
Eventually Maria is taken to a hidden chamber located deep within the hospital known only as 'The Room.' Herein she is horrified to find herself surrounded by old bloody skulls, gory meat hooks, and bizarre flying phalluses that cover her in cum. The more time Maria spends in the hospital, the more insane she gets, and things eventually culminate in a truly bizarre and utterly nasty (literal) climax of evil!
To be blunt, Hard Gore is fucked up. A Satanist is castrated, blood spurts all over the willing participants of the devilish orgies that take place in the hospital, and a man in a Kabuki-style devil mask oversees all of the action, even partaking in a good portion of it himself. An axe finds its way into a woman's crotch, a different woman is electrocuted by a large white dildo, and the entire thing is bathed in swirling psychedelic lights and bizarre primary colored lighting gels.
Diane Galke, however, is pretty solid in the lead role. She does a fine job of portraying the primal sexuality that her character explores throughout the film, and she sure is fun to look at. She also does a decent job with the more dramatic and horrific elements that her character faces in the film. She bears witness to some seriously deranged occurrences throughout the film and her reactions definitely do appear to be those of a woman truly terrified by what she sees. It's too bad that she didn't make more films.
The horror elements in the film are the highlight - the gore and splatter effects are gruesome and bloody. When a nurse has her throat slit, it's reasonably believable. There couldn't have been much of a budget here, considering how this was originally conceived as a low budget horror/porn hybrid film that couldn't ever possibly appeal to a mass audience. Some lighter BDSM themes run through the film, adding an element of kink that suits the sinister proceedings of the cult and the minions involved in the satanic orgies held within the hospitals confines. The final sex scene, a sweaty, massive, hairy orgy with a whole lot of people groping and grabbing whatever they can is reminiscent of Tim Vigil and David Quinn's Faust comic (later made into a mediocre movie by Brian Yuzna of Bride Of Re-Animator fame), in that it's explicit and bloody and ends in an especially violent climax of blood and sex (complete with a candle in the snatch, natch!)
This version of the film runs sixty-four minutes and forty-three second in length, meaning that it runs a bit longer than the sixty-three minute releases that came out on DVD from Something Weird Video and Alpha Blue Archives years back.
Hard Gore – Blu-ray Review:
Hard Gore arrives on Region Free Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition presentation framed at 1.85.1 widescreen with the feature taking up 15.4GBs of space on the 25GB disc. Taken from a new 4k scan of “the only known complete 35mm print,” this is a transfer clearly limited by what was available to work off of, and at the same time, a pretty nice upgrade over what we’ve had before (the previously mentioned DVD editions looking very soft by comparison – you can see some screen caps from the Alpha Blue edition, which featured bad video generated credits, here). Past editions were 1.33.1 but the widescreen framing on this version looks just fine, it never feels cropped and seems to offer more information on the sides of the frame. While there’s print damage of varying degrees of severity evident throughout pretty much the duration of the movie, there’s still way more depth and detail here than we got on the DVD releases and color reproduction is much better as well. Skin tones also look good, and black levels are decent even if some of the darker scenes are a bit too dark thanks to the original lighting and camerawork. Overall, however, fans of the film should be pretty happy with the way that this looks compared to what has come before.
English language audio options are provided in Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono, with optional subtitles provided in English only. Although this is hardly a super enveloping mix, a lossless track would have been ideal. Still, what’s here is, once again, an improvement over past editions even if it is still limited by the less than perfect elements. There’s some sibilance here and there and the occasional spot where you’ll notice some hiss but overall, the audio is reasonably clean, properly balanced and generally pretty easy to follow.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much here in the way of extras. Aside from menus and chapter selection options, we get trailers for a few other Massacre Video releases (TFW NO GF, American Rampage, Toxic Zombies, Suicide Dolls, Portraits Of Andrea Palmer and The Underground) and… that’s it. To be fair, however, it stands to reason that finding anyone who was involved with this movie way back when would be exceedingly difficult. The disc does come with a slipcover though, if that’s your thing.
Hard Gore - The Final Word:
Hard Gore is almost as depraved as they come. It's tasteless, it's gory, it's raunchy, it's sleazy, it wallows in its own filth and it's fantastic! Truly one of those whacked out products of the 'sadistic seventies,' it delivers as much sex as you could want and even if the steamy bumping and grinding isn't particularly arousing, it's got castrations and axes and psychedelic flying sparkler dildos in it! How can you go wrong? You can't! Hard Gore rules. While it would have been nice to get lossy audio and some proper extras to accompany the feature, it’s nice to have the complete version available in high definition.
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Hard Gore Blu-ray screen caps!
