“This is really a shitty place to be.”

Sour-pussed punkette Maria (Dianne Galke) is shipped off to the Fox Hollows Sanitarium (which looks to be located somewhere deep in the San Fernando Valley) to shake a raging case of “uncontrollable nymphomania with masochistic tendencies.” Her tip-off that the asylum is not your average booby hatch (aside from the sign on a door that reads “Happy Room”) is the all-over tongue bath she receives from her nurse seconds after arrival. Nursie snacks on Maria’s twat like the first honeydew melon of the summer before the pair furiously bump uglies with the irresistible attractive force of those magnetic Scottie dogs one could pick up at a county fair. This is followed by a nice rub-a-dub in the bathroom, but just as Maria’s thinking to herself, “Jeez, a girl could get used to this kinda mental health,” the nurse issues a dire warning: things are not at all kosher at Fox Hollows. An escape in the dead of night is planned, but when Maria gets up to meet Ms. Nurse, the lady is waiting at her door – with a slit and gushing throat. Yikes, goes Maria, and she runs full tilt boogie through the asylum, only to be grabbed by unseen hands and dragged into some kind of kinked-up operating theater where strange men with panty hose over their heads shove hard pricks into her mouth. This concludes only when one dude lops off the cock of another, and Maria earns herself a bright red facial. Wonderful. Oh, did you have your own dick in your hand just now? You can put it away for a while. You won’t need it.

And so it goes for Maria, and all of us, as Hardgore puts us through its paces: first Maria’s frizzy-haired doctor (John Seeman, but more on him later) tells her that the horrible, soul-scorching images she saw the night before are all a product of her frazzled brain, and that the brand new nurse standing by her bed is the same nurse she’s had all along. Then said New Nurse treats Maria to the sanitarium’s unorthodox therapy, like, say, a vibrator and a touch of cunnilingus. And then, of course, the whole thing goes straight into the nightmare toilet (in the case of the vibrator, another unseen hand turns the thing up to eleven, which causes the nurse’s snatch to start smoking – “Call the fire department!” yells the hapless candy striper). And finally, Maria gets dragged unwillingly (well, at first) into some kind of Satanic orgy, with the entire asylum staff fucking and sucking each other in sweaty dogpiles, and a red-robed goon in a sunburst devil mask presiding over the whole affair and alternately grunting in a Cannibal Corpse voice or piping up with non sequiturs like “Nirvana!” Oh, and then someone gets killed.

Eventually, Maria puts two and two together and realizes that the orgies and the murders aren’t hallucinations, but actual events organized by her doctor and some mustachioed goon henchman (Turk Lyon, but more on him later too). Unfortunately, she’s caught eavesdropping on their plans for the next ritual – which will culminate in Maria’s sacrifice – and she’s dragged off to “the Room,” which turns out to be a blood-soaked slaughterhouse/morgue that houses the bodies of Maria’s previous nurses. I won’t presume to speak for you, but this really isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to get a young lady’s libido to boiling, but apparently in Maria’s case, it does, and she fucks her doctor in the middle of all the corpses and splatter while his second-in-command spreads wide one of the bodies on a slab and bangs her. Bangs the dead woman. Yes, he does.

I’ll say that from this point on, things in Hardgore start to make even less sense, but I get the idea that if you’re still reading this review, you’re probably praying for stronger and even more intense weirdness. And you won’t be disappointed: thoroughly fucked six ways to Sunday, Maria lapses into a hallucinatory state in which she sees visions of a chattering skull with blood leaking from its eye sockets, a disembodied hard-on that moans forebodingly at her, a trio of wind-up dildos with sparks jetting from their back ends, and best of all, three more dildos that spurt buckets of goo all over her. This, and only this, is the motivation Maria needs to fight back against her devilish doctor; suffice it to say that a large axe is involved, and that ultimately, no one wins. That’s what you were hoping for, right?

A longtime staple on the bootleg market, Hardgore is definitely first-rate ugliness from the sick, sick Seventies by virtue of its hellbrew of triple-X sex and unfettered violence, but it’s not the soul-stripping experience of, say, Avon’s monstrous B&D/hardcore hybrids, or the grainy netherworld of certain New York 8mm loops. The gore is effective, but the fantasies –the spurting cocks, the talking boner, the babbling high priest – pretty much nullify any sense of disgust or discomfort by being ridiculous to the point of near-lunacy. But as a novelty, it’s definitely worth a look-see, especially if your particular cinematic interests lend themselves towards both hardcore and gore; the sex, which is mostly of the group variety, is occasionally difficult to see, but it’s lengthy and sweaty. Galke is nobody’s idea of a looker (and amusingly, she gets numerous voice-overs which are rendered by an entirely different person; her own speaking voice is alarmingly close in pitch and accent to Baretta-era Robert Blake), but she’s an eager performer. The rest of the cast appears to be mostly no-names (John Seeman and Turk Lyon are frequently credited in write-ups as the doctor and his flunky, but I sincerely doubt that they are the actors in this film), but they pull off the fucking and the freakery with professionalism.

Alpha Blue’s DVD is fullscreen and looks a bit worn in places (their print is missing any title or end credits), but the image quality shouldn’t distract you from the on-screen action. The disc is rounded out by one of the most alarming 8mm loops I’ve ever witnessed; titled “Never Talk to Strangers,” it stars Galke as one of two schoolgirls at the mercy of a sex psycho who binds and tortures them with astonishing savagery. Galke is brutally face-fucked before puking up her abductor’s load onto to her own chest; she’s then slashed with broken pieces of glass and cast aside so the creep can work over her pal. The whole thing comes to a head with what appears to be a pair of stripped electrical wires being applied to places where callused hands shouldn’t go, much less high voltage; to borrow Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford’s pungent phrase, it’s enough to make anyone even remotely sane want to faint. But maybe that’s not you. Either way, you’ve got your work cut out for you with Hardgore.