The Weekly Grind

Editors Note: After a conspicuous absence of more than two months (during which time he was presumed dead and taken off the employee roster), Mr. Beedon was found unconscious, dressed only in a kimono and a pair of argyle socks, on the doorstep of our offices. Upon regaining consciousness, Mr. Beedon spent fifteen minutes pacing the hallway and muttering about “the FUCKING MONKEYS”, then pulled off his socks and took out a wadded piece of Hello Kitty stationery, on which was written the bulk of this article. While we cannot speculate upon Mr. Beedon’s whereabouts during the past two months (nor would we care to), we can safely ascertain that he will be fully rehabilitated and back to something resembling normal by next week. Thank you for your patience.

There was a strange sort of reversal that went on in the world of exploitation during the late sixties. With the repeal of the Hays Code, the grindhouse suddenly became the last refuge of the square.

Perhaps some explanation is in order…

Up to this point, the exploiteers had been near revolutionary in their attempts to put taboo subjects on screen, albeit mostly for completely selfish, money motivated reasons. But now, with the Code gone, and pop culture exploding in a million different directions, the studio system went into a freefall, and the money men started hiring hippies to revamp their image. No you could go to any mainstream movie theater and see revolutionary, boundary breaking, original cinematic visions (plus plenty of tits and ass to boot).

What was a sleaze merchant to do? The answer was simple. Pander to the prurient interests of the conservatives, while delivering a big, shiny fuck you to the hippies in the process.

To begin with, I apologize.
I know this column has become one big ponderous history lesson, but it’s only because there’s so much background to cover, so many stories leading to the big moment, the fateful day that kicked exploitation cinema into the spotlight, into its all too brief golden age before hardcore porn and mainstream horror stole its thunder.
You have to finish your salad before you can get to the main course, after all…
But I’m happy to report, this is the last bite of salad.

1967 was a big year for the movies. With a little high profile help from Antonioni and MGM, who released his film Blow Up in spite of a denial by the MPAA, the Hays Code finally, mercifully, bit the dust. Although it was replaced by a rating system that grew more and more restrictive over time, the first few years of chaos were exploited mercilessly by filmmakers everywhere. And no one did it better than our friends in the grindhouse. For the next five years, an unleavened stream of sex, gore and brutality would pour out of drive-ins and inner city cheapo theaters, and into the eyes and ears of an America hungry for something different.

But for now, let’s take one last look at the repressed America of before, America on the verge of explosion, a time capsule of 1967 L.A., courtesy of Peter Perry and Harry Novak, and one of the strangest and shortest lived phenomenons of pre-grindhouse cinema: Mondo.

Two Thousand Maniacs! 1964
Color Me Blood Red 1965

“Holy Bananas! That’s a girl’s leg!”
That’s also the most compelling reason to see H.G. Lewis and David Friedman’s third and final collaboration, Color Me Blood Red. By 1965, it was becoming clear that the Hersch and Dave show was being stretched a bit thin, and that fraying shows in every tortured frame of that ill fated third outing. By the final day of filming, the partnership would be no more. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

America’s thirst for gore was growing in the wake of Blood Feast, and Lewis and Friedman knew they had to deliver in order to survive. Fortunately, they had a number of ideas up their collective sleeve, and a dedicated crew to help with the effort. So, late in 1964, they rolled back down to Florida, this time to St. Cloud (now simply another tooth in the Disney Monster’s gaping maw, but at the time, a genuine small town near Orlando), and commenced the filming of Two Thousand Maniacs!. With the freedom of a larger budget and no small amount of notoriety (thanks to the success of Blood Feast), they were able to take over the entire town, along with most of it’s residents.

It could be argued that there was a sort of fundamental shift in American culture in the early sixties, a kind of subconscious push toward incipient violence that would pave the way for the turbulent years to come.
One could also safely assume that absolutely none of this entered the minds of David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis as they crafted the film that would define their careers and stand as the first full color depiction of blood and guts in cinematic history: I speak, of course, of Blood Feast.

At the onset of 1963, Freidman and Lewis were simply a few more undistinguished players in the sexploitation biz. After meeting in Chicago in the early fifties, they trudged their way through the years of the nudie cuties, dipped a toe into the roughies with Scum of the Earth, and even tried their hands at a nudist musical, all with modest returns.
America’s sleazehounds had grown tired of the meager offerings before them: there wasn’t enough sex in the nudies, not enough nudity in the roughies, and with the code still managing to wrap its withered tentacles around any attempts to subvert it, the outlook grew increasingly bleak.
It was clear something had to change. The drive-in needed something new, some heretofore uncharted territory in titillation, something to bring the audiences back, salivating for more. It came in the form of a simple, four letter word: Gore.

While Doris Wishman was busy pouring out her existential misery on sullen New York audiences, our good friend Harry Novak was plotting his own revolution.
In 1957, Novak was wading through the rapid collapse of Howard Hughes’ ailing giant RKO Pictures. Once the head of distribution at the company, he was now tasked with shutting down all of it’s west coast offices, giving employees their walking papers and liquidating their cars and furniture. Not one to wallow in unemployment, Harry joined forces with a few longtime friends, the frequently aliased director Peter Perry, and Max Gardens, owner of the Gaiety Theater chain, to form Box Office International Pictures, the mantle under which he would peddle prolific amounts of smut for the next decade. After a few years of distributing mostly foreign pseudo documentary sex films, he decided it was time to make a film of his own. Thus was born Kiss Me Quick! crown jewel of the nudie-cuties.

Thanks to Doris Wishman and the peculiarities of American censorship in the early sixties, there’s probably a whole generation of men out there who are secretly turned on by rape.
In other words, welcome to the “Roughies”, a twisted little genre that existed for a few short years in the mid to late sixties, and was almost exclusively populated by directors Doris Wishman and The Findlays (Michael and Roberta), and a dedicated cast of washed up New York actors and, um… performers.
Using the well worn “Reefer Madness” technique (getting taboo subjects on the screen by wrapping them in a cautionary tale), Wishman inflicted Bad Girls Go To Hell on art house audiences in 1965, a sadistic (but also kind of ridiculous) skin flick about an ordinary housewife with abysmally bad luck.
The film gets to it quickly, when poor Meg Kelton, left alone in the big empty apartment she shares with her husband, takes out the trash. But as she turns the corner into the hallway, who should appear but The Creepy Janitor, leering at her from the stairway. Suffice it to say, he attempts to rape her in the hallway, then inexplicably coerces her to his apartment, where he indeed does rape her. Excercising her first (and last) bout of sensible decision-making in the course of the film, she kills him with an ashtray.

“If you have to be a diehard grindhouse fan to enjoy this movie, then the movie’s probably pretty limited. I’m not saying my movie is better than that genre, but I am trying to transcend it. I have my own agenda I’m trying to get across, and it’s not the agenda of most drive-in movies.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Quentin.

Yeah, I know, I’m late, and I’m not delivering the article I promised to my faithful readership (all 3 of you), but this has to be addressed, albeit briefly, and this seemed the perfect format for it.

At Cannes on Monday, Tarantino held a press conference and premiere not for Grindhouse, not for a tribute to forgotten drive-in sleaze cinema, not even for his collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, who sat quietly on the sidelines, but to promote his own ego tripping extended cut of his half of the proceedings, Death Proof.
Kurt Russell, to his credit, gave a few impassioned sentences in praise of the full Grindhouse feature, the attempt to revive the experience of a trash double billing, but to no avail. In the end, it’s Quentin’s show. The award winning filmmaker. The whiz kid. The Auteur.

Well here’s some news for you, Q. Those trashy movies you claim to revere – they weren’t made by filmmakers with a burning desire to tell their stories. With a few notable exceptions, they were made by a twisted consortium of producers who wanted to put blood and tits on the big screen for the biggest return on the smallest investment, desperate directors who needed a break, and actors who needed money for their ever growing drug habits.
Everyone got used. That’s why it was called exploitation.

And it’s gone. The genuinely independent world that existed beyond the studio system has been co-opted by moneymaking machines like the Weinsteins. There are rules to be followed, legal forms to be filled, catering trays to be devoured. No tribute will bring it back, and nothing will emerge to take its place.

With that depressing thought, I’ll leave you until next week, when I swear to you, I will be reviewing Bad Girls Go to Hell. Until then…

The horrors of Harry Novak put safely aside for the moment (don’t fret, you haven’t seen the last of him), let’s whisk ourselves away to a simpler time, to the humble beginnings of sexploitation, when people could get their rocks off with nary a nipple flashing across the screen, with even the slightest whiff of sexuality buried under layers of girdles and rocket bras and snappy dialogue. Welcome to the dark ages.
Specifically, welcome to 1962. Just before the dam broke.
Satan in High Heels was of course not the first film to capitalize on the prurient desires of American audiences. As far back as the 1920’s, “health” films like the Reefer/Sex/Cocaine Madness trilogy, and Sex Maniac! passed through middle America virtually undetected, peddling titillation in the guise of education. It was in this spirit that director Jerald Intrator, fresh off the naughty but harmless last-gasp-of-burlesque classic Striporama, decided to put his lovely ladies in the confines of an actual storyline.

Let me say, by way of introduction, that Quentin Tarantino probably means well.
And it’s not really his intentions in the release of Grindhouse, a double feature co-helmed with Robert Rodriguez, that upset my sensibilities. Nor do I expect bad things from them. By all acounts it is, as with all of Tarantino’s films, a warm, loving tribute to the movies that sustained him through his youth, along with countless other video geeks across the world.
But… and here, folks, is the caveat: Tarantino’s films don’t achieve their implied purpose (to revive lost and forgotten genres of film and expose a new generation to them) because they overshadow and effectively bury the films they so lovingly honor.
So my purpose in all of this is clear: Before you rush off to see Tarantino’s latest mess, pay a visit, via the magic of home video, to the closet sized havens of 42nd Street, to the disreputable drive-ins of middle America, to the back alleys of Hollywood, to a world of flesh and fantasy, of silk stockings and sleazy producers, to the one, the only, the real Grindhouse.