Movies

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.

Sugar Hill (1974)
AKA The Zombies of Sugar Hill, Voodoo Girl

The news about the Blackwater company and their $1000 a day subcontractors in Baghdad, beholden neither to American nor Iraqi law, is such classic conspiracy theory fodder that I bet even the 9/11 nuts are feeling some residual smugness right now. I would hate to see anyone’s paranoid fantasy confirmed, especially my own, but I’ve got to say it (with apologies to Patton Oswalt): shadowy conspiracies are so common now, they’re amusing. It could come out next week that the government has a zombie hit-squad and I’d double over laughing. It would be the unhinged laughter of a lunatic, however, since that schtick was already taken by Sugar Hill, the first blaxploitation horror movie. It’s a fantastic movie where racist pigs get fed to the pigs and the Grim Reaper wears a spangled jumpsuit. It’s a wild story, but 100% fantasy- how reassuring in these troubled times.

White Zombie (1932)

Even those who prefer to begin in medias res, as I do, must eventually come back to the beginning. And as far as zombie movies go, you can’t get any earlier than 1932’s White Zombie. There had been a stage play featuring the walking dead, and a short story about them, but White Zombie was the first to capture zombies on celluloid. The launch of zombies into the American popular consciousness, like that of most monsters, reflected the events of the time. And at the time, Haiti, home of voodoo and zombies, was under military occupation by the United States of America.

Haiti loomed large in the American public’s imaginations partly because it was the first free, black-run nation in the Western Hemisphere. Haitians were slaves who rose up and slaughtered their French masters, the most frightening thing imaginable to racist Americans of the 19th century. For this and many other reasons, when another revolution, this one to overthrow the dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, threatened American business interests in the Caribbean, President Woodrow Wilson sent Marines to Port-Au-Prince in 1915. They weren’t supposed to stay long but for nineteen years, Americans had troops on the island battling rebels while attempting to reorganize the Haitian government in the American model. It was for the good of the Haitian people, Americans rationalized, who needed saving from themselves (sound familiar?). Almost universally ignored in U.S. history books, the memory of 20th century U.S. imperial experiments persists in Latin America and Asia. These little-discussed conquests shaped the American foreign policy which led to the “Global War on Terror,” and kick started the U.S.-centric cultural exchanges some call “soft imperialism;” the similarities between colonial occupations of the early 20th century and the current occupation of Iraq are very instructive.

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.

Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio (1972)
AKA Man from Deep River, Deep River Savages, Sacrifice!

Cannibal Ferox (1981)
AKA Make them Die Slowly, Woman from Deep River

Besides our friend Ruggero Deodato, Umberto Lenzi is the Italian director most associated with the cannibal horror subgenre- and they’re almost all Italian. For better or for worse, Lenzi is credited with starting the genre with his 1972 film Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio. Interestingly enough, cannibal films were absent from grindhouse screens for five years after the film’s release; Deodato brought it back in earnest with 1977’s Ultimo Mondo Cannibale. The deluge of cobra/mongoose battles and “native” breasts that tumbled out of South American location shoots thereafter is surprisingly different from Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio, including Lenzi’s later contribution to the canon, Cannibal Ferox. It’s not a horror film per se, but a blend of the adventure, ethnographic, and romance genres.

Where Cannibal Holocaust is the granddaddy of twenty-first century “gore porn,” Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio resembles cable TV survival stories, albeit with loads more nudity. It begins as a sun-baked film strip extolling the pleasures of the anarchic East; our English hero, Bradley, takes photos of some adorable children in Bangkok, stabs a man with little to no police consequences, and floats lazily down a river, surrounded by chattering monkeys. Until, of course, he’s strung up in a tree like a trapped bear and hung out to dry. Banish those Cannibal Holocaust fears from your mind, dear reader, for although the people of this river village are, shall we say, lacking in character development, they do not gut our hero. This is not to imply, however, that Lenzi’s racial politics are in any way progressive; about 70 minutes in, an ape-like, darker-skinned tribe commits the lone act of gory cannibalism in the movie. Lenzi merely believes that there are “good savages” and “bad savages,” degrees of difference from the European ideal. After some bloody initiation rituals, the friendly tribe makes Bradley a warrior. At first, he dismisses them as “animals,” but eventually he adopts the tribe’s moral code as well as its way of life. In its ambivalent attitude to its own prejudice, Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio more closely resembles early American accounts of capture by “Indians” than the other cannibal movies.

Becoming Jane - August 10th

I have a fetish for guys with accents, specifically UK accents. If you are from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, whatever and you have a penis then chances are pretty high that I’d have sex with you. I think that because I have a uterus I’m required to like guys with accents. It’s unavoidable. I met this Irish girl a few weeks ago and we were talking about how hot guys with accents are. Even she can’t escape it and she’s fucking from there! She said her favorite are Welsh guys. Personally I have a thing for Scots.
This whole “I have a uterus” thing also means that I’m genetically required to love Jane Austen movies; even stuff loosely based on Jane Austen novels (i.e. Clueless). So how happy was I when I saw the trailer for Becoming Jane. It’s about her struggle to balance being a writer and a woman in 1795. And best of all it stars my new Scottish lover James McAvoy!! (Right now just picture me with shrugged shoulders and an ear to ear grin.)
This isn’t the type of movie review that you are used to reading on this schizophrenic fuck-fest of a website. It’s not about Italian zombies, and I can’t actually review the movie because I haven’t seen in yet. Screw you; I know what you’re thinking “what the hell is she reviewing it for if she doesn’t know a thing about it.” We’ll I don’t care. I’ll give my opinion and you’ll like it. I think it’ll be great. It has everything I need: the struggle for women’s rights, love dilemmas, cryptic British prose, and a sexy scot. So go see Becoming Jane this weekend and tell them Amy said so.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Touristas(2006)
Speaking of the colonialist fears conjured up by a film like Zombi 2, talk turns naturally to the frontrunner in the competition for the most violent genre ever: cannibal films. Cannibal films enjoyed their greatest popularity in Italy (and the grindhouse theaters of the U. S.) during the 1970s and early 1980s; these films are unified by a number of thematic and visual characteristics, namely extreme gore, jungle locations, vaguely anti-colonial sentiments, and the real-life killing of animals. Unfortunately, another thing that ties them together is that they’re sadistic bullshit, and racist to boot. Condemnations of both the “civilized” and “primitive” worlds, these films share the nihilistic opinion of Lucio Fulci that human beings are animals at best, nauseating bags of guts at worst. But unlike Italian zombie movies, cannibal films do not trade in metaphors. They are not monsters munching on entrails, but people, and with that extra layer of artifice goes all the fun of a splatter film. What’s left is the discomforting feeling that something must be wrong with you for willingly watching such a display.