In college I had a pal named Grady who was
the rare college film studies major drawn not
to highfalutin Kurosawa, Bergman, Antonioni-type films, but instead to the
ultra-lowbrow exploitation films of the 50s, 60s and 70s – “Blood Feast”, “Wild Angels”, “I Spit On Your Grave” and the like. He was an ardent collector of
badly-recorded VHS copies of these and many other like-minded sex, violence,
Nazi, Blaxploitation, biker, “mondo”, Russ Meyer etc. films, and this world of
cheapo film intersected nicely with that of punk rock and record collecting,
both of which were high on our agendas as well. Thus, many a drunken night in
the late 80s and early 90s was spent watching these films. Our exploitation
fandom was well-timed, too. “THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM” and “RE:SEARCH INCREDIBLY STRANGE FILMS” had come out in the recent half-decade, and both
books became absolute bibles for me and many others of that time, as we sought to see and dissect
some of the worst and the weirdest films of all time. An exploitation
revival crested hard in the 1990s, and mini-genres like 70’s Blaxploitation and
women-in-prison movies “finally got their due”.
So here’s this recent documentary film called
“AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE” that delves into the history of these sordid pictures in
a light, and moderately successful, manner. I feel like this is maybe the third
time I’ve seen a history-of-exploitation-films documentary, or perhaps it just
feels that way, because the only one I can call to mind at the moment is the excellent, better-than-this-film
“NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD”, which tackles the history of Australian exploitation films. Anyway, as someone
who actually got to walk on New York’s 42nd Street in the early 80s and
saw endless marquees showing “Cannibal Holocaust”-esque films all day and all
night, and who also remembers the glory days of 1970s horror schlock and softcore
teen-porn film very well, I’m still interested in how it all came to be, and why
it was so successful. At 44 years of age, actually taking 90 minutes from my life to watch a film like this doesn’t interest me in the least
anymore, but hey, I’m really glad they were around when they were.
“AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE” follows the standard this-is-a-documentary-about-films
convention to the letter: Talking heads sitting in chairs and laughing about
the “old days”, lots of lurid film clips, and chapterized sections for each
phase of the subject’s development. You get the sense that this particular film was really made on a shoestring, though. When
clips are called for from a film like, say, the landmark horror cheeser “Blood
Feast”, there are times when only outtakes from the film are shown – not clips from the
film itself. And yet they got the rights to show real scenes from “Psycho”, “Wild
Angels”, “Easy Rider” and other biggies (public domain?). Some of the talking
heads are great – Hershel Gordon Lewis and John Landis (!) in particular – but others
are just awful, like a twentysomething writer named Kim Miller and a guy who
still bugs me from the time I saw him do his poseur film-expert shtick live,
Eddie Muller.
I did learn some things, though. I didn’t realize
what a big cash-cow craze those “birth of the baby” films were in the 1950s, in
which squeamish, repressed Americans paid money for the privilege of watching filmed,
live births of children. The crazy-Nazi exploitation film genre was more rich
than I thought it was, and a clip from a film called “THE TORMENTORS”, in which
two American hippie actors dressed as Nazis chase a blonde guy who’s supposed
to be Jesus, really took me back to my teens & twenties and made me wanna
drink a Mickey Bigmouth six-pack and watch this one. Twice. All told, I’ll
cautiously recommend “AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE” for its cornucopia of classic clips
from the many eras of exploitation. They’re a real pleasant assault on the eyes
and the depraved pleasure centers of the brain.
