Exploitation Nation

One of my favorite DVD lines from 2007 was BCI’s WELCOME TO THE GRINDHOUSE series. This series replicated the double feature evening at the grindhouse from the opening policy dater and very familiar coming attraction banner, to great old exploitation trailers and a double whammy of grindhouse movies usually from the Crown International library. These releases were the first time anywhere movies like Trip with The Teacher, Pick Up, Black Candles, The Teacher or Malibu High had found their way to dvd. The transfers weren’t always excellent but they were certainly passable. The Sonny Chiba double features of Dragon Princess and Karate Warriors (one of Chiba’s best films) and The Bodygaurd (not quite uncut but very close and finally letterboxed!) and Sister Street fighter were especially charming and fun.

Unfortunately the good times were short lived. After ten mouth-watering volumes, covering everything from horror, to biker and beach films the series just dissapeared from the new release lists. The series was by all accounts selling well enough and was easy to find at most brick and morter stores and online shops. So sales weren’t the issue. The word on the street (though I have to stress this is RUMOR not fact) is that the big hand of the Weinstein Brothers came a swinging with their lawyers and put a stop to the use of the word Grindhouse and the somewhat appropriation of the logo. I’ve heard from other low budget filmmakers who have used the term “Grindhouse” in their marketing or titles that since the Weinsteins put out the Tarantino/Rodriguiz film that Lawyers have been working overtime to threaten lawsuits to anyone using the term. Never mind the fact it existed well before them or their film in and of itself is a “homage” to the very kinds of films that are using the term in the first place. So the word on the street was that this DVD series had to put on the breaks and re-evaluate what they were doing to avoid being sued into the ground. I have no idea if this is true but it sounds reasonable enough.

So finally after almost a year of nothing this series has risen from the ashes and is back in action under a new title called “EXPLOITATION CINEMA“. The format is the same, the packaging is almost exactly the same as well. I suggested to an employee on a message board they should have went with “Welcome to 42nd Street” as a title, but this new one works too. There are 3 new releases on the horizon; Two to be release on September 16th and another one on October 14th. The first two double features are CEMETARY GIRLS/VAMPIRE HOOKERS and the British Norman J. Warren delights TERROR/SATAN’S SLAVE. The October release is MAUSOLEUM which stars Bobbie Breese as a monster with breasts that kill people and BLOOD SONG the movie where Frankie Avalon is an ax murderer! Manufacturer retail price is $12.98 on each disc.

Trust me on this, if you are an exploitation fan, this series is something you will want to visit.

2008-08-28
23:31:18
Andy Copp

The Sinful Dwarf (1973) **1/2 - This is one grimy little movie! I guess this was supposed to be a sex movie but what it ends up being is a twisted, grotesque little peep into a perverse world that is so fucked up you almost have to appreciate it just for the sheer repellent factor. The story is about a dwarf named Olaf and his Mother (a former actress) who own a boarding house. But in the attic they keep a room full of chained naked women that are hooked on heroin that they pimp out to particularly disgusting men looking for a lay. When a down on their luck newly wed couple rent a room Olaf and Mommy set their sights on the new voluptuous gal to add spice to the midnight playpen. Olaf is played by a dwarf actor named Torben who apparently was a children’s show host in Denmark. He’s a frickin force of nature with his gravel voice, insane laugh and penchant for playing with toys. Whenever he is on screen the movie is locked in for the kill. You can’t take your filthy eyes off of it. Mommy has a penchant for reliving her glory days by doing sad renditions of Carmen Miranda numbers complete with full on costumes and smeared lipstick. These are some of the most frightening moments in the film and are sure to send chills up your spine. The whole movie is dark, brooding and looks like it was dipped in piss, right down to the set design and props. Nothing is clean in this movie and you will feel dirty for watching it. But for some reason I find that to be a reason to recommend it. When Torben sneaks into the attic slave den/play pen to torment the naked doped up girls its disgusting, repellent and terrifying in ways that can only come from the worst of nightmares. Add to that the fact this was primarily sold as a sex film and you get a cult item of the most deranged kind. The DVD that I watched is from a PAL release that is licensed from American distributor Harry Novak. It is the exact same transfer that Something Weird used for their tape and DVD-R releases of this title years before. Since then another Dutch company has put out yet another version of this film, this time in a XXX hardcore version that has insert/penetration shots during some of the sex scenes. It seems that in some overseas markets this was in fact a full on porno. This version even comes with a quote from Viggo Mortensen(!) on the cover saying “this is the most disturbing movie I have ever seen!” Severin DVD is planning a new release. No word on if it will be the XXX version or the standard cut. Check out this bit from You Tube about that upcoming release. Its hilarious!

23:17:56 2008-08-26

Andy Copp

The Chilling (1989) ** - This recent DVD release from Code Red is a pretty minor work in the late eighties zombie cannon. It has that straight to tape feel that plagues so many films made after 1987, where the pace is bizarre. Not necessarily slow, but awkward mostly due to editing and not enough coverage of the material to make the scenes flow by correctly. Though the entire last forty five minutes of this movie is all action, it still has this odd, at times uninvolving feel. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story deals with a cryogenics lab that is secretly using the people being stored there for parts to support their black market organ sales business. The movie opens with an upscale man having his wife interred in the lab to be thawed out later. Meanwhile we see her being gutted and filled with green goo so she can be propped up in a cryo tube and her organs sold to some South American bidder. Troy Donahue plays the doctor who owns the lab and Linda Blair plays his on staff grief councilor who helps the clients with the transition. We then rather jarringly cut to the rich client’s son in a hotel room planning a robbery. After he gorily kills one of his partners for talking to his girlfriend the head to the band heist that goes very, very wrong. Naturally he ends up in the cryogenics lab too. Then on Halloween night there is a horrible lightening storm that blows the power and Dan Haggerty as the security guard (giving the best performance in the film) takes the cryo tubes outside so they will stay cold(!). Naturally lightening hits ALL the tubes and brings the dead back to life. Then it is poorly lit zombie mayhem from here on out. The zombies all have intricately sculpted masks that have no facial movements whatsoever. There is a little bit of gore, but the zombies bleed the green goo they had been embalmed with. The good guys eventually figure out that the lab is being used as the organ scam and a unique way to kill the zombies too. The movie is alright, but seems to be locked in the low budget dance where they couldn’t quite afford to do things just a little bit better. There is some impressive miniature work and sets, and some okay effects, but it’s the direction and cinematography that is lacking most of the time. The performances are kind of stiff as well. But I give them credit for really taking the bull by the horns and letting the movie rip for the entire second half with out a moments rest. All in all it is marginally better than the typical late eighties direct to video junk, but not nearly as good as most of the early eighties splatter fest that lived on drive in screens a few years before. The Code Red DVD this time from Shriek Show is decent enough. The transfer is dark and grainy at times, probably inherent in the source material. There is an abundance of behind the scenes video footage, most of it kind of dull until they get to the effects stuff. There is also a investor promo trailer that is basically the whole movie in five minutes as well as the normal preview.

GODS IN POLYSETER and GODS IN SPANDEX are two books put together by Suzanne Donahue and Mikael Sovijarvi that traverse the twisted landscape of the 70’s and 80‘s indie exploitation scene. But these two intrepid authors took a novel approach to the material by deciding to let those who lived through the fire tell the stories themselves. So each book is literally anecdotes from the trenches from these incredible producers, directors and performers that have all made our lives richer over the years. If you are a fan of exploitation cinema at all, there is no reason you shouldn’t have these books in your collection. You really, really cannot live without them.

GODS IN POLYESTER is first up and it is a muscle builder at close to 500 pages, large format coffee table size. This sucker has to weigh several pounds at least! Each section is broken down by year, prefaced by a short rundown of the notable events of that year, then dives into the meat of the matter as each filmmaker or performer writes something about a film that came out in that year. Some people have very short to the point stories like Richard Harrison who tends to be very blunt about the films he was involved in, taking up nary a paragraph (which often tends to stray into how he always saved the production in some way) to the longest chapter in the book from Bruce Glover (yes, Crispin Glover’s Father) who talks at length about his life, how he grew up, race relations, and just about everything else, before finally getting down to what it was like shooting the first Walking Tall movie. The thing is, he manages to make the whole story pretty much tie together! That same chapter also has many sketches from Bruce that he had drawn over the years as well, which were a nice touch. Some of the other stand out T.G. Finkbinder talking about his acting gig as the psycho in one of my favorite 70’s slashers, The Redeemer: Son of Satan, Don Dohler (R.I.P) and his leading man George Stover talk about The Alien Factor, Bill Rebane talks about the insanity of making The Giant Spider Invasion, George Barry on how Death Bed: The Bed That Eats became a lost film only to be found by a late night on the internet, several incredible stories from the awesome William Grefe, but the Whiskey Mountain being the best tale, William Shatner talks about being in his finest film Impulse (also by William Grefe) the indefatigable Leo Fong on how he made so many drive-in chop socky movies for pocket change. And so much more, Geroge Buck Flower, Hy Pyke, John Phillip Law, Carol Speed, Ted V. Mikels, Ferd Sebastion, Linea Quigly and so many more contribute as well. This is a treasure trove of invaluable information of a time long past. One thing all these entries (well most of them anyway) have in common is that they genuinely loved making these films. There is passion literally bleeding from the pages.

GODS IN SPANDEX is more of the same just covering the 80’s scene. The usual suspects make their appearances with Richard Harrison talking a bit more about acting in all those Filipino action movies and the horrors of shooting them. In fact many of the people in the book who mention working on these epics all tell the same horror stories of badly treated crews, shitty hours and nightmarish conditions. Seems that the only way to get something done was to pull a little star power and refuse to work until the crew got paid. That story crops up more than once here. Cool people in this book include the blaxsploitation God Jamaa Fanaka talking about his Penitentiary films (and how he is buddies with Robert De Niro), Gerry Ciccoritti who directed a favorite of mine the vampire cabbie classic Graveyard Shift, Bill Malone of Scared To Death, Mark Piro talks about his super 8 epics like Curse of the Queerwolf, Jon Mikel Thor remembers Rock & Roll Nightmare, Stephen Sayadian talks about his neon colored nightmare Dr. Caligary (his story about Abbie Wool and the blow job is priceless). Plus the regulars like George Buck Flower, John Phillip Law and Hy Pyke all make their contributions as well. Unfortunately all of them are no longer with us at this point. Hy Pyke gets a very loving tribute in the book, but the others passed since it was published.

Reading these books is like sitting down with the elders of some lost exploitation tribe and getting the stories of the past passed down to you. This is what it was like to fight for the glory to make films you believed in. Nowadays, indie film has been eaten up by Hollywood and corporatized, or bastardized by no budget backyard burnouts. On either end of the scale the result is the same; unwatchable, self-indulgent dreck that is made without an iota of the passion and love these guys put into their films. Read these books and maybe, just maybe some of that passion will rub off on you.
Available from headpress books
www.headpress.com

Andy Copp

2008-08-22 00:26:30

Psycho Kickboxer: The Dark Angel (1997) ** - Perfectly serviceable no budget actioneer and starring vehicle for one Curtis Bush 5 time Kickboxing Champion. This thing has been kicking around in the $1 bins for years but Pop Cinema has put it out now on their Shock-O-Rama label with a fairly nice transfer (it gets REAL grainy towards the end though) with a second film called Carnival of Blood. I had heard that Psycho Kickboxer was terrible over the years but it actually isn’t at all. As far as these kinds of American chop-socky flicks go its no worse than the dozens of Kung Fu movies that Roger Corman pumped out through the 90’s. Curtis Bush plays the kickboxing son of a cop. But when Mob thugs kill his dad (with a shocking exploding head shotgun blast you may want to rewind) gang rape and kill his fiance and leave him for dead, its time for revenge. He’s nursed back to health by a warehouse dwelling Black Army vet who was crippled by the same Mobster his dad was hunting. So the Black Crippled Guy helps train our hero in street smarts so he can take on the bad guys. Along the way he starts sneaking out into the streets in a ninja outfit and putting the whoop ass on criminals for the hell of it, thus being labeled by the press “The Dark Angel”. The acting ranges from okay (the pretty female tabloid reporter) the the atrocious (his fiance who gets raped) and everywhere in between. The martial arts aren’t bad at all, but they are not shot very well and edited even less so. But what saves them is that there is lots and lots of bloody violence. Obviously they were Steven Seagal fans (and Seagal fans will appreciate that Curtis Bush runs even funnier than Seagal does, which is saying something!) because they emulate his splatter filled fight scenes. Bush himself is fine during the fighting, but is pretty flat during scenes when he is trying to emote, but shit, thats not much different than a lot of other action stars. I really don’t see why this didn’t sell to cable or get a better release than it did. I think it just fell into piss poor rip off distribution. Hopefully this new DVD will change that. First time seeing this.