The Screengrab : freaks

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing quality, award-winning cinema during the past few weeks of Award Season mania, but now that Hugh Jackman has doffed his top hat and tails and the Slumdog kids have shuffled back to Bollywood, we thought it would be as good a time as any to get back to all the SEX-CRAZED!!!! BLOOD-THIRSTY!!!! ULTRA-PSYCHOTIC!!!! movies we really like, from the gin-soaked swamps and drive-ins of hixploitation to the blaxploitation grindhouse and...BEYOND!!!!

And sure, if you think about it, pretty much everything Hollywood pumps out is some form of exploitation, from the straight-up blood and guts of the zillionth Friday the 13th remake to the pity party relationship-porn of He’s Just Not That Into You. Even this year’s Oscar nominees were baited with pulp: after all, Mickey Rourke’s face in The Wrestler was at least as freaky as anything in Freaks, and where would The Reader be without all the hot Nazi sex and Kate Winslet’s big pepperoni nipples?

But the movies on this week’s list go even faster, pussycat...not to mention further, deeper, weirder and wilder. They did it first or they did it best or maybe they really shouldn’t have done it at all. Can your heart stand the shocking facts as Screengrab salutes THE ULTIMATE EXPLOITATION FILMS-A-GO-GO?!!!!??!?!!!

MARIHUANA (1936)

1930s films such as Marihuana (whose poster bore the subtitle "Weed with Roots in Hell"), Cocaine Fiends, Assassin of Youth and Reefer Madness tended to come with introductions explaining that their lurid tales of young people driven to crime, madness, and death by indulgence in vile narcotics were being presented to the public for "educational purposes only." These things were later revived in the 1970s and turned into midnight movies for hip audiences who enjoyed laughing at the dim old things who didn't know that a little weed could just be harmless fun. In fact, the '70s audiences may have been more naive than those in the '30s, most of whom probably understood perfectly well that putting up with some fake moralizing was the price they had to pay for the wild-child melodramatics, which were so extreme that they could only be justified dramatically with the pretext that these characters were carried away by the kind of bad chemicals that had Hunter S. Thompson seeing drunken lizards in the lounge of his Las Vegas hotel. Truth be told, you have to be a little desperate for cheap thrills to really watch most of these things; despite all the wild and crazy goings-on, the slow, stagy filmmaking isn't exactly psychedelic. Reefer Madness is probably the most famous of them, but the 57-minute Marihuana makes that 67-minute epic seem downright poky by comparison. Its answer to Reefer Madness' famous piano-playing scene is a party scene where a girl takes a toke on one of "the funniest-looking cigarettes I've ever seen" and is soon laughing into the camera with an expression that would alarm the Joker. Soon she and her gal pals, one of whom looks like an unchaperoned young Margaret Dumont, are stripping off their clothes and running into the ocean, with the result that one of them drowns and another gets pregnant. (Ask your mother.) After that, it's a short path to dealings with smiling men in dubious mustaches, chases through alleyways against trigger-happy cops with very poor aim, and the once-innocent heroine's steady transformation into Lady Scarface.

DOLEMITE (1975)

Excuse me: that’s DOLEMITE, motherfucker! The world lost a singular talent last year when Rudy Ray Moore, the incredibly foul-mouthed stand-up comic and “King of the Party Records”, left Earth for the big Player’s Ball in the sky. In the blaxploitative 1970s, he made a handful of movies based on his bad-ass pimp persona, but none of them were as enjoyable or as crazily over-the-top as Dolemite. Made for half a buck and some chicken wings in 1975 and starring Moore and a cast of top-shelf nobodies, Dolemite’s plot was so thin it barely existed at all, but who cares? Nobody was going to see this movie for its clever plot twists. They were going to see it so that they could hear Moore call some two-bit cocksucking honky a rat-soup-eating, born-insecure, no-business-having motherfucker. Moore couldn’t act, his director couldn’t direct, and it’s pretty likely that his key grip couldn’t grip, but that doesn’t keep Dolemite from being as straight-up entertaining as anything produced during the blaxploitation era. Whether he was telling his bitch not to buy him no cotton draws or suggesting that a guard use his recently shed prison uniform to wipe his ass with, Dolemite was hilarious to watch, and helped define an insanely politically incorrect archetype that would inform aspects of American culture for decades to come. Even now, Dolemite probably ranks behind only Scarface as the movie that most influenced hip-hop. And even if you’re not a rap fan, if you can watch Moore do his thing without smiling, you might want to have your fun gland looked at.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)

The key to a successful exploitation movie often boils down to having just enough intriguing elements and shocking visuals to fill a two-minute trailer. In the case of The Hills Have Eyes, those two minutes are just about all the movie has going for it. You’ve got the family driving their Winnebago off the beaten path, despite the warnings of the old coot at the gas station. You’ve got the tires blowing out, leaving the family stranded in the middle of the Nevada desert. And you’ve got the most exploitable element of all: the head of Michael Berryman. Berryman – who plays Pluto, the muscle of the clan of cannibalistic mutants that terrorizes the family – was never known for his romantic leading roles. His lumpy, oblong head, recessed eyes, lopsided nose and complete absence of hair pretty much ensured him steady work as one of nature’s mistakes, and he’s true to form here. Other than Berryman, The Hills Have Eyes is thin gruel indeed, one of Wes Craven’s most overrated works, way too reliant on the dog-jumping-out-of-the-shadows school of shock effects. And yet it spawned not only a sequel and a remake, but even a remake of the sequel – or is it a sequel to the remake? Either way – that’s exploitation!

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978)

Those looking for either a passionate condemnation or defense of Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman) will have to look elsewhere, since aside from its unforgettably titillating VHS cover artwork – which made my teenage heart yearn to rent the film – and its infamous reputation, this piece of exploitation hackwork mostly elicits a shrug. Still, it’s nearly impossible to deny the status of Zarchi’s shocker as an exploitation cinema touchstone, what with its Z-grade craftsmanship, empty-headed commingling of sex and violence, and pitiful strategy of reveling in abhorrent brutality and misogyny and then attempting to condemn such behavior with more gruesomeness. Over the course of 30 minutes, a New Yorker vacationing in the country is raped by sadistic hicks (including a mentally challenged virgin Neanderthal) who don’t like city folk. After suffering this assault, the woman seeks lethal vengeance on her attackers, a twist which may upend the film’s early gender-power dynamics, but nonetheless mainly just affords Zarchi further opportunity to stage bloodthirsty mayhem.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six...if you dare!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak & Nick Schager

Set Your DVR!: Carny Edition

Hayden Childs — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:30:00 GMT

Late Friday TCM is going for broke, carny-style. Starting at 1 am central/2 am eastern, TCM has lined up a handful of cult movies featuring little people and other actors of unusual physical appearance.

The first movie up is 1938's The Terror of Tiny Town, which is a Western musical drama (it's like I'm picking words out of a hat, right?) cast entirely with lttle people, many of whom would go on to be munchkins in The Wizard of Oz the following year. IMDB gives it a whopping 2.4 stars out of 10, but the reviews reveal a serious struggle to adequately describe the movie. Many of the reviewers appear to be conflicted about whether it's okay to laugh at the cast, especially when most agree that the cast approaches the material almost as if they were - get this - serious actors (spoiler: they were serious actors).

Next, at 2:11/3:11 am (seriously, this is programmed to play eleven minutes into the hour?), TCM has the short Three Chumps Ahead, about which I know nothing. But I'm going to recommend it on the basis of the word "chump" appearing in the title. Also, it's less than 20 minutes long. I mean, what else are you recording at that time of night? QVC?

The second feature, at 2:30/3:30 am, is The Unholy Three. This is the talkie from 1930, not Tod Browning silent version of 1925. Lon Chaney stars in both as the head of a group of thieves composed of sideshow performers. This was Chaney's first and only talkie, as he passed away shortly after completing it. Harry Earles, a little person of some note to fans of the Wizard of Oz, plays Chaney's sidekick.

Earles is also in TCM final movie, Freaks, playing at 3:45/4:45 am. Earles plays Hans, the little person married to the conniving trapeze artist Cleopatra. This one is, of course, the classic Tod Browning film, and it's almost impossible to do justice to it in a few sentences. In conclusion, gabba gabba hey.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)

Fuck a Zack Snyder remake – no other zombie movie, not even by George Romero, will ever surpass the original Dawn of the Dead. How do I love this gory, nasty, and surprisingly moving masterpiece of terror? Let me count the ways. First of all, while it can’t surpass the closed-up creepiness of the original Night of the Living Dead, it opens it up to staggering effect and makes it a truly apocalyptic horror film. Second, Night had always been projected as a one-off; it was Dawn that made zombies into one of the famous monsters of filmdom, that transformed Romero’s dead-eyed flesh-eaters into beings with their own mythology and internal logic. By doing so, it didn’t just launch a franchise – it launched an entire universe, a cultural archetype with as much meaning and possibility as vampires, werewolves – or angels. Third, it’s tight as hell, incredibly suspenseful, and remarkably well-acted, with the technical difficulties of filming something so ambitious on a shoestring overcome in surprising and effective ways. Fourth, like all great horror movies, it gives us an essential human drama at its center; we care about the story because we care about Stephen, Peter, Roger and Francine. Fifth, it’s a deeply satirical exercise, the first attempt – and probably the most successful – by Romero to mock us by showing us the way a lot of people probably see us: zombies as cultural/political metaphors. And sixth…well, it’s about a bunch of flesh-eating zombies running amok in a shopping mall. And, to use the highfalutin language of film criticism, that’s awesome.

4. PSYCHO (1960)

One of the running jokes around the opulent Screengrab offices is that no matter what lists we come up with, there’s some way to fit Psycho onto them. I’ve personally written up so many aspects of it, I feel like I should get a screenplay credit. But Psycho is definitely responsible for two major accomplishments – both, to me, indisputable, and both decidedly mixed blessings to cinema – that make it especially suitable for this list. The first is that it effectively killed off noir. The highly stylized crime dramas were already on their way out, but Psycho, by cribbing so many of their visual cues but utterly annihilating (literally, at least in the case of Marion Crane) their doomed criminal anti-heroes and shifting the focus from ordinary criminals to extraordinary psychopaths, Psycho put noir in the ground as a dominant method of storytelling. The second is that it ushered in a new kind of villain: setting the tone for the slasher movies of 20 years later and the torture porn of 40 years later, Psycho replaced the notion of the murderer as a relatable character – a villain, surely, but one driven by rational urges like greed, lust, revenge, or envy – with that of the psychopath. Gone was the moral ambiguity of crime dramas past, and in its place was the appeal of the villain who was totally alien: who was intriguing because we could not recognize ourselves in him, because he did things we literally could not imagine. There’s no denying that these two transformations did more harm than good, and ushered in legions of terrible movies, but they’re also further testimonies to how great, and how transformative, Psycho really was.

3. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

George A. Romero has directed a number of great films, but his legacy will surely be his contributions to the zombie horror subgenre. With five Dead films under his belt and yet another on the way, Romero has defined the modern concept of big-screen zombies. Many consider his masterpiece to be 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, with its scathing critique of our consumerist impulses, but for sheer thrills, nothing can top the original Night of the Living Dead. The plot is simple, almost crude -- a group of strangers barricade themselves in an abandoned home in order to defend themselves against an infestation of zombies roaming the countryside. But working from this rudimentary premise, Romero fashioned a scruffier, scarier counterpart to Hitchcock’s The Birds, another film that mined horror from a sudden, uncanny plague unleashed by nature. In addition, Romero’s hardscrabble shooting style -- his black and white 16mm cinematography was necessitated by the film’s $100,000 budget -- helped to change the way horror movies could be made. With the runaway success of Night, horror began to move away from the elegant, big-budget productions to more quick-and-dirty scares, paving the way for the likes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and many others. But none of this would matter if Night wasn’t scary as hell, which it definitely is, in large part because Romero so skillfully orchestrates the breakdown of society that results from the zombie plague. With the line between living and dead so thoroughly obliterated, nothing else can be sacred -- government, law, morality, and perhaps most memorably, the institution of the family. When a couple’s infected daughter suddenly turns on her parents, it’s clear that anything is possible in Romero’s world, which is perhaps the scariest notion of all.

2. FREAKS (1932)

Having launched a legend the year before with the Bela Lugosi talkie of Dracula, old Hollywood hand Tod Browning decided to quit fucking around: this time, he was serious. This time, the horror felt by his audience wasn’t going to be creepy or sensual: it was going to be repulsive and visceral. And he was going to make them pay for it. The essence of some of the greatest horror stories is making the audience question who, exactly, the monsters really are, and, by peopling its cast with authentic touring circus freaks and then making them the victims of the greedy, lying “normals”, Freaks made it crystal clear: they are us. Some have accused the film of exploiting its cast, but that’s a knee-jerk reaction that not only ignores the movie’s moral complexity (and the fact that the wronged freaks exact a chilling, and utterly deserved, vengeance on their tormentors), but also the fact that for many of the performers, it was the biggest paycheck they’d ever have. They were also treated well by Browning and his cast, something that couldn’t be said for the studio (which wouldn’t allow most of them to dine in the cafeteria) or many of its stars (who refused to star alongside “sideshow exhibitions”). The knowledge of how the picture was made only serves to enhance its powerful condemnation of intolerance -- which was even stronger, just as the ending was even bleaker, before the studio forced cuts. Even today, over 75 years later, Freaks remains one of the most disturbing films ever released by a major Hollywood studio – just as Tod Browning had intended.

1. THE SHINING (1980)

One of the big mistakes many horror filmmakers make is to over-explain the mysterious forces at work in their films. Ask anyone who’s watched the misguided “explanation scene” that George Romero belatedly added to some of the DVD releases of Night of the Living Dead -- usually, not knowing exactly why the monsters are attacking is much more effective than knowing. No horror movie has captured this idea better than The Shining. Stanley Kubrick memorably stated of 2001 that he “wanted to ask more questions than we had answers,” and he used the same tactic in bringing Stephen King’s bestseller to the screen. Naturally, this annoyed many viewers, including King himself, who didn’t cotton to the liberties Kubrick took with his work. But no matter -- it’s the film’s ambiguity that makes it so disturbing. Why are there two different Gradys? What’s up with the guy in the animal suit? And what exactly happens to Jack at the end of the movie? Wisely, Kubrick withholds the answers, allowing the disorientation that results from these scenes to go unresolved. In addition, the film also tells a more human-sized horror story, of a family that’s barely holding together even before the ghosts arrive on the scene -- a man whose eerie formality keeps his demons uneasily at bay as long as he stays off the sauce, a boy overwhelmed by his supernatural gift (curse?) and still scarred by an act of drunken violence by his father, and the woman who can’t handle the idea of losing either of them. All the while, Kubrick practically hypnotizes us with his filmmaking brilliance -- those Steadicam shots! -- meaning that even when The Shining becomes difficult to watch, it’s impossible to look away.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributors: Jack-o-Leonard Pierce, Mauled Clark

The Rep Report (October 24 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: As part of the annual Earshot Jazz Festival, the Northwest Film Forum is hosting a trio of documentaries that offer chilled sights and sounds for music and movie lovers, from October 23 to November 1. The mini-fest opens with the new Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer and Ron Mann's 1981 Imagine the Sound, featuring Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Archie Shepp, and Bill Dixon. Then, starting on the 26th, comes Bruce Weber's newly restored Chet Baker profile Let's Get Lost, a movie that we are always happy to tout.

NEW YORK: New French Films (October 24 - 28) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music provides audiences with the chance to buck the increasingly spotty international distribution system and see the New York premieres of some recent work from France. One film, Je t’aime...moi non plus: Critics and artists is a documentary, on the role of the film critic, directed by the actress Maria De Medeiros, that will be followed by a panel discussion including such critics as Kent Jones, Dave Kehr, and Dennis Lim.

Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema (October 26 - November 14) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is designed to provide an entry point for audiences unfamiliar with Yugoslavia's cult reputation as a hotbed of experimental and provocative film making. The schedule crams in thirteen classics from the "golden age" of Yugoslav filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, eleven more recent works, and a selection of eleven shorts, curated by Croatian film scholar Mato Kukuljica, showcasing the achievements of "the Zagreb school of animation." Krsto Papic, Dejan Sorak, and Ognjen Svilicic, three directors whose combined careers span some fifty years of moviemaking, will be in attendance.

LOS ANGELES: It's that time of year again, and the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theater just wants to say, from the bottom of its heart: Boo! Starting Wednesday, October 25 (with the classic ghost stories The Haunting and The Uninvited) and continuing on Thursday (with the funkier '70s sci-fi of Demon Seed and the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it throws on a couple of double features as a simmering build-up to its Dusk-to-Dawn Halloween Horror-Thon on Friday the 27th. With two films by Italian gorehound Lucio Fulci and movies by Tod Browning (Freaks), Stuart Gordon (From Beyond), and Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) that probably aren't the first thing even those guys would tell their mother's friends about, this is not the horror marathon of guys who believe in doing things half-way.

— Phil Nugent