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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953)

By high school, I’d seen plenty of artsy foreign films and indies (not to mention a decade's worth of Saturday morning creature double features on UHF), but I’m pretty sure Glen or Glenda? was the first real exploitation flick I ever saw (at least on the big screen), followed by a half dozen more during a day-long marathon at the late-lamented Off The Wall Cinema in Central Square, Cambridge. Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s impassioned fauxcumentary -- about a man (Wood himself) who can work better, think better, even play better, and be more of a credit to his community and his government, in satin undies, a dress and a sweater of finest angora -- was unlike anything I’d ever seen, less a work of art than a Rorschach snapshot of a fringe perspective far beyond mainstream standards of taste, commerciality and talent (in...uh...the traditional sense). Before long, I knew everything about Ed Wood, Jr. and his merry band of misfits, but few cinematic experiences in my life, before or since, have been so bizarrely disorienting as my baffled first encounter with the spectacle of stampeding buffalo superimposed over Bela Lugosi’s impassioned command to “PULL THE STRING!” Wood may have only been exploiting himself (and, I suppose, Lugosi), but respectable Hollywood movies are rarely this fascinating, sincere or unique.

THE TRIP (1967)

Roger Corman was never slow to jump on a trend, so it’s no surprise that he was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the 1960s. Ever the consummate professional, Corman sampled the drug while camping at Big Sur and by his own account, had a mighty fine time doing so. Nevertheless, in the course of his diligent research he had come across some mentions of what the hippies termed “bad trips,” and felt compelled to present a more balanced picture of the hallucinogen’s effects than his own experience had provided. Peter Fonda stars as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. The man is not possessed of a soothing bedside manner, to say the least. All seems to be going well for Groves at first; he stares at his hands and entertains deep thoughts about the significance of the phrase “living room,” and experiences vivid hallucinations in which he runs around the sets from Corman’s old Poe movies. (Even while experimenting, it seems, Corman never took his eye off the bottom line.) Groves’ trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he’s killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. He proves to be an even worse judge of character than we’d previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. He also has a proto-Robert Downey Jr. moment when he wanders into a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches TV with a little girl until he is chased away. None of this strikes me as a ringing endorsement of the drug, but apparently it was still too ambiguous for distributor AIP, which added a “shattered mirror” effect to the film’s final shot of Fonda, against Corman’s wishes.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven’s later successes made him a genre icon, but it’s the director’s early, bare-bones efforts that delivered his canon’s most inspired chills. That’s certainly true of his skuzzy, deranged calling card The Last House on the Left, which commingled camp, dirt-under-fingernails brutality and one stunner of a twist. Spitting in the face of the peace-and-love generation’s idealism about humanity’s goodness (and rife with hoary urban panic), Craven’s debut mimics Bergman’s The Virgin Spring save for that film’s happy ending, its initially goofy amateurishness – full of ham-fisted cross-cutting, silly songs, and a group of fiends who seem better fit for a sitcom – soon giving way to stark, vicious brutality. After two girls are slaughtered for trying to procure some pot, their murderers coincidentally show up at the house of one of the victims’ parents, who quickly deduce who the strangers are and what they’ve done, and decide to do something very, very violent about it. Cheap, graceless and often shocking, Craven’s film is in many ways quite inept, but it’s the memorable carnage that’s truly, intentionally awful.

IT'S ALIVE (1974)

Ever want to have a baby? If so, make sure to avoid Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, which trumps Rosemary’s Baby as the ‘70s horror gem most likely to turn couples permanently sour on the notion of procreation. Though the director’s first mainstream success, few scary movies have been as underrated as Cohen’s masterpiece, an undeserved fate one can only assume has something to do with the corniness of its creature’s rubbery appearance and two sequels that did little to enhance its reputation. With a no-frills, slightly surrealistic approach that heightens his tale’s emotional immediacy, Cohen blisteringly exploits the myriad anxieties that accompany the impending birth of a child, which in this case proves to be a mutant monster begat by a middle class couple. A physical expression of its parents' neuroses (as well as ecological ruin), the creature’s rampage is stoked for typical genre scares, but Cohen doggedly keeps the focus first and foremost on the inner conflict of the creature’s father (John P. Ryan), torn between an instinct to care for, and a burning desire to kill, his unholy progeny.

MS. 45 (1981)

Few exploitation cinema auteurs are as skilled as Abel Ferrara, and few exploitation films are as grimly proficient as Ms. 45, the director’s nasty, nimble tale of a female avenger taking her fury out on NYC’s chauvinistic male population. Ferrara’s down-and-dirty aesthetic lends some high-voltage seediness to his story about a mute seamstress (Zoë Lund) who’s raped by two different men in one afternoon and responds by going Charles Bronson on any guy unfortunate enough to cross her path. Her feminist fury unleashed, Thana becomes a simultaneously sexy and scary angel of death, singlehandedly embarking on a campaign of terror that ultimately leads to a mesmerizing finale in which she carries out her bloody work in a nun’s costume. Far from merely an exploitation hack, Ferrara arranges his frame with a master’s eye, conveying his story’s central gender conflict in a raft of expertly orchestrated compositions, all while addressing his own Catholic hang-ups and – as implied by his cameo as her maiden, masked attacker – taking a decidedly ambiguous stance towards his anti-heroine’s rampage.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...insurance policies are available in the lobby!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager

The Rep Report: August 21--27

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's that time of year--the humidity-soaked dead space between the last of the real summer movies and the first of the autumn "serious" pictures--where unexpected flurries of stray weirdness count for a lot even in repertory programming. Starting August 21 and running for a week, Anthology Film Archives digs deep into the seamier recesses of the nostalgia glands for a celebration of New York vigilante movies from the 1970s and 1980s. including the official kick-start to the genre: Michael Winner's Death Wish, with Charles Bronson in his most archetypal role, and a movie that Jeff Goldblum (who made his screen debut with a five-second appearance as one of the caterwauling thugs who fuck up Chuck's wife and daughter) has been apologizing for ever since. The schedule also includes Abel Ferrara's moody, arty-looking bloodbath Ms. 45, which is notable for its wordless star performance by the beautiful and doomed Zoe Lund, who would later write Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant under the name Zoe Tamerlis. (She also appeared in that film as one of Harvey Keitel's drug connections. Zoe Tamerlis Lund died in 1999, of a heart attack brought on by cocaine use, at the age of 37.) The schedule also amounts to the closest thing you're ever likely to see to a William Lustig Festival. Lustig, the subject of a new interview in the New York Press, directed the 1988 Maniac Cop (which was written by Larry Cohen and boasts one of the all-time classic B-list casts of its era: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Sheree North, Richard Roundtree, William "Big Bill" Smith, and the cruelly-underappreciated-by=everyone-except-Larry-Cohen Laurene Landon) and its sequel Maniac Cop 2 as well as the 1983 Vigilante. (Say what you like about Lustig, nobody can accuse him of going in for opaque, misleading titles.) Vigilante, which stars Fred Williamson and my man Robert Forster, has an impressive back-up choir itself in Richard Bright, Joe Spinell, Woody Strode, Joseph Carberry, Rutanya Alda, and Steve James, a talented performer who died young after practically taking out a patent on the category "Action Hero's Sidekick, Black Male." There are people who actually watch the Times Square scenes in Taxi Driver and tear up from thinking about the "good old days." They'll be squeezing them into the theater with a crowbar.

The dog days are also a great time for rummaging in the career of actors who had such long and busy careers that they can to be part of the landscape and rediscovering what they were like when they were walking cult items. The Brooklun Academy of Music is having a three-day Richard Widmark festival from August 25 through the 27th, and the inclusion of the London-set Night and the City makes it an event. This febrile yet moving noir was directed by Jules Dassin, who as it happens died this past March, as did Widmark himself, when both men were in their nineties. Neither ever did better work than they did here.

The Screengrab : zoe tamerlis lund

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

The Rep Report: August 21--27