Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
Glen or Glenda: Psychiatry, Sexuality, and the Silver Screen
Normalizing “deviant” genders and bodies is just one of many tropes in Wood’s complex camp classic.
Category: Exploitation & Erotica
DIY · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Film Culture · Impresarios · Outsiders · Programmers
Unsinkable Natural-Born Showman Dennis Nyback Dies at 69: A Testimonial by an Irritating Friend
He told me about when his piano player canceled out of a silent movie performance. “I walked outside during the kiddie matinee and saw some young people loading musical instruments[…]
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Exploitation & Erotica · Impresarios & Moguls
Mom and Dad: The Most Successful Sex-Hygiene Exploitation Flick Ever
Mom and Dad is likely the most successful exploitation movie ever, and it still offers a lesson in the facts of, well, not life but canny American entrepreneurialism, that is,[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Memoir · Outsiders
Obscene and Obscure Longings: The Video Diaries of George Kuchar and Carl J. Sukenick
As much as there remains some graspable appeal to each man’s video work – George’s comic personality and the humorous reckoning with his own legacy, and Carl’s peculiar brand of[…]
Trash and Masochism: The Transcendent Aesthetics of Dungeon of Harrow
“. . . a jewel with facets of disease running all through it.” – Lester Bangs * * * It was once said that the real heroes of 18th-century writer[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Franchises & Series · Producers & Studios
Surf’s Up! Beyond the Beach: AIP’s Beach Party Movies
With summer starting to fade, what better way to while away the hours than by revisiting the beach, as imagined by exploitation studio American International Pictures in the early 1960s?[…]
Actors & Personalities · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Happy Birthday, Pam Grier: Interview with the Accidental Action Heroine
It’s time again to tip our hat to Pam Grier, who’s 67 today (born May 26, 1949), by reposting Steve Ryfle’s interview. Here the incomparable star of Foxy Brown and[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Pure Auteurness: Bert I. Gordon in the BIG World
What better way to celebrate Halloween than with Bert I. Gordon, budget-compromised auteur of War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider, Picture Mommy Dead, Empire of the Ants,[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Reviews
The Devils (the Angels): Sympathy for John Landis
“I can always make something work, if I have a camera.” – John Landis There are two John Landises. There’s the director equally at home with comedy as he is[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Photo Essays
Frame Analysis: The Title Sequence for Doris Wishman’s Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)
“This question of what makes a ‘bad girl’ is posed by the film’s title and answered by its title sequence – implied in the formal quotations (pinups) that inform each[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Could You Spare Me a Nightmare? The World of Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
In honor of Vincent Price’s birthday (May 27, 1911-October 25, 1993), we present Sean Nortz’s thrilling exegesis of one of the actor’s most intriguing and downright bizarre films. (After this piece[…]
Books · Exploitation & Erotica
Book Review: Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange, by Robert Hofler
Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange – How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos, by Robert Hofler. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. Hardcover, $27.99 When Michael[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews · SF/Fantasy
Bondage, Bestiality, and Bionics: Sexual Fetishism in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
Blade Runner is a film seeping with representations of repressed sexuality. Every scene, sequence, and image is imbued with, commenting on, or directly a result of sexual frustration and need.[…]
Crime · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
The Di Blasio Grime Revival: Ms. 45 (1981), Little Nicky (2000)
This is a film from the era of Bernhard Goetz, Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, and of course, Charles Bronson finding himself facing muggers wherever he may go.
DVD & Blu-ray · Exploitation & Erotica
“Rated R for Retro” Scream Factory Loves the 80s
With Scream! it’s now possible to realize that the 80s as the best decade ever for schlock movies; grindhouses and drive-ins still lured us in like evil aunts. And best of all, we could still be genuinely scared.
Actors & Personalities · Exploitation & Erotica
Soul Diva, John Waters Star Jean Hill Dies
When people die there is usually an element of shock to the news, but when I heard Jean Hill passed away this week (8/21/13) I wasn’t shocked, since her health[…]
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
Ten Shades of Girl: One Guy’s Response to Fifty Shades of Grey
The causation of this book’s variable inattentiveness to any coloring detail is the same source of the book’s greater fundamental and overarching flaw. Fifty Shades of Grey just has too much sex in it.
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Genre, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of “Category III”
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
Exploitation & Erotica · SF & Fantasy
Roots of ALIEN: A pre-pre-PROMETHEUS Triple Feature
If you’re excited about the promos for the Ridley Scott science fiction movie coming out this summer, Prometheus… it might be a good time to visit some of the films that have been mentioned over the years as the inspirations for ALIEN, and it just so happens they’re all pretty short and all available on Netflix streaming – a perfect weekend triple bill.
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Noir
Life of Human Loss: Hugo Haas’s Strange Fascination
“Through his ability to improvise his own scenarios and engage others in their perambulations, Haas successfully negotiates the threat of circumstance that ensnared Pavel and, most always, wills out.”
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