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Vice Rackets! Narcotics! Nazis! Nudists! Cults! Wrestling Women! No sooner than the first movie camera was invented, it was put to sordid use.
Grindhouse is a sexy and sardonic romp through the history of "adults only" cinema, from the roadshows and "hygiene" movies of the '30s, to the burlesque and vice movies of the '40s, to the Scandinavian Invasion of the '70s. Includes photos of rare posters and lobby cards as well as portraits of the auteurs of the films, such as Russ Meyer and David F. Friedman.
Before the advent of the corner video store, connoisseurs of sex and sensation sought the stuff they loved in grindhouses. Although the low-budget films these low-rent venues screened promised more lewdness, nudity, and weirdness than they delivered, some are monuments of ludicrous filmmaking. Perhaps the best known is Ed Wood's transvestite opus,
Glen or Glenda, but it is just one of the daffy and scuzzy movies Muller and Faris note in their decade-by-decade tour of yesterday's prurience. As historically responsible scribes, the pair recognizes the role of such big-budget, more hard-core movies as
Deep Throat in the demise of the grindhouse genre and recounts how a film now considered a genuine classic, Tod Browning's
Freaks, was once double-billed with classic trash like
Wages of Sin and
Reefer Madness. Possessed of some reference value for collocating the many titles under which the same sleazy shows were repeatedly recycled, the book's most endearing aspect may be its many illustrations--a rogue's gallery of cheesy publicity for cheesier flickers.
Mike Tribby
