Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond

Description

The pervasive image of New York’s 42nd Street as a hub of sensational thrills, vice and excess, is from where “grindhouse cinema,” the focus of this volume, stemmed. It is, arguably, an image that has remained unchanged in the mind’s eye of many exploitation film fans and academics alike. Whether in the pages of fanzines or scholarly works, it is often recounted how, should one have walked down this street between the 1960s and the 1980s, one would have undergone a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of disparate “exploitation” films from all over the world that were being offered cheaply to urbanites by a swathe of vibrant movie theatres. The contributors to Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond consider “grindhouse cinema” from a variety of cultural and methodological positions. Some seek to deconstruct the etymology of “grindhouse” itself, add flesh to the bones of its cadaverous history, or examine the term’s contemporary relevance in the context of both media production and consumerism. Others offer new inroads into hitherto unexamined examples of exploitation film history, presenting snapshots of cultural moments that many of us thought we already knew. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: 42nd Street, and Beyond 1 Grinding Out the Grind House: Exploitation, Myth, and Memory 2 “This Is Where We Came In”: The Economics of Unruly Audiences, Their Cinemas and Tastes, from Serial Houses to Grind Houses 3 Temporary Fleapits and Scabs’ Alley: The Theatrical Dissemination of Italian Cannibal Films in Melbourne, Australia 4 Run, Angel, Run: Serial Production and the Biker Movie, 1966–1972 5 “The Smashing, Crashing, Pileup of the Century”: The Carsploitation Film 6 Cars and Girls (and Burgers and Weed): Branding, Mainstreaming, and Crown International Pictures’ SoCal Drive-in Movies 7 From “Sex Entertainment for the Whole Family” to Mature Pictures: I Jomfruens Tegn and Transnational Erotic Cinema 8 “Bigger Than a Payphone, Smaller Than a Cadillac”: Porn Stardom in Exhausted: John C Holmes the Real Story 9 From Opera House to Grindhouse (and Back Again): Ozploitation in and beyond Australia 10 Go West, Brother: The Politics of Landscape in the Blaxploitation Western 11 Red Power, White Movies: Billy Jack, Johnny Firecloud, and the Cultural Politics of the “Indiansploitation” Cycle 12 Sleazy Strip-Joints and Perverse Porn Circuses: The Remediation of Grindhouse in the Porn Productions of Jack the Zipper Select Bibliography Contributors Index