MONDO TOPLESS (1966)

If you track a filmmaker’s career, you’re likely to see things like Mondo Topless occur. No, I don’t mean that every auteur is going to crank out a quick-buck skin flick when they hit rough waters but, instead, there is a pattern of running back to material that’s bankable once experimentation bites them in the […]

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965)

In the opening seconds of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Russ Meyer marries sex and violence by employing a stern narration that explicitly welds the two together over the visual of the ever multiplying, squiggly optical soundtrack that quickly fills the frame like a hostile takeover. The narration warns the audience that you’ll never know where […]

MOTORPSYCHO (1965)

Far from the swampy sin bucket of Lorna and the dusty Peyton Place of Mudhoney roars Motorpsycho!, Russ Meyer’s boldest sketch yet of what would become the Meyer template. Yet despite being one of the earliest entries in the biker film craze that would roll through drive-ins for the remainder of the decade and becoming […]

EATEN ALIVE (1976)

Located on the “Horror on the Bayou” bonus feature on Arrow’s impeccable 2015 Blu ray release of Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive, the director spends seventeen long minutes uncomfortably spinning a tale of the production of his third feature from 1976. His recollection is so hazy, halting, and half-recalled that, given the final product that played […]

THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES (1973)

Alone in her solitary New York apartment on a cold, soggy day, Justine Jones (Georgina Spelvin) takes a long look at herself in the mirror, draws a bath, and then slashes her wrists. She wakes to find herself in a still room overlooking a nicely landscaped lawn where Mr. Abaca (John Clemens) acts as a […]

COULD THIS BE LOVE (1973)

One of the fascinating things about Abel Ferrara is his professional trajectory. To be sure, Could This Be Love, a thirty minute short that was Ferrara’s first crack at serious filmmaking, is a prologue or a forward to what will come after. A low-budget slice of life regarding some authentic New York characters with a […]

MUDHONEY (1965)

Fresh off the dizzying success of Lorna, Russ Meyer’s first foray into 35mm narrative filmmaking that cost somewhere around $60K and grossed $1 million, the filmmaker packed up two of the film’s stars and stretched the sparsely cast morality play across a wider area, cloaking it in the skin of Streets Paved With Gold, a […]

LORNA (1964)

Where Russ Meyer’s previous features had generally begun with soft, laconic shots of nature that were coupled with a booming bowl full of earnest, corn-filled narration, Lorna’s mobile, ghost train opening shot promises to transport us to a place we’ve never been before. And, for sure, we eventually roll up to a man clad in […]

MONDO KEYHOLE (1966)

The “roughie” was a subgenre of sexploitation that mixed the kind of soft-focus, waist-up nudity with a hard and dangerous edge of violence of some sort. Invented (accidentally, probably) in 1963 by Herschell Gordon Lewis with Scum of the Earth, the roughie gave audiences of a certain stripe the ability to indulge in a motion […]

THE SEDUCTRESS (1981)

In 1981, a motion picture was released in which a woman is being utilized by a sleazy photographer with dark contacts in the aid of a shadowy political plot meant to clear the road for further malfeasance and corruption. While this sounds like I’m describing Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, I’m actually talking about Bob […]