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 […]

SHADOWS (1959)

John Cassavetes’s Shadows is a vibrant, energetic, and sometimes bittersweet story of a tight-knit family of African-Americans during the live-wire era of the late 1950’s when coffee shops and poetry readings were fostering the minds of the disaffected and restless young folks of the Silent Generation. Known now as the filmmaking debut of actor-turned-director Cassavetes, […]

MEATBALLS (1979)

“You make one good friend a summer and you’re doing pretty well.” You wouldn’t know it today by how little it’s discussed but, believe it or not, there was a time in which Meatballs seemed to be playing all the time and was completely ubiquitous in the experience of a kid cresting ten in the […]

EUROPE IN THE RAW (1963)

Not quite nude enough to satisfy nudie-cutie enthusiasts and just a shade too blue to work as a light documentary on the finer tourist spots in Europe, I’m not entirely sure how one could successfully classify Russ Meyer’s 1963 oddity, Europe in the Raw. Conventional wisdom states that it is one of Meyer’s most trifling […]

FANNY HILL (1964)

It is by mere coincidence that, in another series of career overviews of filmmakers who have meant a great deal to me over the years, I recently watched and wrote about L.A. Takedown, Michael Mann’s 1989 made-for-television movie that was his first attempt to bring his screenplay for Heat to general audiences. In that piece, […]

A WOMAN’S TORMENT (1977)

Sex is a loveless, one-way street in A Woman’s Torment, a particularly effective, dark, and creepy hardcore horror hybrid from writer/director/producer/cinematographer Roberta Findlay (credited here as Robert W. Norman). On one hand, it’s the tale of Karen (Tara Chung), a woman touched by a kind of homicidal hyper-sexuality. On the other, it’s a movie that […]