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DVD Tuesday: Grindhouse and Grindhouse Memories
DVD Tuesday: Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill
In honor of this Friday's opening of Grindhouse — Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's loving tribute to the good old, bad old days of exploitation double features — this DVD Tuesday column is a double header of two films I first saw in real Times Square grindhouses: David Cronenberg's They Came from Within (1975) and Guerdon Trueblood's The Candy Snatchers (1973).
My favorite Cronenberg/Times Square story is actually about Scanners (1981): I saw it in a super-rowdy theater packed to the balcony with the kind of people you didn't ask to be quiet because odds were they were crazy or high out of their minds. In fact, prudence dictated avoiding eye contact, being careful not to bump their seats, and never, ever walking in front of them; they may have been carrying on as though they had no idea there was a movie playing, but god help you if you blocked the screen for even an instant. They talked all the way through the coming attractions. They talked all the way through the credits. They talked all the way through the opening sequence, in which some goofy-looking balding guy with glasses, sitting at a dais in front of a half-empty auditorium, asks for someone to come up and join him so he can demonstrate "scanning," warning that the process is often uncomfortable. A volunteer — ordinary-looking fellow in a suit — steps up, sits down and, as instructed, starts thinking about something. Chatter, laugh, chatter, yell, chatter, chatter, chatter from my fellow moviegoers. Glasses guy starts looking uncomfortable and squirming. Hooting and hollering... this sh*t is lame, funny-looking jerk squirming around like he needs to use the toilet. And then, boom! Guy's head explodes. More than 25 years later, I cannot tell you how shocking that image was. It was so outrageous that the entire Scanners trailer was nothing but the last minute and a half of that scene: no running voice-over claims of the most shocking this or the most daring that, no quick-cut action montages, no scary music. Just that scene. For the next quarter of an hour, you could have heard a needle drop in that theater.
But by 1981, I already knew Cronenberg was one to watch. They Came from Within was a classic grindhouse find: It popped up in a grimy flea pit, the poster featured an anonymous screaming girl on it, and I'd never heard of the writer-director. But hey — Barbara Steele was in it and she was usually good for spookiness, so I paid my money and took my chances. And I walked out saying, "God damn!" and making a mental list of who I was going to call because I'd just seen the gem everyone always hoped was somewhere under all that muck. The story lays out every idea Cronenberg has been exploring ever since. Imagine Starliner Towers, a brand-new, upscale apartment complex, a clean, anonymous, self-contained middle-class community on an island in the St. Lawrence River, less than 15 minutes from downtown Montreal. Too bad about that murder-suicide, the eccentric geneticist and his teenaged mistress... but things like that happen everywhere.
Except for the part that only happens in Cronenberg-land, where a researcher trying to engineer a kind of organic blank slate that could assume the form and function of diseased human organs instead creates a slug-like parasite that enters the human body in ways best left to the (perverted) imagination and then transforms its host into an aggressively polymorphous sensualist burning to spread the word made flesh. They Came from Within was low-budget and brilliantly icky, as well as whip-smart and genuinely provocative. The scene near the end in which sweet-faced exploitation regular Lynn Lowery sums up Cronenberg's unique brand of body horror in all its seductive grotesquerie was resonant in the hedonistic '70s and has only grown more so three decades down the line.
The Candy Snatchers was more typical grindhouse fare, a gritty, cheaply made thriller about stupid, vicious people and a get-rich-quick scheme that goes totally wrong. But unlike a lot of the movies that played the Deuce, it delivered on its promise of sleaze, sex and all-around nastiness. Its drawing card was Tiffany Bolling, a second-string starlet who was always good for a gratuitous nude scene and a malicious setup: Three lowlifes — a tough cookie (Bolling), her sex-offender brother and the dimwit who'll do anything for her because he's nursing a secret crush — kidnap a Catholic-school girl named Candy and plan to ransom her back to her rich parents. But they don't know the lay of the family land: Candy's mother is an ineffectual drunk and her gold-digging stepfather would like nothing more than to get his hands on Candy's inheritance, so he's got no reason to pay for her return. The movie's great talking point is that the kidnappers bury Candy alive in a box with an inconspicuous air tube that keeps her from suffocating. That image has been used many times in the last 30 years, but Candy Snatchers pulled off the neat trick of recalling the
real-life 1968 kidnapping of heiress Barbara Jane Mackle, who spent more than four days buried in a box before her father paid $500,000 ransom and her abductor left directions on how to find her. It also blamed the made-for-TV movie The Longest Night (1972) for inspiring copycats: Bolling's character confesses to getting the idea to bury Candy from TV.
The movie's ending is the stuff Times Square junkies lived for: Candy's story and a subplot involving an autistic boy with the worst parents in history dovetail in a closing image of breathtakingly casual cruelty.
I saw plenty of world-class crap at grindhouses, but movies like Candy Snatchers and They Came from Within kept me coming back. On the evidence of Grindhouse, I'd say Rodriguez and Tarantino (who overtly tipped his hat to Candy Snatchers in his notorious fifth-season CSI season finale) feel the same way.
Things to consider:
Tarantino and Rodriguez are paying homage not to a particular film or genre (like, say, 2002's Far from Heaven), but to an experience: seeing battered prints of disreputable movies punctuated by sensationalistic trailers, amateurish ads for local businesses and faded in-house promotions. So what's the point for A) people like me, with fond memories of the real grindhouses and B) people for whom the grindhouse is purely something they've only heard about secondhand?
Rodriguez and Tarantino are often criticized for being recyclers rather than filmmakers with original visions. Is collage a legitimate form of creative expression? How about musical mash-ups? What do they have to do with Rodriguez's and, especially, Tarantino's films, and is "homage" just a fancy word for stealing other people's ideas?
Movies, like popular music, are often viscerally connected to particular times and experiences — people like me order the world along points defined by pictures: "I met Michael the week Nurse Sherri and House of Psychotic Women opened at the Selwyn"; "Your new boss is sheer Jane Fonda circa Klute"; "That was when the Roxy Deli was the Victoria Theater and played all-night vampire-movie marathons." So what are some of your most vivid movie memories, and are they connected with larger life experiences?
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!
Previous DVD Tuesday blogs:
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
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Apr 2, 2007 10:47 PM
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My most vivid Times Square grindhouse memory is of going to see John Ritter in Hero At Large. I was lounging in the balcony with my feet up on the railing when I became aware of some movement to my left. I picked up my feet just in time to avoid a huge rat that was scuttling along the railing. Evrybody wants to be in show business.
My most vivid movie memories are connected with my dad-going to see Lawrence of Arabia, The Brothers Grimm and Lord Jim in Cinerama-at least I think Lord Jim was in Cinerama. I was 10-12 for those and it was great to have my dad there when I was terrified at the sight of one of T.E. Lawrence's young Arab "friends" being swallowed by the desert sand or to have him explain to me why Jim went voluntarily to his execution.
I can still remember seeing Gorgo at the neighborhood theatre (just down the block and across the street)with my father. I was 7 and Gorgo was one of the first movies I'd seen in a theatre. We sat in the balcony and it was great to have my dad with me for that one. My dad was built like Anthony Quinn and looked a little bit like him but with a friendlier handsomer face.
I saw Seconds with my dad and remember being embarrassed at the nude scenes-trying not to let him see that I was looking.
Other vivid memories-
Being devasted by the deaths of Old Yeller and Bambi's mother.
...Having my mother drop me off at the beautiful United Artists Theatre in Detroit to see A Hard Day's Night. I came in about the middle of the film and felt my life change as I watched it. I sat through that half then a full showing and then watched it again up to the point where I had originally come in. Of course I forgot about the fact that my mother was waiting for me outside.
...In high school I went to see The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie with my girlfriend. She bore a remarkable resemblance to the young actress Pamela Franklin who played one of the students. When we left the theatre other patrons kept looking at us and whispering and gesturing thinking she was Franklin.
...Actually crying at the end of Cooley High because it reminded me of my own high school friendships.
...Going to a matinee of The Big Chill and being the only person under a 100 in the audience except for one stoner sitting way up front. When the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" began to play as Kevin Costner's corpse came into view in the opening scene he and I were the only ones who "got it" and we laughed hysterically. I imagine the people around him also looked at him like he was some insensitive dope fiend too.
...Actually thinking I was going to die laughing during It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Putney Swope and during the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles.
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Apr 3, 2007 2:58 AM
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Growing up in a small town, our version of a grindhouse had to be "The Drive-In". I remember seeing all of the "Billy Jack" movies along with the terrible but captivationg "Spit on Your Grave".
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Apr 3, 2007 12:54 PM
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One of my most favorite grindhouse moments was at Howard the Duck (1986): I was sitting in front of a couple who'd obviously disagreed strenuously about what to see and the girl won. Her date/boyfriend was seriously not into Howard the Duck, talking to her and the screen until the big, um, love scene between Howard -- and understand, he really is a duck - and cutie-pie Lea Thompson. And that was clearly the last straw: He stood up and said as loudly as he could, "Oh man.... she's gonna f**k that duck!" and took his leave with maximum huffing and puffing.
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Apr 3, 2007 3:49 PM
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I can only wish that I grew up near the world of true Grindhouse cinema during the 70s and early 80s. But all we had was the drive-in and Chilly Billy Cardilly on Saturday nights. And you know what, that was good enough!
However, the video boom of the 80s gave me access to lots of bizarre stuff and a variety of choices. And you didn't have to wait for a movie you'd already seen to stop playing so you could watch, say, Basket Case or SS Experiment Camp. You could watch one each night during the summer. And I did! So my memories are of dust-covered, sun-faded VHS boxes of movies that most people dare not rent. And I loved it.
Plus, they had no problem renting R-rated stuff to psychotic 16-year olds. You might get away with it in N.Y., but it was not easy to get into R films in my town.
Again, I can only wish I'd seen Scanners in the theater Maitland describes. Or going to see midnight showings of El Topo or something. I hope those who did realize how lucky they are. I appreciate it when they can share those experience with me. A whole book on that perhaps, FlickChick?
As to the new Grindhouse movie, I am a little worried that it cannot meet expectations. Since it is a pastiche, it cannot hope to match the visceral experience of seeing a movie that was made without transcendence to a meta-level of creativity.
So while there will be wink-wink moments to those who love grindhouse cinema, it just can't possibly match a true grinder that takes itself seriously... even a comedy like Death Race 2000 believes the world it creates. Both of these directors are kind of hit-or-miss for me. But I cannot think of more capable hands for this homage.
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Apr 3, 2007 4:01 PM
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Maitland: I don't know if you've read it (and, if you have, your opinion of it), but there's a book called Sleazoid Express, by Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford that not only recreates the days of grindhouse movie-going, but discusses the films as well.
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Apr 3, 2007 5:47 PM
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One of my most fondly remembered movie experiences is seeing the twin bill of Atragon and Latitude Zero at the Strand Theater, here in Calgary.
I took my sister, Bonnie, and we were so entranced that we stayed through three showings - getting home so late that I was subjected to that favourite of fifties [and early sixties] punishments, the belt.
To this day, I keep alive the hope that someone will secure the rights to both movies and release them - with suitably odd special features - in a twin bill DVD release.
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Apr 4, 2007 2:47 PM
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Cap'n, are you looking for some type of deluxe special edition? Because they are both on DVD in sort of regular editions. They each come with their trailer and Atragon has a commentary.
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Apr 4, 2007 3:03 PM
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Re: Jay/ Sleazoid Express:
I bought Sleazoid Express as soon as it came aout (and got another copy as a gift soon after -- people clearly have my number); I even have a couple of xeroxed copies of Bill Landis' original Sleazoid Express newsletter somewhere. Our paths crossed back in the day because there was only a handful of us writing about grindhouse movies and the Times Square experience -- for me, the best thing about his book is his memory for sordid detail. Positively Proustian.
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Apr 5, 2007 11:51 AM
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Maitland, I see Kill Bill is one of your favorite films. Just read your grindhouse review. Micheal Parks actually first played that sherriff earl macgraw character in "From Dusk till Dawn" (again with the Tarantino/Rodriquez connection).
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Apr 6, 2007 1:37 PM
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I just read her review too and, well, my heart kind of sunk. I don't need a simulated scratchy print and faux-melted frames and the like. That's all pomp and no circumstance.
On the plus side, my expectations are now lowered so I may enjoy the movie more! I just hope it's more "movie" than "experience". One of the things that is so great about the movies they are attempting to emulate is that they originals weren't trying to be precious.
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Apr 6, 2007 1:40 PM
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This weekend, I'll be seeing at least Grindhouse and The Hoax, and perhaps even The Lookout.
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Apr 6, 2007 2:15 PM
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Wow. Looks like Grindhouse tanked. What happened? It was getting SoaP-type hype. Did it backfire? Too high concept?
Two previous releases and Are We Done Yet? each had higher per screen averages.
The Hoax seems to have done reasonably well.
You may be interested in this LA Weekly article that has a roundtable with grindhouse luminaries. Of course, Quentin won't shut up, but it's all good:
www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/grindhouse-gang/16045/
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Apr 8, 2007 6:17 PM
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I think Achy may have hit on one of the reasons Grindhouse didn't do so well at the box office-lots of concept maybe not enough substance.
Sure the nostalgia of the experience of going to the has more meaning than the films themselves.
Those days were also a time when the movies themselves were 'growing up'. You had the exploitation flicks which Tarantino et al love so much but we were also beginning to get more realistic westerns and war films more considered social statements and more adult love stories than grindhouse fare offered.
For me those years are defined as much by films like Shampoo, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, If,Payday, Z, Go Tell The Spartans Klute, Putney Swope, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and the work of directors like Herzog and Fassbinder as they are by 'exploitation' films. I've got nothing against popcorn flicks and the grindhouse experience but films like those above were more memorable for the "what" and the "who" than the "where".
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Apr 9, 2007 2:30 AM
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Also, like Achy,the scratchy-print stuff etc. isn't a draw for me either. I don't mind putting up with such when I have to-when there is no alternative way of seeing a great or favorite movie. But those things were actually irritating distractions back then. Who needs 'em?
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Apr 9, 2007 2:41 AM
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