Bikers versus squares Nazis versus Jesus — it’s all part of America’s grindhouse canon.
Drive-in doc chronicles American Grindhouse classics
See Lili St. Cyr’s erotic striptease! See the cannibals of the South Sea Islands! See men transformed into snarling beasts before your very eyes! See it all here !
Well who can resist a pitch like that?
This of course is precisely the kind of hucksterism celebrated in the new documentary American Grindhouse and while the film doesn’t always deliver the same electric jolt as its subject matter fans of vintage sleazy cinema will definitely want to check it out.
This clip-laden history lesson on exploitation cinema begins with the Edison films of the early 1900s before speeding through the rest of the 20th century’s rudest films at a brisk pace. Along the way new interview footage with grindhouse aficionados John Landis William Lustig Jack Hill Fred Williamson and many others give us the lowdown on nudist camp movies “roughies” the Hays code birth-of-a-baby films gore cinema biker movies women-in-prison films blaxploitation and more.
While none of these elements are examined very thoroughly the film covers quite a lot of them. The late Don Edmonds in his only onscreen interview tells a great story about his initial reaction to the script of Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1975) and his decision to direct it. Another interviewee comments “There’s only so much you can do with Nazis (on film)” a statement made more bizarre by the inclusion of a clip from The Tormentors (1971) in which Nazis beat up Jesus. Landis scores one of the most memorable quotes with “The only real grindhouse movie in the last 10 or 15 years is The Passion of the Christ .”
While not as frantic focused or entertaining as Mark Hartley’s “Ozploitation” doc Not Quite Hollywood (2008) American Grindhouse manages to cover an impressive range of outrageous films while keeping the audience informed and satisfied.
