Tag Archives: grindhouse

The TSL Grindhouse: Locked Up (dir by Jared Cohn)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2017 film Locked Up tells the story of Mallory (Kelly McCart).

Mallory is not having a great life.  Her wealthy father has relocated to an unnamed county in Southern Asia.  (The film was shot in Thailand but the uniforms that we see various officials wearing seem more appropriate for North Korea.)  Mallory lives with her Uncle Tommy (Jared Cohen), who is Mallory’s legal guardian while her father is off doing whatever it is that he does.  Mallory goes to a school where she is the only American and certainly the only redhead.  She is bullied to such an extent that she finally snaps and punches another student.  Mallory is promptly arrested and sentenced to the country’s version of reform school.

When Tommy and Mallory first arrive at the facility, it seems to be clean and welcoming.  The Warden (Maythavee Burapasing) appears to be friendly and compassionate.  It seems like the type of place that all of us bleeding hearts are always insisting that we need here in America.  It’s only after Tommy leaves that the truth is revealed.  The reform school is actually a prison and the Warden is a sadistic tyrant.  Mallory is tossed into a filthy cell with several other girls and ordered to strip while everyone watches.  One of Mallory’s cellmates, Kat (Katrina Grey), orders Mallory not to cry because Kat doesn’t want the sound of her tears keeping her awake at night.

After manipulating Mallory into signing a document that says she doesn’t want her uncle to visit her in prison, The Warden reveals that she enjoys watching the prisoners fight.  She informs Mallory that she has two weeks to prepare for her first fight and that, if Mallory doesn’t fight, she will be gang raped twice a week for as long as she remains in the prison.  Mallory, having no experience with fighting (despite having hit that one student hard enough to get sentenced to confinement), begs Kat to train her.  At first reluctant, Kat eventually agrees.  But can even Kat’s training prepare Mallory for a fight against the fearsome Riza (Anastasia Maslova)?

If this all sounds rather exploitive, that’s because it is.  The film hit every sordid women-in-prison cliche with the efficiency of well-wound clock.  In fact, it’s so dedicated to hitting all of the expected beats that it actually becomes a bit comical at times.  Less than a minute after she enters her cell, Mallory has another inmate talking about how cute she is and sniffing her neck.  Mallory and Kat’s fight training inevitably leads to a shower room sex scene and Kat talking about how she’s in prison because her boyfriend convinced her to be a drug smuggler.  Meanwhile, because she is determined to turn Riza into a killing machine, The Warden personally injects steroids into Riza’s neck.  It’s all so shameless that you can’t help but appreciate the film’s audacity, even if there are several scenes (most of which involve the Warden’s threat to have the guards rape Mallory) that cross the line from being merely tasteless to being actually offensive.

Locked Up is an Asylum Production.  Like most Asylum films, it makes no excuses or apologies for being what it is.  (Regardless of how you feel about their films, it’s hard not to appreciate The Asylum’s honesty.)  In most ways, Locked Up is a pretty dumb movie but director Jared Cohen keeps the action moving quickly and The Warden is a properly hissable villain.  The Warden tells Mallory that her problem is that Americans have allowed themselves to become weak and, even if the film’s portrayal of Asia makes Midnight Express‘s portrayal of Turkey seem fair and balanced, it’s hard not to feel that the Warden has a point.  Get out there and fight, America!

6 Trailers For May 4th

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Star Wars not only launched an entire expanded universe.  It also launched a few thousand rip-offs.  For this weeks edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film Trailers, we’ve got six trailers that might seem just a little familiar….

  1. Battle Beyond The Stars (1980)

From Roger Corman comes this film, which is as much a rip-off of The Magnificent Seven as it is of Star Wars.  Battle Beyond The Stars was a surprise box office success when it was first released.

2. Space Raiders (1983)

Also from executive producer Roger Corman, Space Raiders tells the story of what happens when a quirky band of intergalactic outlaws pick up an annoying (and frankly, rather stupid) kid.

3. The Humanoid (1979)

From director Aldo Lado, The Humanoid features the great Richard Kiel as the title character.  There’s also a cute robot, an older mystic, and an evil Empire.

4. Message From Space (1978)

Do you remember another film that had a message from space?

5. Flash Gordon (1980)

Interestingly enough, Star Wars was as inspired by the original Flash Gordon as the Flash Gordon reboot was inspired by Star Wars.

6. Starcrash (1978)

And finally, we have Starcrash, the Star Wars rip-off that is actually better than Star Wars!

The TSL Grindhouse: The Spook Who Sat By The Door (dir by Ivan Dixon)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1973’s The Spook Who Sat By The Door opens with Senator Hennington (Joseph Mascolo) in a panic.

The Senator is running for reelection and is struggling to appeal to white voters and minority voters at the same time.  White voters are happy that the Senator recently gave a speech in favor of “law and order” but now, he’s polling weakly with black voters.  His wife (Elaine Aiken) suggests that the Senator win back black voters by demanding that the CIA hire more black agents.

The CIA responds to the political pressure by hiring Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook) to be their first black agent.  Freeman is given the standard CIA training and taught how to start revolutions in other countries.  However, after he completes his training, Freeman is assigned no real responsibilities.  He is given a desk job and spends most of his day making copies.  Whenever a senator or a reporter visits CIA Headquarters, Freeman is trotted out so that the CIA can claim to be diverse.  Freeman understands that he’s a token.  He knows that his job is to basically sit by the door and be seen.  But Freeman actually has bigger plans.

After spending a few years at the CIA, Freeman resigns and heads back to Chicago to work as a social worker.  Using what he learned at the agency, he starts to recruit young black men as freedom fighters.  He and the Cobras (as they’re called) launch their own guerilla war against the establishment in Chicago.  Some of their tactics are violent and some of them are not.  Freeman understands the importance of winning both hearts and minds and he recruits Willy (David Lemieux) to serve as his lead propagandist.  Because Willy is light-skinned, he is also assigned to rob a bank because Freeman knows that both the witnesses and the police will mistake him for being white and will be less likely to fire on him.  (The other members of the Cobras wear whiteface during the robbery.)

Freeman hopes that he will be able to recruit his childhood friend, Dawson (J.A. Preston), to the cause.  Dawson, however, now works as a detective for the Chicago PD and has been assigned to beak up the Cobras.  Will Freeman be able to bring over Dawson and what will happen if Dawson resists?

Based on a novel by Sam Greenlee (who was one of the first black men to be recruited to work with the United States Information Agency and who based many of Freeman’s CIA experiences on his own), The Spook Who Sat By The Door has achieved legendary status as a film that the FBI reportedly tried to keep out of theaters.  Theater owners were pressured to either not book the film or to only book it for a week before replacing it with a less incendiary film.  As a result, The Spook Who Sat By The Door became a difficult film to see.  As often happens, the efforts to censor the film only added to its revolutionary mystique.

Of course, in 2024, one can go on YouTube and watch the film for oneself.  It’s definitely uneven film, one that has pacing issues (especially at the beginning) and also one that suffers due to its low budget.  Depicting the overthrow of the government on a budget will always be a challenge.  Some of the acting is a bit amateurish but Lawrence Cook broods convincingly as Freeman and he’s well-matched by J.A. Preston’s portrayal of the more down-to-Earth Dawson.  At its best, there’s a raw authenticity and anger to the film that immediately captures the viewer’s attention.  It’s the rare political film to actually feature conversations about actual politics and it’s a film that asks how far people would be willing to go to accomplish change.  The Spook Who Sat By The Door suggests that the true villains are the members of the establishment who cynically embraced the civil rights struggle in their words but not in their actions.  In the end, Dan Freeman becomes a bit of a fanatic but the film suggests that perhaps a fanatic was what the times demanded.

The TSL Grindhouse: Jailbait (dir by Jared Cohn)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 2014, Jailbait tells the story of Anna Nix (Sara Malakul Lane).

Anna is a teenager who loves to play the cello, largely because it allow her a mentally escape from her abusive homelife.  When her stepfather sexually assaults her, Anna pushes him back and he ends up hitting his head on a wall and promptly dying.  After her own mother testifies that Anna is lying about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, Anna is sent to a juvenile prison.

Warden Frank Baragan (Steve Hanks) has a quick smile and a dorky sense of humor and he might seem earnest and supportive when he tries to encourage Anna to play her cello at the prison talent show but he quickly reveals himself to be as much of a perv as Anna’s stepfather.  Warden Frank is willing to help Anna but only if she does things for him.  (You can guess what things.)  And, even when Anna complies, Frank makes it clear that there’s no way he’s going to support her efforts to get parole.

There’s a lot to deal with in this prison.  Anna’s cellmate, the well-meaning Genie (Jennifer Robyn Jacobs), may love her but Genie can only provide so much support.  Meanwhile, gang leader Kody (Erin O’Brien) provides Anna with protection but only as long as Anna follows orders.  (Kody even forces Anna to get a tattoo identifying her as being a part of the gang.)  As soon as Anna tries to get away from Kody, she finds herself targeted.  Anna soon starts smoking and then injecting drugs, becoming an addict who is continually sent to the dark, dirty, and vermin-infested isolation cells, where no clothing is allowed.  (Yuck!  If I was ever on one of those Scared Straight shows, all of that would be enough to keep me out of prison.)  Will Anna be able to survive long enough to not only impress the other prisoners with her cello skills but also to expose the corrupt warden?

Released by The Asylum, Jailbait hits all of the usual women-in-prison movie beats.  It’s definitely a sordid film, one of those movies where everyone somehow still looks good despite living in a filthy prison and only getting to take a shower once or twice a week.  (Occasionally, someone will get a smudge of dirt on their face but considering the amount of time that many of the characters spend locked away naked in a filthy cell, everyone still looks remarkably clean and healthy.)  That said, Jailbait was still better than I was expecting, largely due to the performance of Sara Malakul Lane, who didn’t let the fact that she was starring in an exploitation film keep her from giving a fully committed performance.  She gets strong support from Jennifer Robyn Jacobs, Erin O’Brien, and especially Steve Hanks.  (Oh, how you will hate the Warden!)  Director Jared Cohn is a veteran when it comes to directing on a low budget and he keeps the action moving quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, of course.  The film has its flaws.  I’ve read a few comments online from some people who felt that the cello scenes were not convincing.  I’ve never played the cello so, to be honest, I really wouldn’t know.  But, with all that in mind, this film is far better than I would expect any film called Jailbait to be.

6 Trailers For October 31st, 2023

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy Halloween!  For today’s special edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film Trailers, we are paying tribute to the great George Romero!  Here are six trailers, all for films directed by the master of American horror!  How many of them have you watched this October?

  1. Night of The Living Dead (1968)

2. The Crazies (1973)

3. Martin (1977)

4. Creepshow (1982)

5. Monkey Shines (1988)

6. The Dark Half (1993)

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Ruby (dir by Curtis Harrington)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1977 film, Ruby, opens with a scene set in 1935.  The Great Depression is still raging and the only people making money are industrialists like Joseph P. Kennedy and gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello.  In the Florida swamps, gangster Nicky Rocco (Sal Vecchio) is betrayed by both his gang and his pregnant girlfriend, Ruby (Piper Laurie).  As Nicky’s bullet-ridden body sinks into the bayou, Ruby goes into labor and gives birth to Leslie.

16 years later, Ruby owns her own drive-in.  The theater employs several members of the old gang and Ruby is herself married to one of Nicky’s former partners, the crippled and blinded Jake Miller (Fred Kohler, Jr.).  Ruby’s lover is another former member of the gang, Vince Kemper (Stuart Whitman).  Leslie, meanwhile, is now 16 years old and has never spoken a word in her life.  Ruby laments that she never made it as a lounge singer but she does a good job running the theater and it seems to be a popular place to see movies.  She’s even able to show Attack of the 50 Feet Woman, even though that film came out in 1958 and Ruby is set in 1951.  That’s the power of having mob-connections, I guess.

When strange things start to happen at the theater, it could just be a case of Ruby having bad luck and the former gangsters that she’s hired not being particularly good at their jobs.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Nicky swore to get revenge on everyone with his dying breath.  One employee is found hanging in a projection booth.  Another is found hanging from a tree.  Another is left in a cold drink machine and the lady who puts in a quarter to get a cup of tea instead gets a cup of blood.  While Ruby might be in denial about the fact that her business is obviously cursed, Vince realizes that something has to be done so he brings a psychic/exorcist named Paul Keller (Roger Davis, who also provides some narration at the start of the film).

Of course, it’s not just ghosts that Ruby and the gang have to worry about.  Leslie is acting strange as well!  At one point, Leslie even speaks but it’s not with her voice.  It’s with Nicky’s voice!  Leslie has been possessed and soon, Nicky himself is appearing on the drive-in’s screens and repeating, “I love you, I love you.”

Ruby is a real mess of a film, one that attempts to rip-off The Exorcist while tossing a bit of Carrie in as well.  Director Curtis Harrington plays up the campier aspects of the story and Piper Laurie gives a scenery-chewing performance that suggests that she realized it was pointless to try to take anything about Ruby seriously.  Stuart Whitman plays Vince as being the most well-meaning but also the most clueless man in Florida while poor Roger Davis is stuck with the most earnest role in the film and, as such, gets the unenviable task of trying to explain what’s going on in a rational manner.  There’s nothing rational about Ruby, which goes from being a film about gangsters to being a film about ghosts to being a film about possession without even stopping to catch its breath.  It’s a deeply silly film but one gets the feeling that it was made to be silly.  Ruby works as long as you just accept the weirdness of what you’re watching while you’re watching it and you don’t give it too much thought afterwards.

6 Trailers For October 30, 2023

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse And Exploitation Film Trailers, we share some trailers from the maestro of Italian horror, Mario Bava!

  1. Black Sunday (1960)

After starting his career as a cinematographer and a visual effects engineer, Mario Bava made his directorial debut with 1960’s Black Sunday, starring Barbara Steele!

2. Black Sabbath (1963)

In 1963, Bava directed one of his most popular films, the horror anthology Black Sabbath.  The trailer put the spotlight on the great Boris Karloff.

3. Planet of the Vampires (1965)

One of Bava’s best films, Planet of the Vampires, was later cited by many as an influence on the Alien films.

4. Bay of Blood (1971)

One of the first slasher films, Bay of Blood was also a social satire that featured Bava’s dark sense of humor.

5. The House of Exorcism (1974)

When it was released in the United States, Bava’s Lisa and the Devil was re-titled House of Exorcism and, after new scenes were filmed, sold as a rip-off to The Exorcist.

6. Shock (1977)

Bava’s final film as a director was Shock, which starred Daria Nicolodi as a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of her first husband.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (dir by Bob Clark)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The title of this 1972 film is definitely a case of truth in advertising.

Children definitely should not play with dead things!  I don’t care how mature they are or how lenient of a parent you’re trying to be.  When you see your child playing with a dead thing, it is on you to step forward and say, “Child, leave that dead thing alone unless you want to forever burn in Hell.”  I know that type of language might be traumatic for some children but you’ll be glad you did it.  You know who played with dead things when he was a child?  Jeffrey Dahmer!  And look how that turned out.  He got a miniseries made about him and became an internet meme.

Now, it should be pointed out that they’re aren’t any children to be found in Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.  The children of the title are actually a group of wannabe actors who are led by a pretentious douchebag named Alan (played by the film’s writer, Alan Ormsby).  With his mustache and his long hair and his hip clothes and his vocabulary of psychobabble and buzzwords, Alan considers himself to be quite the chic 70s gentleman.  He refers the other actors as being his “children,” and they let him get away with it.  Personally, I would be kind of insulted but whatever.

One night, Alan and his theatrical troupe ride a boat off to an island that is sitting off the coast of Miami.  The island is reputed to be haunted and Alan tells the actors several rather gruesome stories about things that have supposedly happened to the inhabitants of the island.  According to Alan, the island is used as a cemetery for criminals who were so vile that no one wanted to collect their bodies.

Why are the actors on the island?  Along with leading his theatrical troupe, Alan considers himself to be a bit of a warlock.  He wants to perform a ceremony at midnight and he expects his actors to help him out.  If they don’t help, they’ll lose their jobs.  If they do help, they’ll probably lose their lives.  Alan and his actors dig up the body of a man named Orville (played by the wonderfully named Seth Sklarey).  The ceremony that Alan performs at midnight fails to bring Orville back to life but it does cause the dead who were left in their graves to rise from the Earth as zombies.  The zombies are not happy that their island has been invaded and they’re especially not happy about Alan digging up Orville.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things is a mix of comedy and horror, with Alan’s pretentious foolishness dominating the first half of the film while the second features the zombies laying siege to a cottage.  It starts out slow but, once the zombies come to life, the film achieves a surreal grandeur.  For an obviously low-budget film, the zombie makeup is surprisingly effective and the zombies themselves are so relentless and determined in their pursuit of the living that they help Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things survive the inevitable comparisons to Night of the Living Dead.  The film’s final scene, which plays out in near silence, has an undeniable horrific power to it.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was the third film to be directed by Bob Clark.  He also directed films like Deathdream, Black Christmas, Murder By Decree, and the infamous (and very financially successful) Porky’s.  Of course, his most beloved film is the one that we’ll all be watching in a little less than two months, A Christmas Story.

6 Trailers For October 29, 2023

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As we reach the conclusion of our annual Horrorthon, how about another edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film trailers?  Today, we pay tribute to the godfather of Halloween, Mr. John Carpenter!

  1. Halloween (1978)

Obviously, I was going to have to share the trailer for the original Halloween eventually.  This is still the best of the franchise.  In fact, all of the attempts by other directors to “improve” on it just serves to remind us of the fact that John Carpenter said everything that needed to be said in the first film.

2. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

How did Carpenter get the chance to direct Halloween?  Well, the producers were impressed with his previous film, Assault on Precinct 13.  Also impressed by this film was Angela Pleasence, who subsequently convinced her father, Donald, to read Carpenter’s script for Halloween.

3. The Fog (1980)

Carpenter followed up Halloween with The Fog, which featured several cast members of both Halloween and Carpenter’s next film, Escape From New York.

4. The Thing (1982)

Incredibly underappreciated when it was first released, Carpenter’s remake of The Thing has gone on to become one of his most popular and influential films.

5. Prince of Darkness (1987)

Speaking of underappreciated, it would also be several years before Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness started to receive the attention that it really deserved.

6. John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998)

Finally, with Vampires, Carpenter mixed the horror genre with the western genre and came up with a hybrid that continues to be influential to this day.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Blood Sucking Freaks (dir by Joel M. Reed)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, with a title like Blood Sucking Freaks, it has to be good!

Right?

First released in 1976, Blood Sucking Freaks is one of those not particularly good films that every horror fan has to sit through at least once.  Historically, it’s important as an example of a film that generated a thoroughly unnecessary moral panic, largely amongst people who had never actually seen the stupid thing.  It tells the story of Master Sardu (Seamus O’Brien), who runs a Grand Guignol-style theater in SoHo.  Wealthy New Yorkers flock to the theater on a nightly basis, to watch as Sardu and his dwarf assistant, Ralphus (Luis de Jesus), torture women on stage.  The crowd thinks that it’s all fake but what they don’t know is that Sardu and Ralphus are abducting real women and forced them to live in a cage underneath the theater, where they are occasionally brought out to be abused by high-paying patrons.  All of the torture and death that takes place on stage is real.

Most members of the audience enjoy the show and consider Sardu to be a master of transgressive art.  However, critic Creasy Silo (Alan Dellay) doesn’t think much of Sardu or his show and he writes a review in which he refers to whole thing as being pretentious.  Sardu apparently considers “pretentious” to be the worst insult that can be uttered against his production of pain and murder so he orders his followers to abduct Silo.  Held prisoner in the theater, Silo is told the truth about the show and then brainwashed to become a part of the show himself.

Meanwhile, Sardu’s followers have also kidnapped a ballerina named Natasha (Viju Krem).  Sardu feels that, if Natasha can be brainwashed to perform in the show, it’ll lead to greater things.  The show might move to Broadway and then someone might make a movie about Master Sardu!  Natasha’s lunkhead boyfriend, Tom (Niles McMaster), is not happy about Natasha being kidnapped.  He teams up with a sleazy cop (Dan Fauci) and they head down to the theater.

Much as with Snuff, Blood-Sucking Freaks generated a lot of controversy when it was first released, with some speculating that the murders in Blood-Sucking Freaks may have actually been real murders.  It was originally released in grindhouse theaters with an R-rating.  That R-rating might take some people by surprise when you consider how graphic the film supposedly was but it must be understood that the R-rating was self-imposed.  The filmmakers refused to submit the film to the MPAA and just rated it themselves.  When Troma acquired the film and submitted an edited version of the film to the MPAA, the organization refused to even watch the film.  That’s how controversial Blood-Sucking Freaks is!  The MPAA won’t even watch it long enough to tell other not to!

Also, much like Snuff, Blood-Sucking Freaks is actually a pretty boring movie.  Blood-Sucking Friends does deserve some credit for satirizing the pretentions of the underground arts scene but, for the most part, it’s a slow-moving and terribly acted film and the gore, while plentiful, is not particularly convincing.  Seamus O’Brien, who was murdered in an unrelated incident shortly after the film’s release, gives an absolutely lousy performance as Sardu.  Controversy aside, it’s a dumb movie and the only thing that really redeems it is that it knows it’s a dumb movie and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The main lesson of Blood-Sucking Freaks is that it’s the type of movie that probably would have vanished into obscurity if not for the controversy that it has generated over the years.  Outrage sells.