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SXSW capsule review: ‘American Grindhouse’
‘American Grindhouse’
How does someone make a history of American exploitation films without once uttering the name of the most influential exploitation filmmaker of all, crowned “King of the Bs” Roger Corman? Elijah Drenner manages this spectacular feat in his lusty survey of low-budget cinema, a raunchy mash note to the B’s and Z’s (and T’s and A’s).
Thanks to recent grindhouse apologists like the Alamo Drafthouse and the evangelical Quentin Tarantino — who apparently had no time to chat with the filmmaker, another blow to the movie’s bona fides — genre and drive-in dreck has been excavated and glorified, profiting from a mass reconsideration tinged with respect.
Drenner shows that exploitation movies, stuff that became synonymous with L.A. and New York grindhouses in the ‘60s and ‘70s, has been around since at least 1913. Nudity, violence, horror and myriad taboos slither through early celluloid, including many of the pre-Code Hollywood movies that still startle. (See Tod Browning’s once-banned “Freaks” for a jolt.)
A passionate gallery of talking heads — genre masters Jack Hill, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Joe Dante, John Landis, et al — discuss the mercenary “carny spirit,” the hucksterism and gimmickry propelling most of the movies, from the risibly cynical “sex-ed” and anti-drug films (titillations in pedagogic robes) to Russ Meyer’s “nudie cuties.” Trash dominates, but some filmmakers aimed for art: “Freaks” and Wes Craven’s horrifying “Last House on the Left” shiver with subtext.
Biker flicks, gore, women-in-prison, blaxploitation, on down to a kind of culmination with “Deep Throat” — this compact celebration glides through the decades with naughty glee (if not the zest of the 2008 doc “Not Quite Hollywood” about Australia’s exploitation film industry). Clips from some 200 movies will have you raiding your local independent video store.
Screenings: 9 p.m. Saturday, Alamo Ritz and 10 p.m. Tuesday, Alamo South. Trailer and details HERE.
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