Macon County Line (1974)

There’s something very appealing about the languid pace of these mid 70s drive-in movies. It’s as if nobody is in a particular hurry to get anywhere or do anything. “Free and easy” was how I remember them describing that mood in the 70s, which I barely remember at all. The teens in current movies seem very uptight by contrast- always rushing places and snarking at each other. Did they even have snark back in the 70s? I think part of the reason I watch these old movies is simply because they offer a reassuring picture of a world in which young people bum around and don’t worry terribly much about their ‘careers’ or consumer items. Well, until they get cut up with a chainsaw that is.

Here, we focus on two brothers, Chris & Wayne Dixon , played by real-life brothers Alan & Jessie Vint, who are “catting around” the South on one last fling before one of them enters the Army. It’s 1953 and the film is a bit of a nostalgia piece with great rock and gospel songs a la American Graffiti. The film starts with the brothers having sex with a woman in New Orleans before her husband arrives and chases them away in that classic sexual archetype. There’s also something reassuring about these old saws- we all know how they’re going to end. The laughs come easy.

After dining and dashing from the local diner and picking up a cute hitchhiker Jenny (Cheryl Waters), they run into some car troubles and have to stop in a sleepy little Southern town of the sort where everyone forgets what they were saying in the middle of a sentence and the local lawman seems like his name should be Jethro- in fact, he really seems this way as he’s played by Max Baer Jr., Jethro Clampett himself. Baer stars, produces, and co-wrote the script, and it seems likely that he’s trying to overcome his Jethro image here- his character Deputy Reed, is a hardnosed, racist, closed-minded hick with a badge: in other words, the worst nightmare of the teens that would have seen the movie in a drive-in back in 1974. He’s also a stereotype, of course, and we know that, eventually, he’s going to come after those free’n’easy teens and try to blow a few holes in them.

The catalyst for this is a pair of traveling criminals who invade his home and brutalize and murder his wife in a genuinely disturbing scene midway through. One interesting touch- she’s watching a television report about Senator McCarthy at the time, which might be pure nostalgia, but seems to say, “Hey, America, you’re worried about the Reds? Here’s the real threat to worry about breaking into your house as we speak!”

Meanwhile, Jenny and Chris are having sex in a nearby barn with the car broken down outside of the Sheriff’s house, while he’s driving around with his son (played by a young Leif Garret) teaching the kid to avoid black children! Soon Sheriff Jethro is stalking the kids in the woods turning their idyllic romp into a bloody nightmare. This, of course, happens in the last twenty minutes and the movie takes its sweet time getting down to business. No doubt drive-in audiences of 1974 weren’t terribly concerned about plot mechanics and liked seeing the lawman as the villain. The film ends with inevitable pretensions of really being about the wages of violence and intolerance, which might have been what made the film a smash hit in 1974. Or it was the naked girls and shotgun violence. Either way, it’s still a solidly-constructed time waster.

Exorcism's Daughter (1971)

The title is misleading: not only is this not an Exorcist rip off, but it was actually made before the Exorcist and only released in the US in 1974 in an attempt to cash in on William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece. Its alternative title, “House of the Insane Women” is more accurate- it is about a nineteenth century Spanish mental asylum for insane women. The staff are worn out and mistreat the patients horribly, beating and insulting them and even pimping out some of the nutzo nymphs to a local bug-eyed pervert who enjoys the occasional loony bin orgy.

Into this dysfunctional family comes a new doctor Alba who is more in the Enlightenment mold and promises the prisoners that “the time of the straightjacket is over”, arousing their hopes to be treated, “like a human being” as they chant in a dreamlike celebration scene. The slow-mo sequence evokes the dream of liberty and its terror as well, justifying the film’s existence. There are other lovely sequences, including a madwoman lying in the rain and a paranoid in a church belfry mistaking a bell for a severed head in a direct echo of Vertigo’s bell-tower sequence. As in most of the Spanish exploitation films of this era, there are plenty of gorgeous stone castles lit by torches.

The story pits the Enlightened Doctor against the local Catholic establishment, who see his methods as being akin to witchcraft. He focuses his efforts on healing Tanya, a childlike paranoid with a dark secret in her past (psst: she’s the daughter of the exorcism subject, hence the title). Naturally, there are conflicts; the old guard bitches, “Everything’s prohibited! Ya can’t hit ‘em, dunk ‘em, nothing!” The townspeople, predictably, are convinced instead that he’s fucking the patients. The local heiress is trying to blackmail him into fucking her. And, what do ya know- he’s falling in love with Tanya! Before long, he’s siding with the lunatics against the sane society outside.

The movie is a solid Spanish shocker in the gothic mode; it reminds one a bit of The Devils. But it’s not quite as shocking as it needs to be and exploitation hounds might be disappointed by its lack of gore and sleaze. As with many of these Spanish gothics, there’s a fair amount of melodrama to wade through. But, its portrayal of the forces of order trying to keep down those who want freedom is fairly rich and it has some great lines, with my favorite being the drunken guard’s, “On my headstone, I want them to write, “He drank of life while they died.”

East End Hustle (1976)

Young Maryanne (Ann Marie Provenchier) grows up in relative poverty with four siblings, a fatso dad who wears dirty undershirts and smacks the kids at the breakfast table, and, worst of all, a ridiculous Quebecois accent. Sleazy dudes hit on her on sidewalk corners and she works in a textile sweatshop where the boss regularly expects her to screw him. In addition, the bossman decides to rent her out to some pimp friends. The opening scenes of East End Hustle have a suitable aura of sleaze although their languid pacing is a bit off-putting. For some reason, the criminals all speak in a low voice that sounds like they’re on Quaaludes. It’s hard to fear them pimp-slapping young Maryanne when you’re worried that everyone's about to fall asleep!

Luckily for her, and us, she’s saved before doing actual escort work by an avenging hooker angel, Cindy (Andree Pelletier), who is leaving the life behind and who also talks in a thick Quebec accent. “’Ey! Geet in my car ovuh dere!” Ah, the classic days of Cinepix Canuxploitation; back when anyone who wanted a good tax write-off could fund a Canadian exploitation movie and American viewers could try to figure out why the inner city had so many signs in French.

Who knows if it’s a pointed detail that the head pimp, Dan (Miguel Fernandez), sounds like he’s from Brooklyn while the hookers all sound French Canadian. As a pimp, he’s pretty tough and starts bumping off the girls who rebel against him. Weirdly though he talks in a low, steady voice like a librarian. Maybe his boring gelding demeanor sapped the glamour out of hooking for Cindy, who has come to the wisdom: “When your pussy goes for money, something else goes too.” So true. The movie does a decent job of detailing the dynamics of the stable of whores with plenty of nudity, sleaze, and over-the-top dialogue, my personal favorite being a hooker who responds to her dress being torn with, “’Ey yoo! Oh fookin’ shit!!” It might have been more fun if they’d just stuck with that: sort of Car Wash with escorts.
Alas, Cindy becomes a sort of vigilante, pulling a knife on the hoodlums who harassed Maryanne in the opening when they try to pick up the girls and leaving them sans pants in the middle of the street. She’s still in trouble with the mob and Dan the evil pimp tries to send her a message by dispatching his goons to rape her in a public restroom! This starts her on the path to lead a hooker revolution against the evil pimps via an underground railroad of shitty Montreal houses. The mobs take her groggy boyfriend hostage, which doesn’t seem to upset him greatly. But we know this can only end in violence.

The violence does come in the form of some NYC hitmen who slit some throats and send Maryanne down three stories of an open townhouse to her death. The filmmakers clearly know what their audience is looking for with nice gratuitous touches like establishing Cindy’s relationship with her boyfriend via a hot, graphic sex scene. At times, it felt more like a straight sexploitation flick than a revenge epic. The violence is somewhat graphic too, although less so. But there are probably enough sleazy plot points to satisfy a not-too-discriminating exploitation hound. If you’re watching the movie, you’re probably hoping to see boobs, bush, blood, and bad 70s clothes, and it has that in abundance.

The weird thing about the movie, aside from the Inspector Cluseau accents, is the thing with everyone speaking like they’re trying not to wake someone asleep in the next room. Cindy keeps double-crossing the pimps but they don’t seem very angry. They’re looking to kill her, but she doesn’t seem very scared. The soundtrack is full of generic late 70s soft rock, which doesn’t help much. And, as with many of these movies, the characters aren’t well defined beyond what they’re doing; Cindy is the ex-hooker taking on the mob and not much more; Dan is the evil balding pimp; Maryanne is the wimpy young hooker; etc. The languid and subdued tone really goes against the main appeal of these movies: namely, watching a kickass female get revenge on her male oppressors. Cindy is no Pam Grier, that’s for sure. The easy joke here would be that Canadian action heroines are more boring than American ones, but after living here for eight years, my opinion is that Canadians are plenty interesting, although with an English reserve. But it is possible to be a bit too mellow in your vengeance seeking.

House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

Poor David Hess- it's got be hard for an actor to get typecast as a rapist. That's pretty much what happened to Hess after he appeared in the sleeper hit Last House on the Left. He's a compelling actor and accomplished musician, but for years the only roles Hess could get were variations on his thug character from Last House. This film is an Italian Last House ripoff that even rips of the name, making its lineage even more evident. It's a better made film than Last House, although that's not exactly saying much.

Hess plays Alex (probably a Clockwork Orange reference), a young disco-hopping hooligan whose problems with the opposite sex are pretty clearly established in the opening sequence, in which he drives a young woman he saw in a discoteque earlier off the road and britally rapes and strangles her in a scene that is even more disturbing due to its light disco ballad score. It's also sort of amazing that nobody saw this assault since the film is set in New York City. But, whatever- the very next scene shows Alex working at the garage with his hooligan friend Ricky (played by Giovanni Radice of Cannibals in the Streets, The Beyond, and numerous other Italian exploitation flicks in his first role) and they're looking to hit the late 70s streets and boogie.

Into the garage comes a rich, sophisticated couple with minor car problems who, in a pretty unbelievable twist, invite the two thugs to a little soiree of five rich assholes with the intention of making fun of them. The class dynamnics are pretty sharp in these early scenes, with the beautiful rich girl (played by the gorgeous Annie Belle of Laure) Lisa aroused by Alex but unwilling to have sex with him, and the snotty young men getting Ricky drunk in order to make a fool of him. Soon the little party is getting the dim thug to strip for them and ripping him off in a rigged card game.



Before you know it, though, the tables are turned and Hess is holding the kids hostage with a straight razor. Let's consider that again: he is holding five strangers hostage in their own home with nothing but a straight razor, and for most of the movie nobody gets the idea to just throw a chair at him! He throws one dude in the swimming pool and pisses on him, smashes another's face in on the pool table, rapes Annie Bell (although she eventually gets on top- classy), and finally slices up a young friend who comes to the door on the couch with the razor, and nobody stops him. That last bit, incidentally, is excruciatingly cruel and misogynist: Cindy (Brigitte Petronio) is a virgin, so Hess strips her naked and takes at least a dozen slashes out of her on the couch. It's scenes like this that have given the film a notorious reputation.

Again, though, the framework of the story is so stupid and unbelievable that you start to tune out until the last ten minutes in which there's a twist that is supposed to explain everything, but which is even stupider than the original storyline! So, for about an hour and half The House on the Edge of the Park is drawn out thuggery with serious logical problems. Annie Belle is hot as usual and David Hess is lots of fun to watch, and Ruggero Deodato's direction is fairly competent, but the film will lower your IQ by 20 points.

Foxy Brown (1974)

One of the things that sets Jack Hill apart from his exploitation bretheren is his ability to both go way over the top with the melodrama and maintain a wry sense of humor. He doesn't make comedies exactly, but he doesn't play the material as seriously as a heart attack either. Above all, his films are entertaining as hell. And this is probably why Foxy Brown has become such a cult classic: it has a playful sense of humor. It also has a strong female character at its center played by the great Pam Grier who is, indeed, "one hell of a woman".

Foxy Brown was originally intended to be a sequel to Coffy, which was a successful film but for some reason the studio opted against making a sequel. Nowadays studios plan to make sequels before the movie comes out and then make a bunch even if nobody saw the original! But this explains why we never know what Foxy Brown's job is: she was supposed to be a nurse. Now her brother (played by the great Antonio Fargas) is a drug using motherfucker, which is more important to the story. Fargas might not be the greatest actor and Grier was not yet the actress she would later become, but they were both already interesting to watch. This is something else I learned about low budget exploitation filmmaking directly from Jack Hill: Your actors don't have to be good if they are really interesting to watch. Sometimes that's even better. A perfect example of this is Robbie Lee in Switchblade Sisters: she's not so much acting as gritting her teeth and yelling, but damned if you can take your eyes off of her.

Pam Grier, meanwhile, was an actress who just needed time to learn her craft, but again had the charisma to carry a film. Here, she's Foxy Brown, a woman whose boyfriend is an undercover narc who has undergone radical plastic surgery to change his face and avoid the drug dealers who want to ice him. The problem is Link, Foxy's brother, who is in trouble with the dealers and looking for a way to rectify that situation. You can imagine what happens, although it's still a pretty shocking betrayal in the film. Link is clearly in the grip of drug addiction and the film is pretty heavily anti-drugs (or at least hard drugs) with the message that drugs are a new means to enslave the black community. It's a pretty heavy message for an exploitation film, but totally legitimate.

Now, Foxy has to get revenge on the white motherfuckers who killed her man. At the top of the heap is Miss Katherine, who runs a brothel among other things. She's played by Kathryn Loder, who definitely embodies the Hill type of villian- again, it's not great acting so much as being able to chew the scenery like it was Juicy Fruit. In order to get her vengeance, Foxy goes undercover as a hooker in the mob's brothel, dive bombs a drug shack with an ultralight plane, gets help from the always great Sid Haig, and there's a lesbian bar fight for no good reason aside from general awesomeness. It's pretty clear why Foxy Brown is such a cult classic- it's just a hell of a lot of fun. It's also, incidentally, a movie about the sort of smart, strong, badass woman that they still don't make many films about.

The Night God Screamed (1971)

Aside from their clothes, music, and general level of hygiene, there's nothing particularly frightening about hippies. Or, at least, there wasn't until the Manson family did their creepy crawl and justified Establishment paranoia about the love generation. After that, donations to panhandling hippies rose 500% and dreams of an eternal love-in died hard. Not surprisingly, exploitation filmmakers rushed into the void as well. One such exploitation filmmaker, who is sadly overlooked today, was Lee Madden, who turned out this highly entertaining horror rarity about a hippie cult stalking an Establishment matron after killing her preacher husband.

The cult in question is lead by the Mansonesque Billy Joe Harlan, played by Michael Sugich, whose performance is a highlight here. The film begins with Harlan delivering a great sermon at a river about the evils that the Man is trying to bring down on these hippies. "I made them see that using dope was the way to turn on to you!... They don't like us practicing our thing!... They put us down because we ain't one of those establishment churches with one of those fake money-making preachers!" 'Aint it the truth? They never like you practicing your thing.

Unfortunately, there's possibly a traitor in the midst and the robed cult enforcer drags her out for some testifying. After declaring, "God is going to decide if this chick is a Judas!" Sugich "re-baptizes" her, or drowns her if you're some kind of establishment type.

There's great piano music over the opening credits as we watch Fanny Pierce (played by classic studio actress Jeanne Crain) walking through the dirty city streets and hear her thinking, "Everything is ugly and old." Yeah, well, come visit Hamilton sometime! Anyway, she's a preacher's wife in a skid row mission who is depressed about the low quality of bums in the church soup kitchen! Luckily, her hubby (Alex Nicol) has planned a rural revival to drum up the bucks and they're off.

You might guess what happens next: at a rural gas station, the money-grubbing preacher Pierce runs into the gang of hippies who don't like preaching for profit. One of the hippies, in fact, tries to pick up Fanny with the great line, "That man over there your husband?... It make any difference?" Apparently so (she's old-fashioned no doubt) and the preacher stupidly mentions his revival, which the pseudo-Manson family crashes afterwards and nails him to a cross! It's probably the goriest thing in the movie but pretty unforgettable.

In an interesting twist, the maniacal preacher is then tried, convicted, and soon goes to jail, effectively taking him out of the film. There's a nicely creepy scene in which the hippies surround Crain outside of the courthouse chanting "Die... die..." and the second half of the movie is about them stalking her in revenge for putting their cult leader in the hoosegow.

The movie takes a somewhat silly turn in the last act as the judge (Stewart Bradley) lets Crain shack up with his four teenage kids in his big mansion and babysit them while he goes off and does something or other, all the while knowing that cultists are stalking her! The teenagers, who look to be in their early thirties are pissed off about missing their social engagements and basically act like obnoxious shits until some strangers show up and start terrorizing them. There seems to be a real bias towards the older generation in the film: all of the young people are either murderous hippies or really horrible rich kids!

The terrorizing, though, is pretty effective, if not particularly gory. The film goes through most of the house-under-siege tropes fairly well and the cloaked stranger is genuinely creepy. There is a twist ending too that is both completely ridiculous and followed by a nice E.C. Comics twist that puts a cap on the whole business. Admittedly, this is all drive-in shocker stuff and not remotely a serious exploration of the Manson killings. And, perhaps the movie would be on DVD by now if it had much in the way of gore or any nudity to speak of.

Nevertheless, if you're looking for the pleasures of low budget 70s drive-in fare and effective scares, there's plenty to find here.

Penitentiary (1980)

Much respect to Jamaa Fanaka. This, his third film, shows a continuous progression from his first two, both of which are pretty good. Oh, and again, he made all three feature-length films as student projects at UCLA. Penitentiary was shot with friends and volunteers at a decommissioned California prison as a graduate student film, although you'd swear to God it was a studio project. Man, it's great to discover a cool filmmaker out of the blue! This is why I still watch no-budget exploitation movies- to hear an original voice speaking.

Penitentiary stars Leon Isaac Kennedy as a young wanderer, Martel "Too Sweet" Gordone who gets picked up by a call girl en route to a diner rendevouz (and listening to the love theme from Welcome Home, Brother Charles on her radio!) that ends up going badly. Two bikers at the diner jump them and a fight ensues and, next thing you know, Too Sweet is in in prison, surrounded by several memorable miscreants with their own personality ticks. The filmmaking here is sharp: the characters are unique and even a bit cartoony, while still being believable. The basic story is a bit more generic than Welcome Home, Brother Charles, but it's the touches of color that bring out the characterizations.

Too Sweet is apparently pretty sweet-looking to his rapist cellmate Half Dead (Badja Dolja) who tries to make him his bitch before being beaten to a pulp by Too Sweet in a truly brutal fight scene that achieves a sort of violent kinesthetic beauty. Again, Fanaka scores the scene with avant garde jazz that adds to the intensity. He has said his inspiration here is Spartacus and you can see that in the scene, but it has to stand alone too as one of the best fight scenes in action filmmaking. It's a highlight of the film.

There's also a clear Spartacus parallel in that Too Sweet becomes an inspiration to his fellow prisoners who are "owned" by their larger rapist inmates. The slavery parallel is explicit in a scene in which Too Sweet tells fellow inmate Eugene that no man can own him. As you can imagine, Too Sweet soon becomes a prison boxer competing in matches set up for entertainment and betting by the warden. After this, the movie basically becomes Rocky in jail with Too Sweet overcoming his situation by boxing and through the mentor relationship with his trainer Seldom Seen (a great performance by Floyd Chatman). Chatman gets two of the best speeches in the film, however, wherein he explains his philosophy about being a lifer. I would hold up the first of these scenes to anything in Italian neo-realist cinema for the way they reveal hidden dimensions of a man that society holds to be marginal. These scenes and that initial fight scene are moments in which the movie transcends its exploitation origins.

In the end, there are still the usualy exploitation film problems. The dialogue is good but the acting is not always very good. There is a third act twist that's a bit unbelievable: Too Sweet didn't realize that he was jailed for murder, or the real killer did the deed in front of a diner full of people who didn't mention this fact during the trial? And there are a few boom mics that make their way into scenes.

But you watch these movies for those moments of weird transcendence that you can't get in mainstream films and not because they necessarily hold up as pure cinematic art. It's not suitable for the Criterion Collection, but Penitentiary has moments of true artistry and, to be honest, you can't say the same for any current Hollywood films.