With the release of Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse coming up on April 6, I thought it might be fun to have a look at some of the greatest films of the grindhouse era. For those who haven't yet caught the retro wave, grindhouse theaters were inner city venues whose purpose was to crank out one exploitation film after another, often as part of a double feature and covering a variety of genres. The phenomenon had its heyday in the 60s and 70s, and eventually petered out in the 80s. Films of this type favored sensationalism over artistic merit, usually placing an emphasis on sex and violence. This stuff certainly isn't for everyone, but I find these films fascinating. Watching these movies now on DVD and seeing how extreme their content was, I often find myself muttering "this actually played in a theater?"


Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

This of course is the grandaddy of a particularly sleazy genre known as nazisploitation. Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) is the commandant of a nazi concentration camp where she is conducting experiments on the amount of pain her female prisoners can endure. It is her goal to prove that women can bear pain better than men and should be allowed to serve on the front lines in the service of the Father Land, and she does this with flogging, pressure chambers, infectious diseases and various other depravities. The male prisoners are used to gratify Ilsa's sexual appetite, but the ones who do not satisfy her (and that's nearly all of them) end up castrated. It all seems even more perverse when you realize the film was shot on the same sets at the sitcom Hogan's Heroes. Rob Zombie's fake Grindhouse trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS obviously drew inspiration from Ilsa. The film spawned two official sequels, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Shieks, and Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia, as well as an unofficial sequel best known as Ilsa, the Wicked Warden, though it's been released under several titles.

If you live in the Los Angeles area and you've been looking forward to Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film Grindhouse, now you can have a taste of the real thing. The New Beverly Cinema will host the Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival all through March and April ... programmed by Tarantino himself. Take a look at the New Beverly calendar and you can see the lineup includes a variety of exploitation films. My favorite triple-feature listed on the calendar is for The Swinging Barmaids, The Swingin' Pussycats, and The Swinging Cheerleaders -- gotta love the Seventies.

I'm a little concerned because April is often the month for QT Fest in Austin, when Tarantino brings a lot of grindhouse films here along with other films he likes. What's he doing in LA? I suppose it's only fair that other cities get a turn, and Austin is already so excited about Grindhouse that no further promotion is necessary. I recognize a lot of QT Fest standards in the New Beverly lineup: Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All in a Row, the Filipino exploitation film The Muthers, Rolling Thunder and The Blood-Spattered Bride. One word of advice to LA filmgoers: make sure you've had some sleep before you see The Legend of the Wolf Woman. I saw it at the end of an all-night marathon and it can really mess with your mind if you're sleep-deprived.

[via Risky Biz Blog]

It seems like every week I've heard about a different fake trailer to be included in Grindhouse, the homage to Seventies exploitation films co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. The filmmakers are trying to reproduce a "grindhouse theater" experience (thus the title) and want to include entertaining trailers for nonexistent films in that genre. Trailers for movies like Werewolf Women of the SS are being directed by Rob Zombie, Eli Roth and maybe even Edgar Wright. Danny Trejo is supposed to be in one of the trailers, although I'm not sure which.

Now Rodriguez has teamed up with SXSW to invite all of us to make our own fake trailers for grindhouse movies. You can make and submit a grindhouse trailer to SXSW by February 12, and Rodriguez will select the best one to show during a presentation during the SXSW film festival called "Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse 101." (Please, please, don't let this session be at the same time as the horror panel Scott Weinberg is on.) If you want a lot of grindhouse-loving film geeks and Rodriguez fans watching a short you made -- not to mention the director screening your film himself -- now's your chance.

For those of us who like watching films more than making them, this contest brings up another interesting point. If SXSW is helping to generate this much interest in Grindhouse, will the movie play during the film festival, either as a lavish premiere or as a super-secret surprise like last year's A Scanner Darkly screening? I can't wait to find out. (Too bad Austin weather in March is too unpredictable for an outdoor drive-in-style screening ... that would be ideal.)

You gotta love the Brits and their fabulously raunchy humor. Only from the UK would we have a documentary about disabled male strippers with the perfectly splendid tag line: "They might not have legs, but do they have the balls?" The 24-minute short doc, titled The Crippendales -- a play on the famous Chippendales dancers -- follows Lee Kemp, a wheelchair-bound man with a dream of being a male stripper (hey, we all need a dream) and his efforts to pull together and train a troupe of dancers, all with disabilities, to do the "full monty" in performances at a hen club -- clubs where women go for a "girls' night out" to watch men taking it all off.