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Exploitation films come in all genres, but the staple was sex. Kroger Babb, who billed himself as "Mr. Pihsnamwohs" (showmanship spelled backward), ballyhooed his 1944 birth-of-a-baby film, Mom and Dad, so successfully that it ran for decades and, according to the Grindhouse authors, earned $100 million. And in the late '50s, as bold European films lured the art-house crowds, a new breed of grind gurus revived sexploitation.
Francis Ford Coppola made nudie films; Martin Scorsese's first feature went out on the grind circuit. Meyer (with his giddy editing style), Radley Metzger (who made elegant variations on Euro-smut) and R.L. Frost (a versatile imagist, heavy on the rough stuff) could have played in the majors. But most exploiteurs were amateurs--like Doris Wishman, with her mesmerizingly absurd tales of good women gone bad. The husband-and-wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay, who, Weldon says admiringly, "made the most twisted softcore adult movies of them all," later concocted the fake snuff film, Snuff. They specialized in bizarre ways of killing off sexy women (crossbow, electrified earrings, dildo switchblades). Exploitation? Or prophecy? Michael was decapitated in 1977 by the blade of a helicopter crashing atop Manhattan's Pan Am Building.
Today grindhouse films have a nostalgic savor--old naughtiness that looks naive--but it's certain nobody was thinking masterpiece. The films were often shot in a weekend with untested actors who had to get it right the first time; to producers, the only truly obscene phrase was "Take Two." The running times were as short as a starlet's skirt. A plot-heavy thriller might last 51 minutes (Maniac) or 63 (Herschell Gordon Lewis' gore-gantuan Blood Feast). Then again, the numbing incompetence of some adults-only films made that one hour seem endless. The tone of even the best of them was not so much sexy as seedy. And still the patrons sat there hoping for an epidermal epiphany. "That's who was paying my way," Friedman says in Grindhouse, "a lot of very lonely men."
As they were born in prudishness, sexploitation movies died in licentiousness. Porno films, which became chic in 1972, delivered the goods, up close and impersonal, without the showman's expert tease. And when home video arrived, gentlemen could take their vicarious pleasures in private. The community of sexploitation producers and audiences--suckers--was sundered forever.
Now it's deja blue all over again. On video, and with Grindhouse, bad-movie lovers can be taken once more. It's good clean fun, really--for we are taken back to an age when moviegoers were innocent enough to be shocked, and producers were canny enough to do the shucking.