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Quentin Tarantino continues his role as the
cinema’s greatest cheerleader of B-movies. His latest foray into
cheese is a celebration of grindhouse movies — or, as they are better
known, exploitation cinema. The relaxing of restrictions in the 1960s
allowed filmmakers to up the quotient of sex and violence, elements
necessary in all good grindhouse movies. Rundown urban theaters and
drive-ins were the main locations where the more lurid horror and action
movies that characterized the form were showcased. Sometimes the titles say
it all. No one would expect great art from The
Gore Gore Girls (1972) or The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972), and Edward Wood Jr. would be ashamed to put his name
on them. Ironically, home video brought them a wider audience, but the
switchover to DVD made them disappear from the video-store shelves. The horror genre veered further from the supernatural
and into the realm of realistic and sadistic violence. “Keep
repeating it’s only a movie” became its mantra, and it was also
the tagline for the infamous Last House on the
Left (1972). Two teenage girls are raped and
murdered by a gang of escaped convicts, who are even more brutally
dispatched by the parents of one of the girls. Wes Craven’s cult
classic is shoddy in every respect, from cinematography to acting, and the
attempt at humor is more cringe-inducing than the castration scene.
Everyone is familiar with Tobe Hooper’s The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the greatest
indie horror film of the ’70s, but few are aware of his demented
follow-up, Eaten Alive (1977). Neville Brand is the proprietor of a hotel on a swamp who
attacks his guests with a scythe and feeds them to his pet alligator. The
brooding Southern atmosphere envelops the film just as surely as it does a Tennessee Williams play.
Movies this creatively deranged must be cherished. Tarantino has cited Dirty
Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), a road-weary
90-minute car chase, as one of his main inspirations for his Grindhouse segment. It’s
a terrible film. The oddity of Vigilante Force (1976) puts it at a much higher level of drive-in action
flick. Ben Arnold (Jan-Michael Vincent) recruits his brother Aaron (Kris
Kristofferson) to bring in his Vietnam-vet buddies to clean up their town.
Success breeds power, which leads to no good, and the
vets take control of the town. Vigilante Force may seem unnecessarily chaotic, but its apocalyptic
mood lingers. Art can be found in the trashiest locations.
New on DVD this Tuesday (April 24): The Queen, Night at the Museum, and Déjà Vu.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2007.
