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The pervasive image of New York''s 42nd Street as a hub of sensational thrills, vice and excess, is from where "grindhouse cinema," the focus of this volume, stemmed. It is, arguably, an image that has remained unchanged in the mind''s eye of many exploitation film fans and academics alike. Whether in the pages of fanzines or scholarly works, it is often recounted how, should one have walked down this street between the 1960s and the 1980s, one would have undergone a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of disparate "exploitation" films from all over the world that were being offered cheaply to urbanites by a swathe of vibrant movie theatres.The contributors to consider "grindhouse cinema" from a variety of cultural and methodological positions. Some seek to deconstruct the etymology of "grindhouse" itself, add flesh to the bones of its cadaverous history, or examine the term''s contemporary relevance in the context of both media production and consumerism. Others offer new inroads into hitherto unexamined examples of exploitation film history, presenting snapshots of cultural moments that many of us thought we already knew.>
List of contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: 42nd Street, and Beyond
Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker
Chapter 1
Grinding out the Grindhouse: Exploitation, Myth and Memory
Glenn Ward
Chapter 2
Where
Did We Come In?: The Economics of Unruly Audiences, Their Cinemas and Tastes, From Serial Houses to Grind Houses.
Phyll Smith
Chapter 3
Temporary Fleapits and Scabs' Alley:The Theatrical Dissemination of Italian Cannibal Films in Melbourne, Australia
Dean Brandum
Chapter 4
Run, Angel, Run: Serial Production and the Biker Movie, 1966-72
Peter Stanfield
Chapter 5
"The Smashing, Crashing, Pileup of the Century": The Carsploitation Film
Robert J Read
Chapter 6
Cars and Girls (and Burgers and Weed): Branding, Mainstreaming, and Crown International Pictures' SoCal Drive-in Movies
Richard Nowell
Chapter 7
From "Sex Entertainment for the Whole Family" to Mature Pictures:
I Jomfruens Tegn and Transnational Erotic Cinema
Kevin Heffernan
Chapter 8
'Bigger Than A Payphone, Smaller Than A Cadillac': Porn Stardom in
Exhausted: John C Holmes The Real StoryNeil Jackson
Chapter 9
From Opera House to Grindhouse (And Back Again): Ozploitation In and Beyond Australia
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Chapter 10
Go West, Brother: the Politics of Landscape in the Blaxploitation Western
Austin Fisher
Chapter 11
Red Power, White Movies:
Billy Jack,
Johnny Firecloud, and the Cultural Politics of the "Indiansploitation" Cycle
David Church
Chapter 12
Sleazy Strip-Joints and Perverse Porn Circuses: The Remediation of Grindhouse in the Porn Productions of Jack the Zipper
Clarissa Smith
Select Bibliography
Contributors
About the author
Austin Fisher is Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, author of
Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (2011), founding co-editor of the "Global Exploitation Cinemas" book series and editor of
Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (2015). He serves on the Editorial Board of the Transnational Cinemas journal, is Co-Chair of the SCMS "Transnational Cinemas" Scholarly Interest Group, and founder of the "Spaghetti Cinema" festival.
Johnny Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University, UK. His writing on horror and exploitation cinema can be read in journals such as
Horror Studies, the
Journal of British Cinema and Television, and in his forthcoming books
Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (2015) and
Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2015).
