DVD Tuesday: Grindhouse and Grindhouse Memories
DVD Tuesday: Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill
In honor of this Friday's opening of
Grindhouse -
Quentin Tarantino and
Robert Rodriguez's loving tribute to the good old, bad old days of exploitation double features - this DVD Tuesday column is a double header of two films I first saw in real Times Square grindhouses:
David Cronenberg's
They Came from Within (1975) and
Guerdon Trueblood's
The Candy Snatchers (1973).
My favorite Cronenberg/Times Square story is actually about
Scanners (1981): I saw it in a super-rowdy theater packed to the balcony with the kind of people you didn't ask to be quiet because odds were they were crazy or high out of their minds. In fact, prudence dictated avoiding eye contact, being careful not to bump their seats, and never,
ever walking in front of them; they may have been carrying on as though they had no idea there was a movie playing, but god help you if you blocked the screen for even an instant. They talked all the way through the coming attractions. They talked all the way through the credits. They talked all the way through the opening sequence, in which some goofy-looking balding guy with glasses, sitting at a dais in front of a half-empty auditorium, asks for someone to come up and join him so he can demonstrate "scanning," warning that the process is often uncomfortable. A volunteer - ordinary-looking fellow in a suit - steps up, sits down and, as instructed, starts thinking about something. Chatter, laugh, chatter, yell, chatter, chatter, chatter from my fellow moviegoers. Glasses guy starts looking uncomfortable and squirming. Hooting and hollering... this sh*t is
lame, funny-looking jerk squirming around like he needs to use the toilet. And then,
boom! Guy's head explodes. More than 25 years later, I cannot
tell you how shocking that image was. It was so outrageous that the entire
Scanners trailer was nothing but the last minute and a half of
that scene: no running voice-over claims of the most shocking this or the most daring that, no quick-cut action montages, no scary music. Just that scene. For the next quarter of an hour, you could have heard a needle drop in that theater.
But by 1981, I already knew Cronenberg was one to watch.
They Came from Within was a classic grindhouse find: It popped up in a grimy flea pit, the poster featured an anonymous screaming girl on it, and I'd never heard of the writer-director. But hey -
Barbara Steele was in it and she was usually good for spookiness, so I paid my money and took my chances. And I walked out saying, "God
damn!" and making a mental list of who I was going to call because I'd just seen the gem everyone always hoped was somewhere under all that muck. The story lays out every idea Cronenberg has been exploring ever since. Imagine Starliner Towers, a brand-new, upscale apartment complex, a clean, anonymous, self-contained middle-class community on an island in the St. Lawrence River, less than 15 minutes from downtown Montreal. Too bad about that murder-suicide, the eccentric geneticist and his teenaged mistress... but things like that happen everywhere.
Except for the part that only happens in Cronenberg-land, where a researcher trying to engineer a kind of organic blank slate that could assume the form and function of diseased human organs instead creates a slug-like parasite that enters the human body in ways best left to the (perverted) imagination and then transforms its host into an aggressively polymorphous sensualist burning to spread the word made flesh.
They Came from Within was low-budget and brilliantly icky, as well as whip-smart and genuinely provocative. The scene near the end in which sweet-faced exploitation regular
Lynn Lowery sums up Cronenberg's unique brand of body horror in all its seductive grotesquerie was resonant in the hedonistic '70s and has only grown more so three decades down the line.
The Candy Snatchers was more typical grindhouse fare, a gritty, cheaply made thriller about stupid, vicious people and a get-rich-quick scheme that goes totally wrong. But unlike a lot of the movies that played the Deuce, it delivered on its promise of sleaze, sex and all-around nastiness. Its drawing card was
Tiffany Bolling, a second-string starlet who was always good for a gratuitous nude scene and a malicious setup: Three lowlifes - a tough cookie (Bolling), her sex-offender brother and the dimwit who'll do anything for her because he's nursing a secret crush - kidnap a Catholic-school girl named Candy and plan to ransom her back to her rich parents. But they don't know the lay of the family land: Candy's mother is an ineffectual drunk and her gold-digging stepfather would like nothing more than to get his hands on Candy's inheritance, so he's got no reason to pay for her return. The movie's great talking point is that the kidnappers bury Candy alive in a box with an inconspicuous air tube that keeps her from suffocating. That image has been used many times in the last 30 years, but
Candy Snatchers pulled off the neat trick of recalling the
real-life 1968 kidnapping of heiress Barbara Jane Mackle, who spent more than four days buried in a box before her father paid $500,000 ransom and her abductor left directions on how to find her. It also blamed the made-for-TV movie
The Longest Night (1972) for inspiring copycats: Bolling's character confesses to getting the idea to bury Candy from TV.
The movie's ending is the stuff Times Square junkies lived for: Candy's story and a subplot involving an autistic boy with the worst parents in history dovetail in a closing image of breathtakingly casual cruelty.
I saw plenty of world-class crap at grindhouses, but movies like
Candy Snatchers and
They Came from Within kept me coming back. On the evidence of
Grindhouse, I'd say Rodriguez and Tarantino (who overtly tipped his hat to
Candy Snatchers in his notorious fifth-season
CSI season finale) feel the same way.
Things to consider:
Tarantino and Rodriguez are paying homage not to a particular film or genre (like, say, 2002's
Far from Heaven), but to an experience: seeing battered prints of disreputable movies punctuated by sensationalistic trailers, amateurish ads for local businesses and faded in-house promotions. So what's the point for A) people like me, with fond memories of the real grindhouses and B) people for whom the grindhouse is purely something they've only heard about secondhand?
Rodriguez and Tarantino are often criticized for being recyclers rather than filmmakers with original visions. Is collage a legitimate form of creative expression? How about musical mash-ups? What do they have to do with Rodriguez's and, especially, Tarantino's films, and is "homage" just a fancy word for stealing other people's ideas?
Movies, like popular music, are often viscerally connected to particular times and experiences - people like me order the world along points defined by pictures: "I met Michael the week
Nurse Sherri and
House of Psychotic Women opened at the Selwyn"; "Your new boss is sheer
Jane Fonda circa
Klute"; "That was when the Roxy Deli was the Victoria Theater and played all-night vampire-movie marathons." So what are some of your most vivid movie memories, and are they connected with larger life experiences?
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in
Movie Talk!
Previous DVD Tuesday blogs:
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
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Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This week's new DVD releases
