Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square

by Bill Landis, Michelle Clifford

Overview

Warning: Watch your wallets and stay out of the bathroom!
In a bygone era, when Times Square was crammed with porn shops, gun stores, and drug pushers, disenfranchised moviegoers flocked to the grindhouses along 42nd Street. If the gore epics, women-in-prison films, and shockumentaries showcased within their mildewed walls didn't live up to their outrageous billing, the audience shouted, threw food, and even vandalized the theaters. For dedicated lovers of extreme cinema, buying a movie ticket on the Deuce meant putting your life on the line.
Authors Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford came to know those grindhouses better than anyone else, and although the theaters were gone by the mid-1980s, the films remained. In Sleazoid Express, Landis and Clifford reproduce what no home video can — the experience of watching an exploitation film in its original fight-for-your-life Deuce setting. Both a travelogue of the infamous grindhouses of yore and a comprehensive overview of the sleaze canon, Sleazoid Express offers detailed reviews of landmark exploitation classics and paints intimate portraits of directors whose notorious creations played the back end of triple bills for years on end. With wit, intelligence, and an unflinching eye, Landis and Clifford offer the definitive document of cinema's most intense and shocking moments as they came to life at a legendary place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743215831
Publisher:	Touchstone
Publication date:	12/03/2002
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bill Landis founded the legendary magazine Sleazoid Express in 1980 while working as a projectionist on the old 42nd Street. He is also the author of Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger.

Read an Excerpt

Sleazoid Express

A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square from Chapter Thirteen: Lost in the Roxy

The Roxy theater had several incarnations, but all of them were pretty foul.

Located on the south side of the street next to the Cine Twins, it was originally one of the Deuce's grungiest, most pungent smelling, and most dangerous adult houses. Sharing management with the landmark scumatorium Show World, the Roxy spent the 1970s through the mid-1980s showing third-run hardcore porn, hosting a live sex show, and serving as an open stomping ground for quickie prostitution. It attracted the worst, most desperate people on the Deuce. You didn't even stand near the theater unless you wanted a drug addict streetwalker propositioning you as her pimp/live-show partner hung over your shoulder.

In the early to mid-1980s, rare Deuce favorites that had been gone for years were suddenly accessible again because of video, and distributors who hadn't shown some movies in years suddenly saw dollar signs. In 1985, the Roxy was renovated and converted into a multileveled fourplex that showed exploitation double bills on video, becoming a sort of living Sleazoid museum. You could catch every sort of film from every year, including many rough-girl gems from the 1970s, like Fugitive Girls and the ArthurMarks classics Roommates and Centerfold Girls. There were bookings so dissimilar only the Deuce could conceive them, like Superman (1978) and Superfly (1972). Unfortunately, despite the renovation, the Roxy remained devoid of fresh air and retained both its BO aroma and its super-sleazy vibe. Sometimes you'd see the Roxy cashiers -- former live-show workers with names like Duran -- run into a broom closet with a crack pipe during their breaks.

To walk into one of the Roxy's mini-theaters meant walking into any number of crazy scenes or insane outbursts. You'd see Laura Gemser getting violated by her real-life husband, Gabriele Tinti, in Smooth Silk and Raw Velvet after she participates in a sex magick ceremony at the Sphinx. (The movie was a legendary Eurosleaze classic that you'd have been lucky to catch when it was first released in 1977.) Or maybe you'd see Victor Buono screaming at you while rearranging an Alice in Wonderland style tea party in the horror oddity Moonchild (1974), unable to get it together -- something about the guests not sitting where he wanted. You never knew what movie you were walking into. You'd have to stand there for a few minutes to figure it out.

If you stood too long, though, people would start to surround you, thinking you were looking for a possible sex partner or were just stupid and asking to be robbed. So it was wise to take one of the ass-numbing plastic seats anyway if you weren't sure, then figure it out. But before you sat down, you'd have to flick a lighter at the seat to make sure there was no weird wet mess on it.

Once seated, you could easily imagine Victor marching off the screen to tell you to move your chair, as the rest of the cast shouted at you that they hated it there and wanted out of Times Square.

Copyright © 2002 by Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford

Continues...

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Excerpted from Sleazoid Express by Bill Landis Copyright © 2002 by Bill Landis. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Preface	XI
	Introduction	1
1	Bitch Goddess: Madame Olga Works the Cameo	7
2	The Findlays and Ameros Invent the Roughie at the Globe	22
3	Bloodthirsty Butchers at the Lyric: Times Square's Militant Auteur, Andy Milligan	47
4	The Anco Does a Gendertwist	79
5	Race Relations Within the Empire	89
6	Blood Horror: Chopping 'Em Up at the Rialto	108
7	Taking Their Show on the Road: Times Square Mondo Movies	154
8	The Liberty and the Cinerama: Showcases for Eurosleaze	177
9	Bitch Goddess of the Apollo: Ilsa, Queen of Pain	214
10	Peeking on Female Rough Trade at the Harris	229
11	The New Amsterdam Presents Celebrity Crime	253
12	Orientalia Comes to the Deuce	266
13	Lost in the Roxy	283
	Appendix of Video Companies	299
	Index	301

Editorial Reviews

Hubert Selby, Jr. author of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream I am amazed at the information....[Landis and Clifford] certainly do know these films, and have captured the atmosphere and ambiance of the theaters....I'm certain a lot of people will have a lot of fun reading this book.

Larry McMurtry author of The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove One of my most cherished possessions is my near-complete file of Sleazoid Express, a work of rare wit and almost unbelievable devotion to trash cinema. I consider it an invaluable resource.

Robert Downey, Sr. A bent, funny, smell-the-facts look at the movies on 42nd Street during their heyday.

From the Publisher

New York City's grindhouses (burlesque theaters gone to seed) are long gone, but sin-ema fans can relive the experience with this definitive study. Landis, founder of the eponymously titled cult classic periodical, and Clifford, his partner in grime, take readers on a tour of the Deuce, the psychosexual netherland on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the area was home to numerous theaters before being razed and overlaid with family theme restaurants and chain stores in the 1990s. Organized by film genre ("Blood Horror," "Eurosleaze," etc.), the book covers the venues themselves as well as industry personnel, 42nd Street habitu s, and, of course, the deliciously offbeat and perverse films-Black Mama, White Mama; Women in Cages; and, this reviewer's personal favorite, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Like Jimmy McDonough's The Ghastly One, an excellent biography on sexploitation auteur Andy Milligan, this book moves the chains down the field in grindhouse cinema's march for respectability. Great fetish film fun for all popular culture and film collections.-Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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