Sleazoid Express
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Spending time in those theaters, I grew increasingly irritated by the offhand putdowns and snide of cinema snobs like the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, who implied that Times Square movies could only entertain low-IQ types, and seemed unable to praise anything beyond the hip new Fellini or Bergman film. I, on the other hand, felt their "old masters" were directors who hadn’t shown a new wrinkle in years,. To me, 42nd Street was where the real aesthetic innovations were being made. There was no permanent record of the type of exploitation films I had so relentlessly attended. So in June 1980, I started Sleazoid Express."-- Sleazoid Express (1984) by Bill Landis |
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Sleazoid Express[1] (1980-1983) was a film journal on the New York grind house scene in circa 1964-1984. Edited by Bill Landis, a projectionist and devotee of the crime-ridden sleaze houses, the magazine captured the genre affections but the whole Times Square milieu of drugs, violence and prostitution. Typical films shown in the movie houses, which centered around the city's 42nd Street, included The Big Doll House, Blood Sucking Freaks, The Corpse Grinders, Mad Monkey Kung Fu, Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In and The Ultimate Degenerate.
The book describes in detail the unique blend of people who made up the theater-goers, including black pimps, low-grade mafiosi, transvestites, Latino gangsters, "rough trade" homosexuals, aggressive lesbians, trench coat-clad perverts, and thrill-seeking squares.
Far from representing a marginal off-shoot of the movie business, the grind house films would be later plundered for ideas and imagery by mainstream cinema, while the trash ethic and aesthetic of the magazine itself would be effortlessly copied by many others.
TOC
- Bitch Goddess: Madame Olga Works the Cameo, (see Olga (film series))
- The Findlays and Ameros Invent the Roughie at the Globe, (see Michael Findlay)
- Bloodthirsty Butchers at the Lyric: Times Square's Militant Auteur, Andy Milligan (see Andy Milligan)
- The Anco Does a Gendertwist (see Glen or Glenda)
- Race Relations Within the Empire (see I Spit On Your Graves and The Intruder)
- Blood Horror: Chopping 'Em Up at the Rialto (see Blood Feast)
- Taking Their Show on the Road: Times Square Mondo Movies (see Mondo Cane)
- The Liberty and the Cinerama: Showcases for Eurosleaze (see Eurosleaze)
- Bitch Goddess of the Apollo: Ilsa, Queen of Pain (see women in prison)
- Peeking on Female Rough Trade at the Harris
- The New Amsterdam Presents Celebrity Crime
- Orientalia Comes to the Deuce
- Lost in the Roxy
Bibliography
- Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square by Bill Landis, Michelle Clifford
See also
