Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Incredible journey to the sordid heart of sleazy exploitation cinema once shown round the clock at the crossroads of the world. This is the milieu of Taxi Driver, of Midnight Cowboy and The French Connection, when NYC's theater district was a genuinely dangerous place. Watching HBO's The Deuce led me to online research and discovery of this book, which I bought immediately. An enjoyable but tawdry reference work on scuzzy, nothing-budget movies and the sticky theatres that screened them two generations ago, when Times Square was wall-to-wall with lost souls and hustlers peddling fantasies in glorious old movie palaces gone to seed on 42nd St. The Deuce has long since been cleaned up, polished and sanitized. A Madame Tussaud's wax museum stands on the south side of 42nd between 7th and 8th, and a BB King blues club welcomes tourists across the street. There's a Hard Rock Cafe around the corner and a Walgreen's at the other end of the block on the corner of 7th, but there's nothing approximating the sense of adventure that used to accompany an adrenaline rush -- that giddy surge borne on the knowledge that anything could happen here, in this little stretch of Midtown -- because it no longer can. Turning Times Square over to Disney is like neutering a wolf.
A minor lament: this book delivers mainly a capsule-review aggregation of mostly forgotten films; I would have liked more you-are-there accounts of what it was really like to roam those two blocks of 42nd St. between 6th and 8th Avenues, say, around 1975. Old photographs of the era show individuals who appear by turns either so depraved or smacked out of their minds on heroin that there appears to be no hope for any of them. What was it like to venture after the show into the Terminal Bar a block away on 41st and 8th for a shot of rye? Gone some 35 years, the Terminal was reputed to be one of the most violent bars on earth. Who went in there? Why did some people not come out alive? Surely there must be yellowing police records containing information that could put flesh on these skeletons.
These anthropological questions get short shrift in an otherwise fine book about some of the weirdest movies ever made and the equally strange venues for their exhibition. Maybe I'm asking too much of a movie reference book, although the title also promises a travelogue into the surrealistic bowels of urban hell. By the late 1970s the Deuce was overrun with porn theaters and massage parlors, and theaters showing strange grindhouse films of grisly horror, eurotrash erotica and kung fu foolishness were on the decline. These films live now only in my memories and in the handful of itchy & scratchy DVDs I've managed to acquire. Jess Franco remains a perennial favorite, as well as select examples of Italian Giallo, but the gold standard for insane violence has got to be the Lone Wolf and Cub series, a grindhouse staple at disreputable cinemas that today is part of the Criterion Collection, a boutique company devoted to important, classic and arthouse cinema. Oh, how times have changed.
One thing hasn't: I confess to a dangerous and evidently incurable addiction to B-movies, the trashier the better. This book is like catnip to a voracious cineaste like me. Because we cannot feast on Bergman, Fellini and Godard alone.
Give me a triple feature of Venus in Furs, Kung Fu Zombie and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS. And a large RC Cola to go with 'em.
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