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Patty Hearst sexploitation films were a ‘thing’ in the 1970s
12.14.2016
10:41 am
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‘Patty’ poster available at WestgateGallery.com
 
Although the notion of rushing a “cash in” product to market to capitalize on a story or scandal in the headlines isn’t exactly a new thing, even in the more freewheeling 1970s a porno “cash in” was still, historically speaking, a fairly novel phenomenon. Case in point, when publishing heiress Patty Hearst was abducted by the left-wing terrorists known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

If you weren’t around then or need a refresher course, on February 4th, 1974, Patty Hearst, then a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley was abducted from her apartment by the SLA, a radical leftist urban guerrilla group led by escaped convict “Field Marshal” Donald DeFreeze. She was raped, beaten, constantly threatened with death and basically brainwashed/coerced into participating in various highly illegal activities, including an infamous April 15, 1974 San Francisco bank robbery, helping to make improvised explosives and driving a getaway car.
 

 
Hearst was arrested in a San Francisco apartment with another SLA member on September 18, 1975. At her police station booking she listed her occupation as “Urban Guerilla” and asked her lawyer to “Tell everybody that I’m smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there.” Hearst was just 87 pounds when she was apprehended, and despite being described by the prominent psychologist Dr. Margaret Singer, who examined her, as “a low-IQ, low-affect zombie” and clearly having suffered psychological and physical trauma, she was convicted by a jury of several crimes and sentenced to decades in federal prison. Jimmy Carter commuted her prison sentence after 22 months served and Bill Clinton gave her a full pardon in 2001. Hearst appeared in two John Waters films and has been active in charity fundraising, concentrating her efforts towards pediatric AIDS.

The Hearst story was quite a big deal in the mid-70s, daily frontpage news, on the cover of TIME, Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post and People and the subject of frequent TV news stories. You could buy “special edition” magazines devoted to Hearst’s travails next to the TV Guide and Reader’s Digest at the grocery store checkout line. And there were two, arguably three, exploitation films made about her at the time.
 

 
The most curious of the three was a film simply called Patty (no last name is ever mentioned) a mockumentary that came in hardcore XXX-rated, softcore X-rated and R-rated versions. The only “star” worth mentioning was 70s porn stalwart Jamie Gillis and the film was directed by Robert L. Roberts the same low budget sleaze auteur who gave the world Sweet Savior, the 1971 “love-thrill murders” Manson Family-themed exploitation film starring former teen heartthrob Troy Donahue as a shaggy hippie cult leader.

Essentially Patty seems like it was a bunch of sex scenes with various pairings (group sex, lesbian, interracial and even a little girl-on-snake action according to a VARIETY review) held together with a framing device of “a Freudian psychologist and four of his colleagues” (along with the director himself) conversing about “Patty.” The film’s tagline was “The story of a revolutionary, told in highly erotic terms.” NY Times film reviewer Vincent Canby dubbed it “a frisky romp.”

According to the Temple of Schlock blog, the film had been considered “lost” but that:

The negative for all three was rescued from a condemned movie theater in New Jersey almost seven years ago and sold on eBay to a DVD company on January 14, 2008. A DVD/Blu-ray will hopefully come out sometime soon.

(Apparently a 2017 release has already been announced by Synapse, but with no further information available.)
 

 
And then there is Tanya AKA Sex Queen of the SLA a comedy directed by one “P. Duncan Fingersnarl” (Nate Rogers) in 1976. Here’s what one reviewer on IMDB said about it:

This film is a fun spoof, based on the real-life 70s Patty Hearst kidnapping. In the movie, a young affluent woman named Charlotte Cane, is kidnapped and held for ransom. Her kidnappers are a group of radical revolutionaries, who are holed-up in a grungy hideout, in the Oakland ghetto.

They’re a mixed-race bunch, who are committed to camaraderie, and saving the ‘people’ from the oppressive ‘insect pig’ capitalists. This band of freedom-fighters, are also dedicated to having lots of sex with each other. There’s plenty of juicy sex scenes, including both interracial and lesbian trysts, between the group members. The sex in this film, is very graphic indeed, including showing lots of male full- frontal nudity.

Charlotte gets caught-up in the lustful antics of her kidnappers, and has marathon sex sessions with them all. She enthusiastically enjoys her newly uninhibited sexuality, that the kidnappers have awakened in her. Charlotte also becomes sympathetic, to the radical extremist cause of the group. She even renounces her name, choosing to be called Tanya instead. So, Tanya has to decide if she really wants to return to her former affluent, sheltered existence, when she gets the chance to do so.

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.14.2016
10:41 am
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Particularly lurid exploitation film posters of the 50s, 60s and 70s
01.30.2016
12:44 pm
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The Black Klansman

Forty years before Chappelle’s Show made the joke, a black man spends his nights in a most curious manner…

This is a sampling from a private collection of rare, massive 40” x 60” posters that were printed on cardstock for drive-In movie theaters.  More posters and related merchandise are online at hautecampe.com (“Archeaologists of the Strange”).  All are for sale at auction until February 8, when the bidding closes.

Haute Campe offers a collection of original rare, vintage film posters from the 1940s-1970s originating mostly from drive-ins and grindhouse theaters. Most of the posters went through a single distributor called National Screen Service, hence the “property of N.S.S.” at the bottom of 99% of the movie posters printed in the 20th century!  While many posters were destroyed by the elements and others were pulled off the wall by collectors, a great many returned to the distributor’s archives and piled up for many many years. 

We were fortunate enough to be able to acquire a large part of the archives and the treasures were fantastic, including rarely-seen posters that were for small run promotions and exceedingly impossible to find sizes like the gorgeous and massive 40” x 60” silkscreens created for drive-in movie theaters.

This is just a selection from the first part of the alphabet…
 

Blood and Black Lace

Mario Bava directed this 1964 film that created the template for the “body count” slasher films of the 1980s.
 

Blood Bath

A 1966 stinker that started out in Yugoslavia as a spy film and—being judged unreleasable—had extra sequences filmed in Venice, California and was re-edited as a horror movie.
 
Many, many more movie posters, after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.30.2016
12:44 pm
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‘The Sinful Dwarf’: Four feet of pure, deranged, nightmare-inducing evil
09.17.2015
06:01 pm
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In a way I feel kind of bad about calling your attention to what I am about to call your attention to. Normally I prefer to highlight unusual “gems” of the outsider arts here, you know, marquee things we feel positively about.

This isn’t one of those times. This is one of those “This smells like shit, here, smell this” kinda posts. No, I’m not exactly being “a good person” by posting here about the oddball/disgusting 1973 Danish cinematic trash epic known as The Sinful Dwarf... but here it is anyway!
 

 
The Sinful Dwarf, as you might have already gathered from the title alone, is not high art. It’s not low art either, it’s just appalling on every level. But funny, too! The plot, as relayed via a very brief synopsis on IMDB is… simple: “Olaf and his mother run a boarding house and a white slavery ring. They also smuggle heroin to keep the addict girls happy so they do not try and escape. A young couple move into the house and the evil landlords take a liking to the female.”

Olaf is one sick fucking dwarf. He would pretty much have to be with a title like this one, no? That’s about all you really need to know about The Sinful Dwarfother than the heroin comes in teddy bears (via a sleazy crook who calls himself “Santa Claus”) and that the mother is a bit Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
 

 
Here are a few more salient details courtesy of Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies: The Blog back in 2008:

I know the LPA hates this kind of stuff, but if there is an apotheosis of the deranged, nightmare-inducing dwarf that haunts the dreams of little children everywhere, brother, I just spent 90 minutes with him. I’d like to think that’s a testament to Torben’s acting skills. Because if he’s not acting…*shudder*...

The set-up goes a little like this: Olaf’s mother is a former showgirl who was scarred in a cataclysmic fire that consumed the dance hall where she was the star, the same year that little Olaf was born. “I don’t want to think about that year,” she tells a friend. “First the terrible fire—then Olaf—one disaster after another.” Love you too, Ma.

Since the horrific end of her showbiz career, Mom has been hosting tea-parties for the Horrible Women’s Auxiliary and pining for the good old days, periodically breaking into ultra-disturbing, Nora Desmond-style dance numbers to relive her former glory. To make ends meet, she and Olaf kidnap young girls, lock them in the attic, get them hooked on smack, and pimp them out to a series of faceless johns. It’s a real cottage industry.


 
According to one tidbit I read online, Torben Bille, the best-known little actor in Denmark, had a good time making the film, but was ashamed that his poor sainted mother knew that her son had made a porno film, basically! (The Sinful Dwarf is not really a porn film per se, but rather something that exists in a cinematic continuum triangulated by porn, Joel Reed’s repellent grindhouse classic Bloodsucking Freaks and John Waters’ Pink Flamingos.) The freaky mother is straight out of a David Lynch film, if not Grey Gardens.

It continues, after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.17.2015
06:01 pm
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‘Teenage Mother’: Nine Months of Trouble!
09.15.2015
11:10 am
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Teenage Mother is one of a small handful of what could be called “quintessential” or even canonical, if you prefer, sexploitation films of the 1960s. Which is not to say it’s all that “good,” either, but it does have a rather full quota of exploitation staples such as sleazy drug dealers, disapproving parents, gang violence, and of course, a lying slut!  (Film School Rejects called Teenage Mother a “grindhouse Juno”—I’m not sure how true that is, but it sounds good in theory, doesn’t it?)
 

 
It’s also a peculiar cultural marker of pre-“sexual revolution” American history. Beyond the scare tactics and corny drama, the film’s pièce de résistance (and the real reason for this otherwise merely “okay” movie becoming so notorious) was, of course, its full color live birth reel complete with speculum and very close close-ups. You have to marvel at the business genius of director Jerry Gross. His company Cinemation Industries—which would later release Fritz The Cat, The Cheerleaders, The Black Godfather and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—pioneered an unusual traveling roadshow presentation with this film that included a sex education lecture at each screening. Why? Because it would make it defensible in court. It wasn’t “obscene” it was educational! In a pre-porn era, this stuff was box office boffo. Gross just wanted to show an extreme close up of woman’s vagina on-screen, but the only way he was going to be able to do it legally back then was in the guise of a “sex education” film with a ham-fisted moral message —as if he gave a damn about anything other than collecting the box office receipts—and… medical footage.

The existence of Teenage Mother is a reminder, not of a more innocent age, in my opinion, but an era just more ignorant of sex in general (not all that long ago, either). The film jumps through several very odd hoops at once, but If you know the backstory, it makes it an even more interesting cinematic curio… I guess! Incidentally according to IMDB, Gross paid a hospital just $50 for the birth footage.
 

 
The hottie in the lead role is actress Arlene Sue Farber—undoubtedly a grandmother by now—who a few years later starred (as “Arlene Tyger”) in Gross’s fake Italian sexploitation flick Female Animal (which God help me, I own the soundtrack for). Teenage Mother also has an unexpected cameo from a baby-faced Fred Willard as the gym teacher.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.15.2015
11:10 am
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Capital Exploits Labor: The US-China Trade and Beyond


Why are these people smiling? Fom left, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan, Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner at the 2011 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., Monday, May 9.

 
A guest editorial courtesy of our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog:

In a classic Marxist set-up, Capital is free to exploit labor because labor is in surplus.

The fundamental dynamics of the U.S.-China trade partnership—certainly the biggest economic story of this generation—boil down to “capital exploits labor.” I am well aware that this sort of quasi-Marxist analysis is supposed to be passe in the era where young nerds can start billion-dollar enterprises in a garage or dorm room. Capitalism is a priori “win-win,” as all those workers in China are getting ahead while our youth launch $50 million IPOs of social networking Web 2.0 companies.

But if you scrape away the high-gloss propaganda and myth-making, then the fundamental dynamic is definitely Marxist: American capital jettisoned American labor as a costly hassle in favor of cheap, no-hassle Chinese labor.

Since Capital’s best buddy in the whole world is the Central State and its proxies, i.e. the Federal Reserve, then the Central State and the central bank (the Fed) smoothed over the exploitation and furthered the consumer economy by inflating a credit-housing bubble. Since 60% of American households own a home, this enabled the increasingly impoverished “middle class” to borrow trillions of dollars in “free” money that could be spent—surprise!—on the new imports from China that filled the shelves of big box global retailers everywhere.

Allow me to illustrate this dynamic by deconstructing two recent stories in the Mainstream Financial Media: ‘Superjobs’: Why You Work More, Enjoy It Less Businesses expect a lot more out of their employees these days…

Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru: Operational innovations at restaurants like Taco Bell rival those at any factory in the world.

The first piece describes in clinical fashion how U.S. capital is ruthlessly exploiting labor, demanding more work for little to no additional pay. The underlying dynamic here is purely Marxist: capital encourages over-supply of labor, which then drives the value of labor down. Competition for the few jobs available makes desperate wage-earners willing to put up with exploitation and insecurity because the options of escaping the cycle of centralized Corporate value extraction are insecure and risky.

Global Corporate America fosters a surplus of labor in the U.S. via three mechanisms:

1. Vast illegal immigration which keeps labor costs down in low-skill corporate workhouses such as slaughterhouses, fast-food outlets, etc.

2. H1-B visas for high-tech workers (now falling out of favor as those positions are better filled directly in India and China).

3. Ship production, software coding and back-office functions to China, and to a lesser degree, to India and elsewhere in east Asia.

The unemployment rate among PhDs is roughly 50%. So much for “winning” by becoming ever more educated. The number of slots in academia is shrinking, and the total number of research positions is relatively inelastic. For more on academia’s “plantation economy,” please read Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education (The Nation).

With labor in surplus, capital is free to demand whatever it needs to boost all-important profits. The propaganda machines in HR (human resources) spray-paint slogans everywhere (“you’re really really valuable to us, Super-Duper Team Member!”) but everyone knows the reality: everybody is dispensible, and everyone but the CIO at a hot startup a few months from an IPO is a corporate serf a paycheck away from being booted out of the castle into abject poverty.

As a result of this exploitation—known as “wage abritrage”—corporate profits (which boost the wealth of the top 10% who owns the vast majority of stocks and mutual funds) are extremely plump and juicy:
 

 
In the second piece, BusinessWeek breathlessly assures us that we have thousands of highly efficient factories running 24/7 in the U.S.—fast food outlets. Yes, all 6,000 Taco Bells are miniature factories pumping out “product” in vast quantities. The fast food “industry” revenues are $168 billion a year, and the workers, we’re told, are paid $1.25 above minimum wage—woo-hoo, love you, Corporate America!—which means that the full-time employee makes $16,500 a year.

$16K a year doesn’t go very far in urban America, but there is no pressure on Corporate America to raise wages.

I realize that I am an outsider, and biased against global corporate power regardless of the nominal country of origin (down with Canal+!), but I still found it noteworthy that BusinessWeek could run thousands of words of glowing praise for the profitable efficiency of the fast food “industry” without noting that it isn’t an industry at all—it’s just a consumerist fantasy (fast and cheap meals that require no effort or discipline) that produces “food” of low value that pushes the consumer into ill-health with overloads of salt, sugar, and low-grade fat.

70% of the fast “food” served is via the drive-through window, which suggests that an overworked, stressed out, focused on getting through the next two hours American is opting to shut the kids up and stave off hunger by pulling into the drive-through lane and loading up on a “meal” that they know is bad for them but they have no time to make a real meal at home (or so they’ve been brainwashed by thousands of hours of adverts).

If Taco Bell is the “manufacturer/factory of the New America,” then I think we need a peaceful revolution, and soon. The toadies and sycophants of the financial media are pleased to worship 1) CEOs 2) profits 3) efficiencies 4) globalized “growth” as long as its owned by global corporations and of course, everyone’s favorite, 5) innovation, because “innovation” drives profits!

Elsewhere in the latest issue, BusinessWeek breathlessly cooed over digital game company Electronic Arts latest “innovation,” which was selling a digital parrot for $10 a pop that sits on your digital warrior’s shoulder.

Excuse me while I raise my glass to American “innovation.” If pumping out fast food garbage (hello, 60% obesity rates, is there any connection?) is the new American “factory” and “innovation” is selling kids with access to Mom’s credit card a $10 digital parrot (and what does the parrot say? “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out, brawk!”) for their hyper-violent fantasy wargame, then this nation is well and truly doomed.

To reap a fat profit, you need to sell the stuff being imported from the American-owned factories in China. Since wages have been flat for decades, that posed a problem, as consumers were tapped out. Never fear, capital’s best buddy rode to the rescue, inflating a stupendous credit-housing bubble that enabled the working stiff to speculate “like the big boys” with free money and limitless leverage, all supported by lies (liar loans) and the misrepresentation of risk.

Wall Street reaped tens of billions in profits originating and packaging the debt loaded onto the middle class debt donkeys—not just mortgages, but auto loans, student loans and even credit card debt.

But now, at long last, capital’s doting partner, the Federal Reserve, has run into a spot of bother: the only way to keep profits rising is to crash the dollar, and doing that has squeezed the purchasing power of the debt donkeys. By exporting inflation to China and the rest of the world, the Fed has engineered massive profits for U.S. corporations (when profits earned overseas are stated in dollars, presto, a 10% increase) but it has also forced China into raising prices and fueled an oil and import-driven inflation in the U.S. which has caused millions of insolvent households living paycheck to paycheck to cut back on their consumption.

China has its own problems, namely runaway domestic inflation (thanks, Federal Reserve) and finding places to dump its excess dollars. It was a wonderfully beneficial trade for awhile: we print paper money, and you give us tangible goods for the paper. Thank you very much, and we can offer you some terrific low-yield Treasuries to recycle your growing stash of dollars.

The Fed’s inflation games are sinking the value of the dollar, and the Chinese are not amused. They are trying to buy tangible resources with their ocean of depreciating dollars, and even sinking to buying Spanish debt.

They have another problem: as capital’s return in China slips, it will exit China just as fast as it exited the U.S.

There is a grand irony in that dynamic: a supposedly Communist country trying to run a central-command quasi-capitalist economy will find that Marx had a point after all. Not that the leadership is at risk themselves; the ChiCom offspring already have homes in Vancouver B.C. and Los Angeles and citizenship/green cards, and the family fortune is safely invested in Switzerland and North America.

The “story” is that the Chinese consumer is about to step up spending, and as a result, “you gotta be in China to profit from all the trillions in new consumer spending.” The reality is that the Chinese middle class is already spending like drunken sailors and their 900 million rural compatriots already own TVs and other cheap consumer goods.

The reality is that Capital has already skimmed the big, fat easy profits, and it’s looking elsewhere as labor costs and pesky regulations rise in China. The truth is American and European corporations have already earned out their investments in China, and shipping the factories from China to Vietnam is not much different than crating the factory up in the U.S. and shipping it to China.

There is a theory that the Fed’s “master plan” is to sink the dollar to the point that the low-income states in the U.S. will be the lowest-cost manufacturing base in the world.

At $16,500 a year for full-time workers pushed to maximum production, they might be getting close.

The above essay was written by Charles Hugh Smith and is cross-posted from Of Two Minds

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.11.2011
10:54 am
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Machete Maidens Unleashed: A look at ‘70s Filipino Exploitation Flicks

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Mark Hartley—the man who brought you Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary on ‘70s and ‘80s Australian action, suspense and horror b-movies—is back to lay the same treatment on the Philippines. Machete Maidens Unleashed shows how that country became the shooting locale for tons of American-funded monster movies, jungle prison movies, blaxploitation and kung fu hybrids—along with better known shoots like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which apparently left the land strewn with sets that got repeatedly reused.

Adding to the genre-crazy atmosphere was Prime Minister Ferdinand Marcos’s harsh and corrupt Bagong Lipunan (“New Society”) program of martial law, during which he and his family ruled with the kind of impunity that eventually led to his downfall in the mid-‘80s.

Check the trailer—it’s quite wild—and look for this ‘un soon at yr local movie establishment.
 

 
Thanks to Mark Turner for the heads-up!

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.05.2010
01:51 am
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